Let’s get a little personal: when my most successful high-school band got started (where many of my worst songs reside), Daughn Gibson was right beside me, also screaming into cheap plastic microphones in bedrooms, sheds and garages that belonged to neither of our particular families. It’s been an absolute pleasure to witness his artistry bloom over the ensuing decades, not only talented in all of the supremely boring ways (production, editing, mixing, musicianship) but also by the most important metrics that no amount of money, time or effort can buy. I’m talking the magical shock of sheer WTF creativity – aesthetics and concepts and execution that pre-date trends by a decade or still haven’t gestated long enough for the rest of the world and his adoring peer group (myself included) to fully grasp. He just self-released his newest full-length, Lake Mary not mysterious – it’s his first true album in eleven years – and it’s as opulent, striking and tragic as anything bearing his name. Meticulous yet feral, he’s like an island castaway who built a paradise mansion out of shipwrecked material on Lake Mary. I’ve released a couple of his albums on my indefinitely-hibernating label White Denim, and have probably heard more of his cutting-room-floor songs than anyone else, so this new interview series seemed like the perfect opportunity to get him on record with the one Daughn Gibson song he likes the least. You can listen along to it here.

YGR: Alright, so I don’t think I would have predicted your choice of “I Let Him Deal” if you gave me a dozen guesses. Why’s this your worst?

DG: Well truth be told it started out as my favorite song on Carnation. In fact, I drove out to Chicago mainly to get my man Jim Elkington’s chilly, serpentine guitar style laid down on top of it. And I thought what he did on this was awesome, to be honest its only redeeming quality. But prior to bringing it to Randall Dunn, the producer of Carnation, the song was quiet, dreadful, dreamy, with percussive elements so teensy that the song felt like malarial delirium. I wasn’t quite done shaping, but I knew that there was room for a more dynamic chorus, and probably only something a studio session could deliver. I wanted the thing to feel like waking up from a gentle nightmare on a raft in a slow moving river into a paralyzing death by orgasm or something.

So our first stop on the recording tour was in LA at Matt Chamberlain’s studio. And again this song was at the forefront of my mind, not as a single really, but something I thought was the most evocative, a centerpiece if you will. Matt is a brilliant drummer, Randall a brilliant producer, what could go wrong? But I have a strong belief that an entire song is shaped by the sonic character of a snare drum. This, unfortunately, is modern music making and the snare is the fulcrum by which all of culture spins. So we tracked drums, I told Matt to go with the guts. And what he played was something so huge, so burly, and so sharp, that I immediately got tricked by its power. Now the song takes a new direction in my mind. Big mistake. I was already off course, but it’s something I’d agreed with.

The problem with a big snare drum in a verse is you leave nothing for a death by orgasm chorus. It was a tense, dreadful verse, with smoky, mutating Lynch guitars, only now with a big ol’ crack every two and four. So we sauntered up to Seattle to finish with other musicians. And because of that snare drum, we had to start adding competitive sonics; beefy guitar strums, gnarled synths, the whole thing. Maybe even a freakin’ horn. Problem is, the chorus was already built with subtle washes, and kind of complicated vocal melodies and harmonies. It’s propulsive, but not something that asked for the musical equivalent of Mankind falling from a sixteen-foot tall cage onto an announcers table. And that was when I knew something was really wrong. Now we’re chasing around bigness in a song that wanted to be creeping and seductive, but way smaller. Like a hot, but evil, fairy.

So the entire time during mixing I’m just wincing. Everything cool is getting washed away in large, stray sonic ideas. I protested but keep getting reassured that it’s fine. I’m telling you the outburst bubbling up in me about this mess would have destroyed the entire session right there, I was feeling very Klaus Kinski about it. But you get second guessing in the presence of maybe more experienced producers who you respect and admire. So I just shut the fuck up.

At the end of it, we added so much horseshit to that damned chorus, just to get it to keep up with a snare drum that was already leaving the song bereft of dynamics in the verses. Chasing around a Sasquatch when I had something menacingly delicate in the first half hour of the song’s life. So yeah, if it were possible to break the “skip” button on your music system of choice I would have done it every time this song was on deck.

YGR: Can you think of any instances where a sort of ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ moment struck gold for you? Or one where perhaps your initial vision was switched up for something you liked more in the end?

DG: I’m usually tyrannical in a studio setting where other musicians are involved. John Baizley came into the Me Moan sessions completely hobbled by a terrible accident Baroness had in England. I mean, he wanted to do the session, but in the moments of tracking, my sympathies seemed to melt away and I worked him extremely hard. Consequently, I too suffered during those sessions from extremely high blood pressure. I went to a doctor in downtown Chicago complaining of dizziness and unusual fatigue and she mentioned being one systolic point away from the ER.

So by the time of the Carnation sessions I made a conscientious effort to tolerate just about everything. The result is a record I don’t listen to very often.

But to your second question, one song I love a lot that turned around completely was called “Won’t You Climb” on Me Moan. I tell you I grinded on that bastard for months trying to unlock what I insanely thought could be Glenn Campbell mixed with something off Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III, mixed with “Steal My Sunshine” or some other 90’s Mixolydian slice of heaven. Anyway in this case persistence paid off by one single lift of a bass note going into the chorus. Song unlocked and under my nose the entire time.

Some thirteen years ago, I interviewed Tony Molina for this very blog, and when I came up with the idea for this new Worst Song series, he was high on my list of hopeful contributors. His discography runs deep, with a list of songwriting credits that must run into three figures, and as his quality has always run high, I was dying to know what he felt worst about. Tony has taken a strict anti-social media, anti-internet, anti-promotion stance for a few years now, and it was only him wanting to “own up to making bad music” (his words, not mine!) that he decided to participate. I do miss his online banter (he once described a Trump vs. Clinton presidential debate as “two fools who have never heard Excruciating Terror”), though I am thankful for his wonderful music and the inspiration to throw my phone in a lake, or at least turn my laptop off once in a while. His worst song can be found here.

YGR: Alright – so why is “No One Told He” your worst song?

TM: Before we get into that, we should start with that I got sober in August of 2022 and am still sober today, no alcohol, no drugs, and I even quit cigs in July of last year. I think this song was written in 2014 when my drinking took an ugly-ass turn, as it did all the time, progressively, until I quit. I was real faded and very sick in all aspects when this song came about. I think at the time in my barely-functioning, cooked-ass brain I thought I was doing some kind of ‘68 Beatles / George Harrison nod with this one. Now in 2026, I have the mental clarity to realize that this song is more of a nightmare early ’70s soft rock AM radio, Crosby Stills & Nash, barefoot-bearded guy, CIA plant, hanging in the Canyon asshole nightmare song from hell. Basically everything gross, swagless and bad is front and center in this song.

There’s a part in the Stooges doc where Iggy is talking about The Stooges being a direct response to the late ’60s hippie-lite, boardroom-created, sellout federal-agent music that “still smells”. This song is totally coming from those things Iggy and co. were railing against.

YGR: As a sober person, are you happier with your songwriting in general? Or is that not a significant influence in the quality of your work either way, and it just happened to take a wrong turn for you here?

TM: No, I made a lot of bad music in my drinking years, I just think this one is number one. One character defect I can tell you about is that when I was drinking, bad music would find its way into my life. There’s a lot of manipulating factors out there, if you go on the internet at any time there’s a million people on there trying to sell you objectively bad music and then trying to manipulate you into believing it is good. And then you got played! I think I just didn’t have the mental clarity or intuition or any real ability to know what was what back then. I quit social-media for good in 2016, so those two things – being offline and sobriety – restored my overall focus, taste, ability, work ethic, and I also got more serious about record collecting and digging deeper and educating myself on music more than making music myself, all those things times ten. It’s like night and day, the difference.

YGR: This feels like sage advice, no joke. Any tips for those who want to kick social media (or drugs) but don’t feel empowered enough to do so?

TM: I think the first thing is understanding that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, the Spotify slimebag, Jack Dorsey, and any / all of these techie gentrifier colonizer pigs are true scum of the earth that do not have anyone’s best interest in mind. They one-hundred percent are trying to keep you addicted, manipulated and powerless, they will rob you of your dignity and integrity, strip you of your desire for honest and true self-expression, condition you to prioritize capital instead of the spiritual value of art. They will condition you to publicly log your character defects to the world, they will erase and wipe out real culture and replace it with swagless garbage, they will make your band suck ass and you will be spending your days thinking of ways to sell the shitty record you made to the public instead of writing real songs; they will sell you garbage and essentially give you brain disease for the rest of your natural life. Nobody needs it for anything, especially your band. I completely stay away from the internet and I’m doing better than ever – I even started a record label extremely recently (Olde Fade Productionz) with no social media or Bandcamp and the orders haven’t stopped coming in for weeks now. And I’m a cooked middle-aged dude at this point, I’m nothing special, so just like sobriety, if I can do it, anyone can. Only a manipulator who is trying to sway the narrative to get something from you is going to tell you otherwise.