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David Duchovny has spent the last decade making the phrase “actor-turned-musician” increasingly useless. His fourth album, Prince of Pieces, finds him returning to songs that have accumulated over years rather than chasing whatever version of himself happens to be standing in the studio that week. Speaking with Kyle Meredith, Duchovny digs into the record’s long gestation, the decade-old “Stay on the Train,” the creative shift that began around his 50th birthday, and the increasingly blurry lines between his music, novels, screenwriting, and upcoming films like Soapbox and See You When I See You. Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts.
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For Duchovny, songwriting also offers permission to use familiar language in ways his fiction often doesn’t. “We don’t demand kind of rigorous originality from our movies or from our songs. We want a commonality. We want to feel a history,” he explains. That instinct runs through “Stay on the Train,” which he describes as a collection of deliberately familiar father-child images built around one piece of advice: keep moving even when the scenery changes.
Songwriting, he adds, also gives him a useful disguise. “It’s also a way for me to hide my personal business,” Duchovny says, describing the process of taking well-worn modes of expression and trying to “reinvigorate them with my own experience.”
That same tension between the personal and the collaborative shows up in Duchovny’s film work. He wrote Soapbox and stars in it opposite his daughter, an experience he calls “certainly profound,” admitting that the first few takes brought an unexpected wave of nerves. “She’s the best thing in the movie. So, I’m so proud of her,” he says. Duchovny also talks about the increasingly difficult path for independent movies to reach theaters and why certain genres still thrive communally. Horror makes immediate sense to him, but he wishes another shared experience would come back with equal force. “I wish that we still had a sense of the communal experience of comedy,” he says. “It would be great, you know, if you could fill a theater for a comedy again.”
Listen to David Duchovny talk about Prince of Pieces, Soapbox, I See You When I See You, and more in the new episode above or by watching the video below. Keep up on all the latest episodes by following Kyle Meredith With… on your favorite podcast platform; plus, check out all the series on the Consequence Podcast Network.