Dean Wareham will perform with a full band and play songs from his solo and band careers.
Dean Wareham was born in Wellington, New Zealand. He moved to New York City as a teenager in 1977, and attended the high school where he met his future Galaxie 500 bandmates. He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Social Studies. In 1987 he founded Galaxie 500, who released three albums, all produced by Kramer and released on Rough Trade. 2024 saw the release of new compilation of B-sides and previously unreleased tracks: Uncollected Noise New York ’88-’90. Wareham’s next band Luna recorded seven albums for Elektra and Beggar’s Banquet (including Penthouse, on Rolling Stone’s list of best albums of the 90s), followed by three albums as Dean & Britta (with his wife Britta Phillips), and two solo albums. His most recent release, also on Carpark Records, was a holiday album in collaboration with Britta and Sonic Boom.
His memoir Black Postcards is a chronicle of his years in indie rock and was published by Penguin. He has also co-composed soundtracks and acted in several films for Noah Baumbach, most recently White Noise.
That’s the Price of Loving Me is Dean's first album with Kramer since Galaxie 500’s This Is Our Music in 1990.
It was June of 1990 when Kramer and Dean Wareham last made a record together, Galaxie 500’s swan song This Is Our Music. “Things were a little tense in the band at that point,” says Dean. “But we had fun too. There were exciting musical moments that I remember vividly, and it was always something that Kramer suggested, like, ‘hey, why don’t you play something up high on the neck for ‘Fourth of July?’ I also remember we had to start late one day because Kramer insisted we had to attend the Friday matinee premiere of Total Recall.”
Their relationship extended beyond the studio, as Kramer hit the road with the band as their live sound engineer on European and U.K. tours, often sharing a twin hotel room with Dean. Yet with the demise of Galaxie 500 (the critically acclaimed This Is Our Music was their last album), Kramer and Wareham’s paths diverged.
Back then, they would not have guessed it would be 34 years until they went back into the studio together. Over time, they kept in touch, with Kramer gently reminding Dean, “it’s crazy we haven’t made a record since then!” But it wasn’t until the pandemic, after Dean lost a couple of close friends, that he realized it was time to stop talking about making a record and just make it happen.
The end result, That’s the Price of Loving Me, was recorded in just six full days in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles. Kramer decamped from his home in Asheville, N.C., and stayed with Dean and his wife Britta Phillips in Echo Park. And in a nod to the past, they once again took a break from recording one day to catch a matinee (this time: Kurosawa’s Ran).
Across That’s the Price of Loving Me’s 10 tracks, you can hear traces of Wareham and Kramer’s earlier work together, but today the chord progressions are more complex – drawing influence from Bacharach, Gainsbourg, Norma Tanega – and the arrangements are too. Yet Wareham’s signature electric guitar stylings still anchor the songs. Before he opens his mouth to sing, you can recognize his voice in the guitar lines. “Kramer insisted that I play all the guitars on this record,” says Dean. “And we worked quickly. Kramer believes that two takes yield more treasure than twenty, and he always seems to have the song mapped out in his head right away.”
Kramer leaves his musical fingerprint throughout; playing acoustic and electric piano, pump organ, celeste and various synthesizers. Phillips (who is also half of the project Dean & Britta) plays bass and adds backing vocals, while drums were played by longtime collaborators Roger Brogan (Spectrum, Alison’s Halo) and Anthony LaMarca (the War on Drugs). Gabe Noel, the extraordinary L.A. session cellist, joined on four tracks he arranged on the spot without hearing a single note beforehand. Vocally, Dean’s range is lower, closer and more intimate than it was in 1990—though he still hits high notes on occasion, like on the Nico cover “Reich der Träume,” sung impeccably in German.