Young luddites

Technology isn’t the boss of Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.

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You can’t take it personally if someone doesn’t want to hear what you’re talking about, but at the same time, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to talk about it.”

One might say that this statement from multi-instrumentalist Josh Epstein — who makes up half of the Detroit-based duo Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. that will play The Fox Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 28 — encapsulates both their writing process and their creative process as a whole. Their most recent album, 2013’s The Speed of Things, repeatedly juxtaposed bouncy and upbeat melodies and tracks with more serious social commentary, so they proved they were not above making you stop and think even while you are enjoying yourself.

Their undeniable dance single “If You Didn’t See Me (Then You Weren’t on the Dance Floor),” for example, was a meditation on the touring life, being away from the ones you love and wondering whether what you are doing is worth it. And the ambient folk pop track “A Haunting” is emblematic of how much effort and soul-searching went into making Speed, and just how much Epstein and bandmate Daniel Zott learned about themselves in the process.

“‘A Haunting,’ for instance, was me writing about a fictional character, but then after writing it I realized I was kind of talking about myself,” Epstein says. “It was a really intense experience, sorting through a bunch of feelings that maybe I wasn’t aware I had felt, or had been running from.”

Such a realization is at the heart of what the duo has been writing about the last couple years. Speed was a musical treatise on the insane pace of life we live in today’s hyper digital, instant gratification-obsessed culture where everything has to move at the speed of light or else we lose interest. Lost in the shuffle of hearing the newest album leaks or catching three-minute-long “teaser” film trailers months before the film comes out, is the beauty of those quiet moments where you can reflect and just be. Epstein stops short of using the cliché of stopping to smell the proverbial roses, but it is implied that the 21st century world is rife with empty pursuits and pleasures that we allow to consume us instead of using our time to engage with others and even our own selves.

“I think technology and the speed of our lives allows us to run from these things,” he says. “You can come home from work, turn on any TV show on your Apple TV or read Beyonce’s book on your iPhone, but you really don’t have to think about how you feel.”

So they seek to create a body of work that will mean something to them beyond such ephemeral notions as whether or not they like how a song sounds. They recognize the value in challenging both their listeners and themselves to feel something on a lyrical level, but they also have an affinity for not doing the same thing over and over again, musically. Their debut EP — 2010’s Horsepower — dabbled in echoing indie pop; My Love is Easy: Remixes, Part 1 was a dance-heavy project; 2011’s full-length debut, It’s a Corporate World, saw the duo waltzing into the rock realm, and then Speed saw them embracing loads of synths and a retro electro sound.

Put simply, the band has no interest in remaining artistically stagnant. This helps explain why the band debuted a new song on Esquire’s website at the end of last month — “James Dean” — which turns fans’ expectations on their head yet again. Autotuned vocals are layered over a chilled out downtempo beat, all while the song plays out like an R&B slow jam. But in addition to the music being yet another curve ball for fans, they also hit hard with the lyrics, including a line that would have been perfect for The Speed of Things: “The Internet will never love you back.” Epstein was excited to share the track with the world, but he cautions against having people assume this is the direction the new album is headed in.

“I don’t know that that’s necessarily indicative of the direction of all the new stuff,” says Epstein, “but our sound is definitely changing, our process is changing. I feel like we’re in a really good place.”

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