Deep Sea Diver’s Billboard Heart music video is pure eye candy. Filmed out in the wide-open expanses of eastern Washington state, it finds guitarist-vocalist Jessica Dobson wandering deserted highways framed by cerulean skyscapes and a stunningly panoramic mountain view.
Another sight to behold is the vintage Silvertone S-shape the bandleader is strumming unplugged throughout. How the thing actually sounds is anybody’s guess – Dobson’s included.
“I got that the week before we made the video,” Dobson says. “Peter [Mansen, drummer] found it in the back of a very large Seattle Goodwill that’s like a warehouse. It was all beat up on the back, but everything else was intact. I actually have literally never plugged that guitar in. I probably should!”
When it comes to Deep Sea Diver’s forthcoming fourth full-length, Billboard Heart, Dobson instead turned to a mix of Fender offset guitars to get through early tracking at her home studio in Seattle before the full band hit various West Coast facilities with producer Andy D. Park.
The songwriter notes, however, that she also was craving sonic and situational “newness” to push her long-running indie-rock force into bold, vulnerable directions. She notes that Billboard Heart begins with a familiar, Tom Petty-anthemic feel, but the group then kept the tape rolling for an unplanned, prismatically heady and mostly improvised two-minute outro.
The record’s Emergency likewise came out of stream-of-conscious circumstances. Its garage-chunky walk-up riff arose off the cuff one day while Dobson was rearranging her pedal chain at home. They tested out the song live during a 2023 tour with Pearl Jam but fully rewrote the chorus shortly after facing their biggest crowds yet.
“Emergency was a really great one to try out in an arena, because it fell in the family of songs that could be potentially well received by a Pearl Jam crowd,” Dobson says. “It’s probably the most ‘rockiest’ rock riff I’ve ever written.”
The upcoming album also finds Dobson dynamically diving from lightning-quick hammer-on sections toward epically slow-fuzzed feedback solos, all of this ripe for future performances atop the musician’s current go-to stage prop: a glowing crate she climbs onto that literally reads, in boldface print, “GUITAR SOLO BOX.”
“I almost didn’t do it because I thought it might’ve been too lame to write ‘Guitar Solo Box’ on it,” she says, though the ingeniously goofy, Chekhov’s Gun-like presentation of the prop has led fans to feverishly anticipate those moments where Dobson literally steps up to rip leads.
“What we said [when we first built it was], ‘Well, that is truly going to set people up to want to pay attention.’ It’s great!”
- Billboard Heart is out February 28 through Sub Pop.
