Bonus Track: Dean & Britta on Singing Dylan via Nico and The Walker Brothers

"I was trying to figure out, 'IS it a mean song?'"

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Dean & Britta at the ‘Going Electric’ concert. Courtesy American Song Archives

Today’s “Bonus Track” chat from backstage at Cain’s Ballroom is with musical duo Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, of both Dean & Britta and Luna (and, for Wareham, Galaxie 500 too).

After the Tulsa “Going Electric” concerts in July, many people I spoke to cited them as a highlight. They covered four mid-’60s Dylan songs between them: “Love Minus Zero” and “Just Like a Woman” together, and, separately, Phillips singing “I’ll Keep with Mine” (with Dean backing on guitar) and Wareham singing “She Belongs to Me.”

By chance, they were the first musicians I spoke with, in the early afternoon shortly after I arrived. At the time I didn’t know what songs they’d be doing that evening. They got me up to speed.

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(All of these Bonus Track conversations from backstage at the Bob Dylan Center’s “Going Electric” shows are archived here—and here’s the main piece I did from the shows)

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Why did you pick the songs you’re doing?

Dean: "I'll Keep It With Mine," we have recorded that.

Britta: And we've played it a lot live. I think Steven [Jenkins, Dylan Center director] was like, "You should do that."

Dean: We had this show that we used to do with the with the Andy Warhol Museum. Songs to screen tests. There's a screen test of Nico. So Britta performs the song in front of that because Dylan supposedly wrote the song for her. Although Joan Baez suggested he wrote it for her.

Britta: Then the other songs you picked.

Dean: I've always loved "She Belongs to Me." Bruce Langhorne plays guitar on that originally. Of all the people who've played with Dylan, he's like my favorite sideman. And then "Just Like a Woman" was suggested to us by Lee [Ranaldo].

Britta: They wanted to cover everything so all the songs weren't from one album. Get a good nice selection.

What balance are you trying to strike between faithfulness to the originals versus taking it in your own direction?

Dean: "Love Minus Zero," there's a couple of covers of it that we really like. The Walker Brothers did a version of it, and Noel Harrison, the English singer—he's the son of Rex Harrison, the actor—he's done some great Dylan covers. He's got a great way of talking in a very English way through the songs. It's kind of funny.

Britta: So, arrangement-wise, we kind of did a mashup between those two versions. Not the Dylan version. And we're doing it as a duet. I'm doing harmonies, so it's different.

Britta: "Just Like a Woman," they're playing it just like the original, but we're singing it as a duet. I'm doing two verses, you're doing one verse, and we're singing a chorus.

Dean: "Just Like a Woman"'s kind of a mean song.

Britta: I was trying to figure out, "Is it a mean song?"

Dean: "You fake just like a woman."

Britta: Okay, that's mean.

Dean: That's okay. You're allowed to write mean songs.