Mountain View’s Dogcatcher will play at San Pedro Square Saturday, April 28, the first show in a monthly series called Daydream Nation that will last until August, and comes out of Bill O’Brien (of Save Alternative)’s efforts to showcase exceptional emerging Bay Area and San Jose artists.
It’s surprising to how much intense personal upheaval went into the gentle, jazz-inspired indie folk sounds of Dogcatcher’s debut record, KILR. 32-year old singer Andrew Heine wrote the record during a several-year stint as a bohemian artist in San Diego, which was a 180-degree change from his prior life. This dramatic shift in his life’s direction was a result of re-examining his life after going to Iraq as a Marine.
“I was a completely different person before. I went abroad completely conservative, a George Bush Republican. I came back a straight hippie,” Heine says.
The quiet intensity of KILR presents itself after several listens. Heine does not emote painful screams or make dramatic statements about Iraq, rather Heine exhibits the kind of self-reflection on the album where everything in his life is being looked at through a new lens.
Before joining the Marines, Heine got a degree in engineering and was planning to get a good paying job in the engineering field, while playing bass in jazz bands as a hobby. He was told this was the smart thing to do. The war gave him first-hand experience to not take everything told to him at face value and to look at things from his own perspective.
“We were told that we are the good guys and they’re the bad guys. We’re not necessarily 100% the good guy. The Iraqi are definitely not all the bad guy. Everyone’s the same. We’re all just people. That’s something I came back from Iraq with,” Heine says.
