On The Big One, Dent May Knows He Can’t Go Back, But He Can Keep Dreaming
- Josh Kitchen
- 18 hours ago
- 11 min read
By : Josh Kitchen / August 14, 2026
Dent May has been baring it all for almost 20 years, his music existing in that beautiful space between melancholy and hopeful bliss. With a voice that’ll tickle the part of your brain that gives you goosebumps, and often playing multiple, if not all, of the instruments on his albums, May has become that special kind of artist who can tap into the nostalgia his listeners love to surround themselves in while still exploring new ideas and musical pathways that make him such an exciting auteur of sound. And on his seventh album, The Big One, an apt title if there ever was one, he may have just made his masterpiece. I’m not just being hyperbolic; he agrees, recently saying he thinks it could be his best record yet. “It kind of feels like a ‘when you know, you know’ kind of situation,” he told me in the run-up to the album’s release tomorrow.
The Big One certainly contains feelings and emotions that live up to the title. May doesn’t give in to despair here, but he looks it in the face, accepting that the things that can make life painful don’t have to define us. “As the final curtain falls / Promise you will not be afraid / Shed no tears for yesterday,” he sings on the title track. It’s a beautiful way to write, and there are plenty of moments like that on The Big One. But it’s not all life-or-death trade-offs. May details a real-life run-in with aliens on “Last Night I Saw a UFO” (“All I have to say about that is that they’re here,” he tells me), Robert Lester Folsom-inspired road tales on “I-55,” and dreams of second chances on “Second Wind,” which features a dynamite music video by Ambar Navarro starring May’s ventriloquist-dummy alter ego.
“Silly me, I had too much to dream last night,” May sings on “Silly Me,” one of the cleverest lyrics on the album, and one that hits at the heart of the whole thing. The song was written during a time of great personal strife, when May realized that, for better or worse, you can’t go back—an idea you don’t really consider when you’re young. But just because you can’t go back doesn’t mean you can’t be happy, and on The Big One, May shows us who he really is: a troubadour who wears his heart on his sleeve, and it's a heart that only continues to grow.
This is your seventh album, and you recently said you think this one is your best.
Dent:
I think it kind of feels like a “when you know, you know” kind of situation, and there are a lot of factors that make me feel like this is my best album. Starting with the process, I think I had the most fun I’ve ever had making this album. I brought in my friend Paul Cherry, who I share a studio with, to produce it. We recorded to tape, which we had just recently acquired for the studio. I invited a ton of different friends to play on it, and the idea was to keep it sort of fast and loose. We didn’t rehearse in advance. We didn’t use a click track, and the goal was just to trust other people and, like I said, have a good time making the album.
Most of the previous albums were made in solitude, for the most part. Or I would make the album on my laptop and then replace the fake drums with real drums and bring in a violin player and things like that. I’ve always said that if you have a good time making it, someone will have a good time listening to it.
Also, I’ve just been writing songs for so long, and I take that seriously. I put a lot of thought into it. I also just feel really good about the songs. I feel like they’re more honest than ever before, and they represent who I am more so than ever. Long story short, I’m excited to finally be sharing this album.
I’m really excited for people to hear it because there’s so much to dig into on this album. What makes your music so great is that you’re obviously a fan of so much great music, and it comes across. There’s so much bright, shimmering, almost candy-like stuff, which is what I love about pop music. The title cut is so dreamy, and a song like “I-55” has such cool electric guitar work—it sounds like it’s full of zap. Talk to me about making a record that sounds like the music you want to listen to, because that’s what I hear.
Dent:
It’s funny because I was just talking to someone else about how I don’t know everything about music. There are certain types of people where you’re like, “Oh, Stevie Wonder,” and they can rattle off who played drums, who played bass. I’ve never known anything like that about music, but I’m just so in love with music that I feel like I dive into all of it. I absorb it, and I love it, and I feel it. I have an open mind about music.
I’ve never been one to believe in guilty pleasures or believe in high art or low art, and I do kind of feel like I’m a sponge. I want to absorb everything that I love about music, mix it up in a blender, and spit it out. I’ve always been a fan of artists who go a little more maximal, like Electric Light Orchestra. And a lot of the indie pop I listened to when I was younger—I’ve been shouting out the Elephant 6 Collective, the kind of Athens, Georgia, ’90s/2000s home-recording movement that was really creative and just full of joy and love of music.
That said, a lot of the ideas and parts on this album I have to credit, once again, to the musicians and Paul producing. I had a lot of arrangement ideas in my head, I’ll be honest, but we really started with very stripped-down voice memos of the songs and brought them to other people. What happened is what happened. The funny thing is, a lot of the time I was like, “Wow, that’s exactly how I imagined this song.” And then other times I was like, “Wow, I never imagined it would have been like this.”
I love a lot of different music. I think of myself as a sort of anti-snob. Even though I like obscure music, I also like popular music, and I love the community aspect of music. I love when a group of people is singing along to a song together. I like the storytelling aspect of music, and I’ve always loved melodies and songs that have an idea behind them. The song title itself can be an idea or a world.
I was reading another interview with you where you talked about some of the early music you were into, and I think you said you were in a cover band doing Creed and 311. I’m glad you brought up snobbery, because I feel like being a music snob is fun in your 20s and 30s, and then if you can get out of it, you end up being a much more pleasant person. I was a huge Creed fan when I was 11 or 12, around the same time I was learning about the Beatles. And Creed, for all you can say about them, those songs had killer hooks, killer melodies. I think it’s interesting to think about the ways we’re brought up to hear music and sounds in different ways.
Dent:
Yeah, I feel like, to some extent, aesthetics are a relatively meaningless social construction that oftentimes is a way to signal to others the type of person that we are. Especially in the world of alternative music and more obscure music, it’s a way to signal to others that, “I have taste.” I reject that, and I embrace it, to be honest, because I do think that style is important, and the way art is presented is so important.
In the examples of film or literature, it’s not just the story or the characters; it’s how the story is told, and that’s certainly the case with music. But I do think that, in the case of—and these are extreme examples—Creed and 311, who some people criticize very heavily, there’s no strong reason it’s bad. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t like the way Scott Stapp sings,” or, “I don’t like the leather pants,” or whatever. These are all valid reasons. We could find some music that I really strongly dislike for whatever reason, but I sort of try to reject the impulse to use my taste as some sort of badge of honor or conscious signaling to others.
Especially—I mean, you can tie class into this. It’s like, “Oh, I went to a private liberal arts college, so I like alternative music, and I read The New Yorker,” and stuff like that. I’m like, okay, cool, I like that stuff too.
I went to The Warehouse and I bought Human Clay.
Dent:
Literally, the day Human Clay came out, my mom drove me to the CD store and we bought Human Clay. That is a true story. I have seen Creed live three times.
Oh, you lucky bastard!
Dent:
The funny thing about that is Creed is big again, and Creed is really cool to young people. Part of that is because their elder-millennial or young Gen X parents think it’s the worst music in the world. Well, guess what? I think Creed is cool. If I’m 13—I might be exaggerating—but go look at their Spotify. “One Last Breath,” which wasn’t even—I forgot about that one, to be honest. For me, it was always “Higher.”
Dent:
These songs are massive, and what goes around comes around. I always say this with pretty much no exceptions: as time passes, these aesthetic divisions start to disappear. That’s why Steely Dan is cool with millennials when Gen X people absolutely despised the Eagles or Steely Dan or quote-unquote yacht rock. The same goes for nu metal with younger people. Turns out, some of the songs are good.
I love the video for Second Wind. I know it's directed by the great Ambar Navarro.
Dent:
The idea came from my girlfriend, who took it from a Dick Van Dyke Show episode where Dick Van Dyke plays a marionette in a dream sequence, and Mary Tyler Moore is the puppeteer. The song is called “Second Wind,” and it sort of takes you on a journey from being really tired, feeling really down, and then catching a second wind and finding the energy to be out there in the world. Ambar’s ideas and visual instincts are incredible, and I find that the things I’m saying about my love of music, I find that Ambar and Max, who is the director of photography on these videos, they just have this voracious creativity. It’s just ideas, ideas, ideas, and I love that.
It kind of goes back to something I was reminded of in our discussion about taste and aesthetics. Musically, I want to resist making what I call “playlist slop,” and I apologize for using the word “slop,” which is overused. Especially in the late 2010s, early 2020s, it’s all about vibes, man. Like, “This is a vibey, chill indie beat that just sounds great on this streaming-service playlist.” I really want to resist that and actually present ideas.
I think that Ambar’s videos are always full of ideas. It’s not just like, “Hey, let’s cultivate a vibe and look hot in this video,” although those aspects are helpful as well. ’m really proud of this video and song. It might be my favorite song on the album.
It’s just a really a 'nice' sounding song. I feel like people don’t talk about that enough. It makes me feel good. I am connecting to it because it’s good to hear something that makes me feel good, and I feel like it’s cliché to say we’re all in need of that, but we really are. And this inspires a lot of those feelings.
Dent:
I’m a very traditional songwriter in the sense that I want my songs to be able to exist outside of the context of their recordings. Like, this is a song. This is a song. I mean, that sounds stupid to say, but it is a true story.
It was a funny songwriting experience that I had because it was one of those days where I did not feel like I had the energy to work on music, but I had been in my head like, “Dude, you have to work on music. It’s been too long.” I kind of get into these ruts and then these extremely hyperactive, productive periods—ebbs and flows.
I was like, “Okay, I’m going to make myself write a song tonight or work on something.” Then, immediately, my friend Leo texts me and is like, “Our buddy Riley is playing music tonight in Chinatown. Do you want to go with me and so-and-so and so-and-so?” And I was like, “Yes, I do. I don’t feel like it, but I’m going to.” Then I was like, “And I’m going to write a song in the next hour and a half before I meet you guys.”
Honestly, I don’t even remember. I blacked out, and then that song happened. There are a lot of changes in tempos and energies throughout the song, and once again, I want to embrace things like that that kind of shake you out of the complacency of just a vibey song that chugs along, and then afterwards you’re like, “What were they talking about?” or, “What was that?”
I have to talk about “Last Night I Saw a UFO.” Can you talk a little bit about that one?
Dent:
Well, that’s another true story, which, unfortunately, I don’t feel comfortable divulging too much about for your own safety and mine. But it is a true story of a real experience I had out in the desert after seeing Pearl & the Oysters at Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown, California. All I have to say about that is that they’re here.
But beyond that, from a songwriting perspective, once again, I wanted to tell a story, but the story also represents something more than the story. The lyrics where I say, “Nothing will ever be the same, something monumental has changed,” that’s about more than just the story of the experience with the aliens.
I don’t know if I try to do that consciously in my songs, but I do feel like all of these songs are sort of stories within stories, where, yeah, that’s about being abducted by aliens, but it’s also about our world changing and our lives. So much of the album is about change and growing older and confronting the reality that we’re going to die one day. I oftentimes will disguise that through a more fun song or something like that.
My favorite lyric off the whole record is from "Sille Me. “Silly me, I had too much to dream last night.” It’s a very meaningful, in my opinion. Talk to me about how lines or lyrics like that come about.
Dent:
I mean, the truth is, I have no idea. I know it’s a cliché that many songwriters say about channeling something from beyond, and I do think, in the case of my best moments, I don’t really remember or know where it came from.
I mentioned that “Second Wind” might be my favorite song on the album. This one might really be my favorite song on the album. I do think it’s the most emotionally charged, personal song to me because I had been going through some really, really difficult times, and I’m going to literally cry talking about it. These slaps in the face that just—you’re like, “Oh, your life is never going to be the same.”
That song is really about the realization—which gets harder and harder and easier and easier as life goes on—that you really can’t go back. When you’re younger, you take that for granted.
"Processing change and mortality and grief is tough. But I like to sing it in a pleasant, beautiful little ditty, and hopefully it touches someone else. Or maybe they just enjoyed three minutes of their day and didn’t think that deeply about it. I really want both—all of the above."
Comments