The long road to Sheep, Dog & Wolf's incredible new album
Kiwi singer-songwriter Daniel McBride has a hell of a story to tell...
Daniel McBride finished his second Sheep, Dog & Wolf album a full four years ago, but it’s only just coming out this month. Why hasn't he released it yet? To answer that question, you’d better pull up a chair and put your feet up. As he tells Chris Schulz, it's been a long journey to get here. Let’s go…
It had been an uneventful Auckland night. Daniel McBride spent it at the Grey Lynn home of his parents, cooking them their favourite mango tofu curry for dinner.
Afterwards, McBride was enjoying a casual evening walk to his nearby flat when he spotted something that seemed amiss.
A young girl waiting at a bus stop seemed worried. Nearby, an older man was acting strangely.
“He seemed quite aggressive,” says McBride. “He was punching the air and rubbing his head a lot and really sweating heaps and tearing at his shirt.”
He approached the girl, asked if she was okay, and stayed with her as she waited for a bus. When one arrived, she didn't get on.
McBride asked if he could call her an Uber instead. She said yes, gave him an address, and he plugged it into his phone.
While they waited, the man came closer to McBride. “He was just talking and acting a bit strange,” he says. “Out of nowhere, he king hit me in the head as hard as he could. I got knocked off balance, glasses came off, blood in my ear. I couldn't really hear.”
As McBride collected himself, he watched aghast as the pair got into the Uber he was paying for and left.
The following day, he woke up unable to hear anything out of his left ear.
“At this point I was freaking out a bit,” says McBride, a self-taught musician who records under the moniker Sheep, Dog & Wolf, and has released an EP and an album, both critically acclaimed. “Music is obviously extremely important to me.”
He went to a doctor, who told him: “You've got a perforated ear drum, it's not too bad, it will heal.” He also said: “You've got a concussion. It also doesn't seem that bad.”
Over the next few days, McBride's hearing improved, but his concussion got worse. He was confused, taking his flat's rubbish bin to the wrong place for collection, then forgetting why he was there in the first place.
He went back to his doctor, who told him to take a month off work. He ended up taking five.
The assault happened in May 2019, and McBride's only just recovered from the headaches and fatigue that went with it, finally mustering the energy to release his much-delayed second album.
It was finished, in its entirety, a full four years ago. A major concussion is just one of many things that caused him to delay its release.
Ask him why it's taken so long, and McBride will sigh and say: “Stuff keeps happening.”
‘I think I might have a mental illness’
Back in 2014, McBride was hot property. His style of music, intensely personal songs that manage to sound microscopic and mountainous at the same time, made him a big deal in the local and international music industry.
His 2011 EP Ablutophobia earned rave reviews. "A young Sufjan Stevens" is how The Guardian described him, while Italian Vogue called it "a rare pearl".
The following year, McBride's debut album Egospect continued that upwards trajectory. It nabbed him the Critics' Choice Prize at the Aotearoa Music Awards, and garnered a Taite Music Prize nomination that was eventually won by Lorde, who shared her $10,000 prize with McBride and the other nominees.
McBride had always made music for himself, but his success meant opportunities to turn his bedroom obsession into a career came thick and fast. He took them up, performing at major European festivals, scoring support slots for American duo CocoRosie and like-minded Aussie folk act Angus & Julia Stone.
He came home ready to capitalise on that momentum with a second album. Then an old friend showed up. “I have a history of mental illness,” reveals McBride. “During that time it flared up again, which made it quite difficult to write for a while.”
Putting himself under intense pressure to create money-making songs meant writer's block soon set in. It became a vicious cycle. “Depression, to me, meant that I couldn't feel anything," says McBride. “So how could I write music about feelings?”
Thoughts turned to self-harm, and suicide. Several times, his partner had to sit on him to stop McBride from scraping his fingernails deeply along his head and arms.
McBride accepted his anxiety, his depression, and his negative thoughts, believing it was part of who he was, and would always be. It was a stand-up special by Wellington comic Eamonn Marra, who has also battled depression, that made him realise that wasn't the case.
“I was like, 'That's me. He just described me. I think I might have a mental illness'. That was really important because it meant I could start asking for help, and look for strategies to work through it."
McBride realised music had become a burden. He needed more stability in his life. He enrolled in a computer science degree, and enjoyed the absoluteness of it. In music, there were multiple answers for every question. In computer science, there's just one right answer. “There's something really satisfying about that, that you don't get from art,” he says.
He slowly found his passion for music returning, so he set up a small studio in the attic of his flat. The first song that came was a slow, sparse, meditative arrangement he called Months. It included the lyrics: “I feel nothing but pain and exhaustion/I haven't been me in a year.”
Of that song, McBride says: “When I listen to it now, I think, 'How the hell did I not realise I had a mental illness when I was writing this?' The level of denial I was in back then astounds me.”
Sheep, Dog & Wolf songs often sound like a full band is playing. McBride's off-kilter timings and jazz-like song structures have a majestic quality to them, with cascades of voices and instruments floating in and out of songs.
In fact, every single instrument, and every vocal line, is from McBride. He'll sometimes sit with a song for months, adding and subtracting elements until he's happy with the results.
“It's a puzzle, you're just fitting things in,” he explains. If he thinks a song needs a certain instrument, he'll teach himself to play it. For his new album, he learnt to play the euphonium that way.
As he recovered, McBride kept writing, and making music. His new songs were more layered and intricate, deeper and emotional than ever before. He wrote lyrics that directly referenced the depression and anxiety that had plagued him.
By the end of 2016, his album, called Two Minds, was finished. “I was really, really proud of it,” says McBride. “It felt like a massive level up for me.” He was so confident in it, he invited someone else to collaborate for the first time, requesting Wellington-based engineer James Goldsmith master it.
Goldsmith had heard early demos for the album but was “floored” by the finished product. “It's absolutely incredible,” says Goldsmith. “It sounds like an orchestra is playing – an orchestra of Daniel’s.”
Together, they finished the album, but more hold-ups arrived. McBride claims he was gaslit by the head of a “major” overseas record label. He turns down the opportunity to say who. “He was really keen,” he says. “We emailed back and forth for five or six months ... He just disappeared. That took up most of a year.”
Eventually, McBride decided to release the album on his own – but then he got a phone call. His dad had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and was given three months to live. McBride moved to Auckland to support his parents, and to spend time with his father in his final few months.
“I didn't feel up to releasing an album ... that's about mental health and chronic illness and recovery, and is quite emotionally invested,” he says. “It can take a toll to release it and talk about it. I wasn't in a place to do that.”
So he delayed it again, spending as much time as he could with his father, who remains terminally ill but has survived far longer than expected. That's why McBride was cooking them dinner, and walking home on his own, on that May night in 2019 when he was assaulted.
When he finally felt like he'd recovered from his concussion, McBride set a release date of February, 2020, but the enforced lockdowns to curb the spread of Covid-19 forced him to again put the album on the backburner.
During all of this, fans and friends kept asking McBride where he'd disappeared to. Sometimes, he would send them a Dropbox link to the full album.
Other times, he'd wonder the same thing himself.
‘I can't have regrets about it’
“Who would I be, without my anxiety?” sings McBride on Two Minds, his album’s title track and a song that dives deep into his struggle with anxiety and depression. “How would I keep from losing me,” he sings in a high-pitched falsetto, “without my panic and my worries?”
When Tom Augustine first heard those lyrics, he connected to them instantly. “It spoke to things that I'd struggled with, the mental health and anxiety issues that I had,” says the budding music video director.
Augustine asked McBride if he'd let him craft a video based on the stress dreams he'd been having. “When I'm really feeling anxious, I manifest these shadowy figures that chase me around,” Augustine says.
McBride said yes, so Augustine hired a team of dancers and dressed them in red. In an overgrown Unitec carpark, he made McBride stagger around as spooky figures chased him, eventually overwhelming and smothering him on the tarmac.
The finished clip is sinister. “I wanted to make something that reflected the fear of when you're having an anxiety attack,” admits Augustine. But it's one that couldn't have been made without McBride accepting everything that's happened to him over the past four years.
Ask him about that, and McBride says: “I wish that I could have gotten on with my life and done more of what I wanted to be doing. I wish that I'd been able to release this a lot earlier. I didn't have control over any of the things that happened to me.
“I can't have regrets about it. It's what happened and I had to just work through it.”
Two Minds is released this month. He isn't touring it, and won't play any live shows. He knows his mental health triggers. It's why McBride continues at his day job, working as a software engineer for music production company Serato, instead of trying to make music his full time gig again.
Music is back to being his bedroom hobby. It will likely stay that way. McBride's got a small studio in Herne Bay where he records in his spare time. He's not the guy who made Two Minds anymore. But he hopes the album helps someone, anyone, who has been going through the same things he's been through.
It already is. When Augustine's video for Two Minds came out, it was the first time Sheep, Dog & Wolf fans had seen McBride for years. Among the many messages he received that day was this one: “I also suffer from anxiety and this really describes how it feels. It helps.”
“That,” says McBride, “feels really wonderful.”
Two Minds is out now. This story first appeared on Stuff.co.nz.