Josh Dolgin AKA SOCALLED

JOSH DOLGIN: I don’t really believe in silver linings. The pandemic sucked. Sure, there’s OK things that happened during this time, but they’re not silver linings: good things would have happened, opportunities and excitement, even if terrible circumstances didn’t happen. I am glad that I now have a little setup to record at home and a little more of a handle on video stuff, but I already did editing and filming and mixing music with video. It was just a necessary evil. 
EK: Do you feel pressure to find the next thing, to keep creating new paths? 
JD: I feel pressure to be inspired and working on something that has potential, that I can believe in, that will have an impact or at least a “result.” My paths are often just my interests that I pursue and then they turn into something. That’s what happened with the puppets, with the beats, with Kurt Weill songs. I just spent many days drawing over the pandemic, and I now have like 100 pretty cool portraits of friends. I didn’t do this for any real reason, but now that I’ve done it, I wonder what will become of them, and probably I will make something happen with it. 
And I feel “not young” these days. Not “old” but definitely not young. When I see what “the kids” are up to, how their whole attitude and style and philosophy and political ideology has really become something that I feel separate from, it makes it hard to make things contemporary and relevant. I just have to make things I like, that I feel are rooted in realness, in quality, that reflect my humor and intelligence honestly. 
EK: I rewatched The Socalled Movie and I was struck by a few things that you said, and I want to know how much they still apply—if at all. “Every- one should hear this beautiful melody.” Are you still guided by that notion, a nign/nigun-forward approach? And second, that you felt as if you had to musically go full-circle—funk, to hip-hop, to klezmer, to klezmer hip-hop, back to funk. Where are you in that cycle now, or are you completely outside it? 
JD: I’m still obsessed with nigunim: they’re at the heart of this class I’m teaching this week, dissecting them and trying to understand how they work. I guess the cycle that ended with funk kind of kept cycling, especially into new directions of theater and musical theater. I hadn’t done that yet during that movie, and now I’ve written and produced five musicals that keep the cycle going; one of them starred Fred Wesley [a trombonist who worked with James Brown and Parliament Funkadelic] and my puppets. 
Sometimes what I do is rooted in klezmer and Yiddish music, and when it is, I’m very comfort- able wearing the title! It’s when the things I’m working on really aren’t trying to be klezmer or Yiddish that it’s strange to be identified with it. Like, if you played one of my pop songs and said “Here’s some new klezmer,” I’d feel disingenuous; it’s not true, it’s not what that is. But if you listened to me singing a Mordechai Gebirtig song with a string quartet, that’s clearly a Yiddish song, presented in a relatively traditional Yiddish song style. It’s all about how you frame what you’re doing and being honest in the framing. Sometimes I’m being “traditional,” really trying to present things in a “classic,” historical style . . . sometimes I’m using elements of these classic styles in new ways, sometimes I’m just making something totally new, but there are echoes of these elements in what I’ve created.