Greg Dulli doesn’t really do small talk. He opens an Afghan Whigs album with a song called “I’ll Make You See God” and names another “Please, Baby, Please,” knowing full well what kind of company that line keeps. But on How Do You Burn, there’s a flicker of unexpected warmth peeking through the smoke. “I think even trying to compete with how dark the world was at the time was folly,” Dulli shrugs. “So maybe that’s why this record came out brighter.”
Yes, the Afghan Whigs have made a “brighter” record. No, that doesn’t mean they’ve gone soft. Dulli’s still crooning about saints and sinners (sometimes the same person), and a Japanese man building a real-doll soulmate inspired one of the album’s eeriest tracks (“Jyja”). “I don’t know if he’s a saint or a sinner. Probably both,” Dulli says.
The band’s longtime orbit of gothic soul and heavy-lidded rock finds a new groove on How Do You Burn, not least thanks to Blind Melon’s Christopher Thorn. “We just have sort of a secret language now,” Dulli says of their musical shorthand. “We’re having a great time making records.” Which isn’t always a given in Whigs world.
What’s most striking about the new record is how casual it sounds for something born in such chaos. Dulli’s solo tour was cut short by the pandemic, and instead of wallowing, he rebounded by cranking out songs with Thorn and Patrick Keeler, shipping tracks across the country like sonic postcards. “I spend a lot of time alone anyway,” Dulli shrugs. “So it wasn’t really a big change for me.”
Still, this isn’t a sunny-side-up Greg Dulli record. It’s just got a bit more oxygen than usual. “There are moments of darkness,” he concedes, “but I do feel like this is a brighter record.” You hear it most clearly on “A Line of Shots,” which, in Dulli’s words, “is a bright sound.” Coming from the guy who once titled a song “What Jail Is Like,” that qualifies as a beach anthem.
The guests bring plenty of texture, especially on “Domino and Jimmy,” a long-overdue reunion with Marcy Mays, who famously fronted “My Curse” on Gentlemen. Their new duet came together during a pandemic-era phone catch-up that turned into three-hour therapy sessions. “I said we should do a song again, and she said ‘Absolutely.’ I wrote it three days later.” His approach was to wait to hear her vocal take before writing his own response. “Even though I wrote all the verses, I had to hear her sing it to me to know what to say back.”
Then there’s the title. How Do You Burn came from a conversation with the late Mark Lanegan, one of Dulli’s closest friends and frequent collaborators. “He just said it offhand. I was like, ‘Did you say how do you burn?’ and he goes, ‘I guess so,’” Dulli remembers. “I asked what it meant and he said, ‘You know… what makes you burn. What turns you on.’” The phrase stuck. The grief, too.
Lanegan’s ghost haunts the record in beautiful ways, including the devastating closer “In Flames.” “It gave the album its… I don’t want to say closure, but its fucking denouement,” Dulli says.
Are there more songs from the sessions? Of course. “I smell blood and I go all in,” he says. “I’ll leave a song just kind of on the side of the highway. Maybe I’ll come back later and strip it for parts.” He says there are four outtakes he really likes. He just has no patience for bloated albums. “I’ve become a big fan of the ten-song record.”
The real heartbreak? The lost art of the B-side. Dulli waxes poetic about Prince’s outtakes and the golden age of 45s. “Black Water was a B-side. Think about that. Countless Beatles songs. Prince was the king. His B-sides were anybody else’s A-sides.” He pauses. “I miss singles. I miss B-sides.”
It’s not all ghosts and nostalgia, though. Dulli still gets his kicks. He grins when asked about the whispered Puff Daddy quote buried in “Crazy.” (“Who’s hot? Who’s not?”) “I always loved ad-libs,” he laughs. “I use a bunch of Outkast lines on Powder Burns. On ‘Forty Dollars,’ I’m practically dry-humping André 3000.”
And yeah, 1965—the band’s 1998 party record that feels spiritually adjacent to How Do You Burn—came up a lot in this conversation. It’s the album with “Something Hot,” the one where Dulli met a voodoo priestess who maybe cursed him and Steve Myers. (“She shook a gris-gris bag at us. Five months later I got clocked in the head in Austin. Steve got shot six times in New Orleans. I’m just saying.”)
There’s always some ghost. Some song left unfinished. Some friend who’s gone but still gets credit on the liner notes. When Dulli talks about Dave Rosser, another fallen Whig, he’s still processing it in real time. “He was like a soul mate,” Dulli says. “I’ll just think of something funny he did. That smile. That dude’s energy is still around.”
So what’s next? Nothing immediate. Maybe some solo stuff. But the Afghan Whigs? “We’re an ongoing concern until we say otherwise,” Dulli says. “We’ve done three world tours in six years and made two records. I think we deserve not to do that for a minute.”
Until then, there’s How Do You Burn—ten tracks, four ghosts, zero filler, and just enough brightness to make you feel something… before you go down in flames.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
