Damon Moon turns death into ghostly dreams

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Damon Moon knows all too well the irony of living with a loss that inspires one to create something new. This week, Damon Moon & the Whispering Drifters released Lungs, Dirt & Dreams, a ghostly, woodsy, angry, lonely Americana-man record that will invade your blood stream upon first listen if you have a pulse. The Atlanta band’s sophomore psychedelic folk album was inspired in part by the loss of Moon’s brother, who he never got the chance to connect with. What complicates the darkness of the LP, however, is that it was obviously made just as the dawn was approaching. There’s a lightness to it, as if Moon woke up on dewy grass after a night of stumbling through the darkness, finally able to see the road so clearly. Time will tell for Moon and his ever-revolving cast of Whispering Drifters, but it’s a green light from us.

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TRIPLE CD RELEASE: Damon Moon & the Whispering Drifters, Sleepy Genes, Cassandras. $8. Price includes all three records. 8 p.m. Sat., Feb. 25. The Basement at Graveyard Tavern, 1245 Glenwood Ave. 404-662-8686.

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You like a lot of books by Jack Kerouac and Robert Pirsig. What about those books interests you?
Damon Moon: I actually have a tattoo of Pirsig on my arm from one of his books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

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Moon shows his bottom left arm, which has the same green plant with a silver wrench sprouting out of it that appears on the book’s cover. Oh wow. Okay, that’s really important to you.
Yeah laughs. Pirsig changed my life, big time. Those books are a huge part of what I am, and even the music as well.

So that explains the instrumental song on the record.
Yeah, Robert Pirsig’s Blues. That was just kind of funny to me, calling it that. It’s a really spacey song. Reading his stuff, you get really spacey and whatnot. So I just wanted to give a little nod to him.

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So what is Lungs, Dirt & Dreams about for you?
For a little while, I noticed this theme in my life of people leaving a lot. To me, the whole thing was like, you can go through some really dark things and you can come out better than you were. There’s darkness and then there’s light. And even though there’s darkness, you can choose light. And so it’s supposed to be a really positive thing, even though everything on the record is pretty sad sounding.

I could sense both listening to it.
You could?

Yeah
Good. It’s kind of this double edged sword. Basically I wrote [the title song “Lungs, Dirt & Dreams”] one night and I demo’d it really quickly, and I sent it to my guitar player, Chris Cooke. I thought at the time the song was about being frustrated with the music industry. But then he called me the next day, and was like “You didn’t have to tell me that’s what the song is about. I know that song is about the death in the family that you just went through.” And I thought about it, and I was like, yeah, I wrote a song about something but it was about something else. After that, I thought that title has to be something.

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What death in the family was he referring to?