It’s not as if he needed another activity. Duchovny, star of shows like “The X-Files” and “Californication,” could have stuck to acting, but he’s found joy in a variety of fields, including writing fiction and becoming a recording artist — a path that didn’t begin until he was 50.
“I’d always loved music and I found myself with time,” he explained of his musical start. “I was shooting ‘Californication,’ and that only took three and a half months out of the year. My kids were younger — I wanted to spend time with them. I’d just gotten divorced, so I had time alone aside from being with my kids, so I had this big space to fill. I hadn’t yet started writing fiction. In lieu of just sitting here: ‘What can I do to amuse myself?’ Then that became creating. I’m not a good guitar player, but I didn’t know that once I learned enough chords that I would start to hear melodies and that I would be able to write songs. I’ve written like 50 songs now.”
The latest dozen of those songs came together for his third album, “Gestureland,” an alt-rock collection that would shelve comfortably near Wilco. It was released Aug. 20.
Becoming a musician, though, was never really a plan for Duchovny.
“You never make these decisions,” he said. “In my experience, that’s not the way life happens. You just walk off the main street onto the side street, and the side street becomes either a dead end or a big street, and that’s just the way life goes on.”
Duchovny thinks about The Beatles (“McCartney 3, 2, 1” and the film “Yesterday” both come up in conversation) and the role that chance played in music history.
“Those sounds become the soundtrack of our existence and then they seem inevitable, but they’re not,” he said. “They’re just playful, and they’re chance in the moment.”
But if the results of the creative process can stem from chance and context, Duchovny also knows the value of hard work in collaboration. After two previous albums and time touring with his band, the whole process as become more of a group effort.
“The first time I got together with my band was for the first album, and they were coming in to figure out what I wanted to do, and I didn’t know enough to know. I’d never heard of a bridge. Some of my songs needed a bridge. They were deferential at first, They were trying to figure out what I wanted, to listen to me in my non-musically educated way try to explain what I wanted,” he said.
As the artists’ comfort grew, “they lost that distance from me or that deference of me. I didn’t want them to have it ever, but they lost it over time, and I began to appreciate their — as a collective, but also individually — musical talents and styles and want to take them into our sound.”
In describing the songwriting process for last year’s single “Layin’ on the Tracks,” Duchovny discusses how conversation with keyboardist Colin Lee helped them decide to “lean into the politics of it.” The group took lyrics from two different songs for a memorable protest number — and one, which Duchovny is quick to point out, points its finger not only at its opponent, but also back at itself.
“This is my problem,” he said. “The problems that I’m seeing out there are the same problems I have. I gotta fix myself, too.”
Duchovny has “a natural aversion to coming down in the real world like that and not making a song for everybody,” and was initially hesitant to be too topical.
“I’m very wary of it. But I just wanted to go on record. Because I’m kind of reticent about it — publicly reticent — I didn’t want it to go by without some kind of comment.”
Speaking politically might not be so easy, but collaboration seems to be.
“Acting obviously is very collaborative. You have your words and your situations made for you, but you’re edited in ways you don’t control,” Duchovny said. “You’re very dependent on so many forces, and hopefully they’re collaborating with you and not fighting against you.”
Fiction doesn’t work that way. Duchovny praises his editor’s role, especially at the start of a project, but describes it as a very different sort of process. Now, though, he’s moving into yet another new field as he adapts his own novel “Truly Like Lightning” into a series for Showtime.
“That’s not something I’ve ever done. It’s very hard for me,” he explained. “I like to have collaborators on this. It’s very hard for me to try to adapt something that I’ve done from one medium to another. It’s almost like taking stitches out of a wound or trying to pull a scab off something that’s healed. I don’t have any attachment to it being my vision from start to finish. I’m not going to direct it. I don’t want to write it all. I want collaborators, because I feel like it makes it better.”
One of his easy smiles comes as he adds, “If I choose the right people.”
“I will act in it,” he said, laughing, when asked about it. “So I’ve chosen the wrong person right away!”
With a string of successful shows, movies (and the Judd Apatow “absurd comedy” “The Bubble” is on its way), books, and albums, it’s hard to see Duchovny as the wrong person for much of anything. Even so, he still sounds humble and enthusiastic about everything he has going on, and who knows what will come next.
“If I’m not acting and I have an idea that I can write, I’ll just do that, because that doesn’t always stay with you,” he said. “Acting comes when it comes, so I’ll jump on those [opportunities] when they happen. Music can happen at any time — not the recording and the touring — but the creating and the playing. It’s all kind of with me at all times. When I’m doing one thing, I might think about how I might start doing more of the other. I always like to have something to look forward to.”
Via: The Daily Progress