Logan Kane Interview

Logan Kane says music has always been an outlet for fun, and that his mentors called the work serious fun. A formative stretch with Thumpasaurus was a month in Scotland performing a rock opera with clown actors, people who were serious about an art form built to make someone laugh. The bass sound people ask about is not maximum pluck. He came up on upright, taught himself electric, and thinks of each note as two steps: feel the string, then use its tension. Tendonitis in college pushed him toward staying relaxed and letting the arm’s weight do the work.

Production started at twelve, on a laptop with GarageBand, alongside bands and a hardcore punk group. The MIDI saxophone is the producer signature he comes back to. He still writes with Logic’s fake saxophone, then has a real player double it, including his partner Nicole McCabe. Muting the fake part makes him miss it. That mix of an obviously fake sound and a great player is the same serious-fun split, and it sits next to old Casio patches he likes because they make him smile. Dolphin Hyperspace began in COVID as tracks sent back and forth before they had met. Their first album includes “Wormie,” built from a free saxophone take she sent. Live, the quantized drums in the track are the click. A headphone-jack stereo feed into the snake replaced a USB-C interface that kept unplugging. In San Diego the laptop fell off the stage and the tracks kept going.

Visuals are hired and mostly left alone. Millie Cohen designed the Dolphin Hyperspace logo. Ben runs the live visuals for both that band and Thumpasaurus, sings backups, and once bought a mini fridge on Amazon in front of a crowd and then canceled the order. Thumpasaurus does not run tracks or a click. At the Echo, Pendleton Ward drew live. Ward had already emailed about a new Adult Swim show after seeing them open at the Lodge Room. They had about two months, he asked for more of the same music, and he did not ask them to change it. Kane’s advice from that booking is to play the show even when the set is still developing. Strategy matters, and skipping the opening slot would have meant no email.

Thumpasaurus started in house parties, more folk and covers, then got stranger, sold out the Troubadour the first time they played it, and picked up an agent from that. A song that had been out for years later filled TikTok with pet videos. Zoos used it. Jimmy Fallon called it his song of the summer, knocked on the dressing-room door, and they were in New York two weeks later. The rowdiest rooms have been north of Manchester and in Scotland, where a chant of “here we fucking go” is a compliment and runs at its own tempo. In London, around one in the morning, they switched instruments so each of them could stage dive. He writes everything on keyboard in one pass, records bass last, and gives students parts that are too hard so the weakness is the assignment. Harmony, for him, is Wayne Shorter’s singable pentatonics over movement that does not need a key center, plus pop-punk and contemporary classical music. One triad over any of the twelve bass notes is the experiment he likes. On Love Music Why he says music is a lifelong project that still makes him want to play every day, fleeting in a way that feels more meaningful than something figurative. The catalog he points people to is solo music under his name, Dolphin Hyperspace with McCabe, Outside Worlds with Henry Solomon, and Thumpasaurus. He is one of the writers on the Lipstick Makeup edit.