Courtney Taylor-Taylor Talks Pin Ups, The Dandy Warhols’ Origins, and Offers a Glimpse at Their Future Album

Transmission 328: Interview with The Dandy Warhols

Featured image: Nicole Nodland

Title: Pin Ups
Artist: The Dandy Warhols
Release Date: 2026-03-20
Genres: Alternative Rock, Indie Rock, Power Pop, Psychedelic Rock, Shoegaze
Label: Beat The World, Little Cloud Records
Description: The Dandy Warhols interview: Courtney Taylor-Taylor discusses 'Rockmaker', glam aesthetics, and the spirit of Pin-Ups.

The Dandy Warhols came together in Portland, Oregon in 1994, the core lineup of Courtney Taylor-Taylor, Peter Holmström, Zia McCabe, and Eric Hedford eventually settling into its definitive form when Brent DeBoer took over on drums. Their sound has never sat still for long — garage rock, power pop, and psych-shoegaze all leave their fingerprints across a discography that found its footing with The Dandy Warhols Come Down in 1997 and its commercial and creative peak with Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia in 2000, the album that put “Bohemian Like You” into the UK top 5 and lodged it there with suspicious ease.

The broader public got a different kind of introduction in 2004, when Ondi Timoner’s documentary Dig! tracked the band’s often turbulent professional arc alongside The Brian Jonestown Massacre, winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. By 2005 they had established The Odditorium, a 10,000-square-foot Portland facility serving as recording studio, rehearsal space, and creative headquarters — the kind of setup that makes artistic independence an actual physical fact rather than a press release position. Subsequent albums including Odditorium or Warlords of Mars and Distortland were built there, as was 2024’s Rockmaker and its 2025 companion reworking Rock ReMaker.

On 20 March 2026, the band releases Pin Ups on Beat The World/Little Cloud Records, a covers album working through The Damned, The Cure, and Gang of Four, and taking its title directly from Bowie’s 1973 record of the same purpose. Away from the band, Taylor-Taylor published the graphic novel One Model Nation in 2009, a fictional portrait of a West German krautrock group set against the political turbulence of the 1970s.

Pin Ups takes its name from Bowie’s 1973 covers album. At what point did that precedent coalesce into a guiding framework?

Okay, we called it Pin Ups because we couldn’t think of any other name. We named it at the end, not at the beginning. We didn’t even think about it until the end. I went back and listened to David Bowie‘s covers record and I didn’t recognize most of the songs on it. Just the Pink Floyd one.

The album leans heavily into late 70s punk and post-punk. What is about that specific era that still feels relevant to you?

I don’t know. We were at a very impressionable age in the early 80s when you start finding the late 70s and early 80s punk and post-punk. I think it has more to do with being Generation X, maybe, than the music itself. Although maybe it is the music itself. I can’t tell. It’s too close to me to know if I would be as moved by it were I hearing it for the first time now as a kid or as an adult.

The album includes b-sides, deep cuts and tracks from tribute compilations scattered across years. What made this the right moment to gather them into a coherent work?

Well, we’ve been talking about it for 20 years, so I don’t really know why now. I think it was Peter Holmström, our guitar player, who was the one really pushing for it. A lot of times it just takes one member of the band to get a head of steam up and push something through to make it happen. That’s probably the answer.

You mentioned that nearly every band cover is a friend or someone you have the meaningful experience with. Could you share a specific memory of an encounter with one of these artists that shifted your perspective on music?

I don’t think knowing any of these legends, whether it’s David Johansen or David Bowie, really changes my perspective on music at all. It maybe just reaffirms that even great legendary artists, there’s something maybe a little bit different about them than other people, but not enough to really be able to tell. If you didn’t know who they were, you wouldn’t go, “that guy must be an amazing musician.” That guy must be an amazing, legendary singer, songwriter, producer because of his personality. There’s nothing that makes me think that it’s apparent in the person.

What does Machine Gun Etiquette mean to you beyond the music? And when did it first land in your life?

That record was probably when I was maybe a junior or a senior, probably a junior in high school. So that would be 1983 or 84. It just seemed like really good music and it was badly produced and the songs are incredible and everyone playing them just was very stylish and cool. It just kind of affirmed everything I wanted punk to be at the time.

You have played with the Oregon Symphony. Does working with an orchestra change how you hear your own songs and does it change how you think about writing?

It hasn’t really changed how I think about writing, but it definitely is a way different experience when you’re playing them and hearing them with the symphony. We were given enough time to adjust the arrangements to make sure that they felt correct, emotionally and psychologically correct. When we’re playing them, when the mix is correct on stage and everything is balanced well, it’s pretty much the most powerful music experience I’ve ever had. I’d have to give it a lot of thought if I’m going to say that, but off the cuff, I would say it’s significantly more powerful. You have to do drugs and listen to our records to have it be as powerful as that is, you know, commando.

Are there bands you wanted to cover but couldn’t make work for some reason?

No. If you have your own studio, you can always make them work. The only reason they wouldn’t work is because you ran out of time.

Outside music, what’s been feeding your imagination lately? Art, film, books or current events?

I’m deep in making—I published a graphic novel a couple of times, maybe 15 years ago. I’m making that into a movie right now. That’s what I’m doing with our year off.

One Model Nation is an extraordinarily ambitious project. It was a graphic novel and also an album posing as the greatest hits of an imaginary German krautrock band. What drove you to invest so much energy in such an elaborate project?

Because what gave me the energy and keeps giving me the energy is I need to say my piece about sociopolitical actions. I need to try and clarify the difference between an ideal and then the people who fly the banner and fight or supposedly fight for, ostensibly for this cause. It doesn’t always—it will not attract exclusively good people doing it for the right reasons. That’s a lie. I need to get that across to people in a way that they can understand because you just can’t scream loud enough. People will just shut down.

Therein lies the rub of politics and political parties. It still comes back to individual people and what kind of people are they. I studied sociology and psychology because one is a group of the other. When I was in college, I just had a lot of personal experience with it being from Portland and a lot lately in the last 20 years. I just have to get it off my chest. I also have some personal shit that happened to me, particularly, that I want to get off my chest. I have a lot to say about it. But I think art is a more complete form of expression than language alone. It’s also a bit more insidious. Storytelling at its best seeks to inform people by using subtext and showing rather than telling.

Portland has changed enormously since you started. Does the city still mean something to the band’s identity or has that connection loosened over time?

Yeah, I think the destruction of Portland has had quite a negative effect on the soul of our band. It doesn’t feel like Portland has a music scene anymore; it has many, many small little scenes. But also you can make music on your computer with people that are in other parts of the world. I think music and the city sound—like the Seattle sound, the San Francisco sound of the 60s, Seattle in the 90s—those days are probably over. Unless you’re looking at the difference between African music and K-pop. I think those will be quite different for a long time. But J-pop and K-pop are so influential in American music, British music—global music is becoming truly global music now. It’s only a matter of time until you won’t have any idea where a band is from by listening to them.

Who were your earliest musical influences before you picked up an instrument? And how much of that still show up in what do you do now?

I wasn’t really particularly interested in bands. I was four years old when I heard Killer Queen. That was the thing that snapped and it changed my life. It was the way it felt. I didn’t understand the feeling, but I was blown away and outraged that none of the adults in the room noticed it. I remember just like, “you can’t hear this? What in the hell?” I went over to the stereo and I turned it up a bit and I got in trouble for it. I just had to turn it back down and then put my head against the speaker and finish listening to Killer Queen.

I stayed up every night. I would pretend to go to sleep and then I would go over to the radio. I would turn that dial and look for Killer Queen. I would just look for this song every night. I never found it on the radio. I heard it during the day or driving in the car or shopping or whatever. But I heard Radar Love. That was when I put it together that maybe the word “cool”—the way the older kids that would babysit me at that age would use the word cool—I put it together. This must be what it feels like to be cool. This feeling that I get from Killer Queen and Radar Love. That must be what they’re talking about.

That is what drove me to music: to try to just have this cool feeling where it wasn’t. It doesn’t apply cool to you; it brings it out of you. It makes—it allows those relaxed, comfortable, confident, slightly thrilled about the world and life feelings to kind of all come together and to take over your body. I just wanted to feel like that all the time. I wanted to make things that made me feel like that. So I started learning violin, couldn’t get it out of a violin; tried piano, couldn’t get it out of a piano; played drums and did that because at least it was fun. Grooves without other music are pretty awesome. Then I went into music college and I just followed the whole thing and wrote charts, tried jazz, chamber music, all sorts of different kinds of classical or mid-century music. I still do. I still try to just create music that brings your blood level up to a certain thing where you just feel good. It’s affirming if you’re depressed and if you’re confused, it can kind of sort you out.

Dandy Warhols formed in Portland in the early 90s. Looking back, what was it about that that specific time and place that made the band possible? And how did you meet in the first place?

Peter Holmström was one of my best friends from the end of high school. We just continued to hang out after high school. He went away to college in New York and I would go and visit him. It was my entrance into New York. He lived in the East Village for several years, so that was my other neighborhood. It showed me travel. He moved back. We put the band together because we had nothing to do.

What made it possible was MTV. MTV brought cool guitar bands up to the top of the music world and it made it seem possible. Like, we can do this. You don’t have to be Queen; you don’t have to be superheroes of it. You just make cool music. We can be Love and Rockets. We can be Bauhaus. We can just make cool music. I learned how to be a filmmaker so that we could have videos and MTV would play them. Not a lot, but enough to where it worked and we could make music that we wanted to make. It was a good time for music. It was the best time for music. MTV was absolutely fantastic. It was a giant corporate monster that was excited about art and fringe art particularly.

Are you working on new material right now?

Yeah, we’re working on a dreamy record that is hypnotic and beautiful. It’s fairly soft. No hard rock and drum beats. No palm muted guitar chunkies. It’s just about beauty and hypnosis kind of in a way. Trance-like state. It’s turning out good. It’s very kind of Brian Eno and kind of Astrud Gilberto and a lot of just that kind of stuff.

Photos courtesy of Dandy Warhols

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others