The truth may still be out there, but David Duchovny has effectively turned the lens inward. After two decades in the TV and film spotlights, Mr. Duchovny has just released his first rock album, appropriately titled “Hell or Highwater.”
“I’d never really played any music before five years ago, so it was something where I took up the guitar pretty damn late in life just to kind of amuse myself,” Mr. Duchovny told The Washington Times, adding that he wrote the tracks on “Hell or Highwater” with “the best intentions.”
Mr. Duchovny learned to play under the tutelage of Los Angeles-based guitarist Carlos Calvo, who was the official guitar coach on “Californication.” Mr. Duchovny subsequently hired Mr. Calvo to coach him privately — even taking his teacher along to his new show, “Aquarius,” and insisting his character have it written in that he was a guitarist.
“It was really just serendipity every step of the way,” Mr. Duchovny said of his path to musicianship. “I never decided ‘Hey, I want to perform live, I want to put on the leather jacket and be a middle-aged rock ‘n’ roller.’ They’re just songs that I wrote in my living room, and [I’m] trying to share them.”
Mr. Duchovny, primarily known for portraying the conspiracy-obsessed FBI Agent Fox Mulder on “The X-Files” TV series and films, will be appearing at the District’s Howard Theatre Monday evening to share with audiences those very compositions. Backed by a several-piece rock ‘n’ roll band, Mr. Duchovny will eschew the tales of aliens and monsters that made him famous in favor of heartfelt songs that plumb the depths of his artistic soul.
Unlike other actors who have musical side projects, Mr. Duchovny has had no formal vocal training, which lends his album an air of both rawness and authenticity. His unrefined vocals are not passed through auto-tuning programs, giving “Hell or Highwater” somewhat of a frantic, unvarnished nowness.
“I just know that I don’t have that kind of a voice, and I don’t think that I ever will,”Mr. Duchovny offers in a strikingly honest admission of his own inelegant vocal stylings. “I don’t really think of myself as a musician; I don’t think I’m good enough to be influenced. I don’t pressure myself to hit all the notes, but I kind of feel my job is just to inhabit the songs and put the songs across.”
Further underlining the point, he added: “My voice has progressed to the point that I can get pretty close to the melodies that I hear in my head.”
Like many of his generation, Mr. Duchovny, 55, was versed on the music of Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty and others of the classic rock era. While that sound undoubtedly influences his own work, it is equally infused with an undeniable country authenticity as well.
“I never listen to country, so that surprised me,” Mr. Duchovny said with a laugh.
“Hell or Highwater” showcases that very diversity of influence. “Let It Rain” bears the stamp of Southern sounds, while “Lately It’s Always December” is a dreamy number near the album’s end. Of particular note are “The Things,” in which Mr. Duchovny’s narrator waxes poetic on both his hopes and his transgressions against others, and “The Rain Song,” in which Mr. Duchovny goes for broke with an ode to a rock legend, singing: “Love is all you need, that’s what the book of John [Lennon] taught you.”
“I like that John wrote one of the ‘gospels,’” of the rock ‘n’ roll sound, Mr. Duchovny explained of the late Beatle. “I like that I get to use that allusion there, which I certainly would not have thought of had I not tried to rhyme it.
“The fun thing about writing lyrics is you get led places by rhymes that you wouldn’t normally go … and it makes you more imaginative than if you didn’t have to rhyme.”
Little wonder that Mr. Duchovny’s lyrics delve deep into his psyche and plumb the ennui of middle age. In addition to his formidable television and film career, the Princeton grad has dealt with rather turbulent turns in his personal life, having been treated for sex addiction during his marriage to actress Tea Leoni. While the couple reconciled, they eventually called it quits last year.
Mr. Duchovny said that a 55-year-old man writing songs about the rock staples of sex and drugs would be “obscene and gross.”
“The Stones can still do it. You have 70-year-old guys still writing songs about making out,” he said of the septuagenarian kings of rock who still fill stadiums. “I don’t know how they pull it off, but they do.
“I can’t write songs about making out with girls in the backseat. I didn’t play [guitar] at that time in my life when I could have written those songs. Certainly I can’t, won’t and shouldn’t,” he said, letting loose a hearty chuckle.
“I feel like I was writing songs appropriate to my age, appropriate to … my contemporaries,” Mr. Duchovnysaid. “As you get older, things fall away, you lose things, and not just because you’re getting old. People die, people go away. Life is about loss, and it’s about compromise. And I think the songs can retain some kind of hope, and I think that’s what makes them rock ‘n’ roll-y, because rock n’ roll shouldn’t just be depressing.
“It’s all summed up in the idea of [the titular song] ‘Hell or Highwater,’” he said, “which is like OK, we promised to take care of one another, come hell or high water. Well, the flood’s in. It’s about what do you do when you’re forced back upon your word.”
In his acting, Mr. Duchovny has certainly played his fair share of liars, most notoriously as the voluptuary scribe Hank Moody on the Showtime series “Californication,” which ended its seven-season run last year.
“That was really [creator Tom Kapinos’] fantasy of a writer being attractive like a rock ‘n’ roll star,” Mr. Duchovny said of the showrunner’s avatar. “This fantasy world where women want to sleep with a writer. I think that’s why writers love that show.”
While Hank more or less plowed his way through a series of Hollywood lovers over the course of the series, it was always the intention of Mr. Kapinos to have Hank get back together with the love of his life — and the mother of his daughter — Karen (Natascha McElhone).
“That was always the sentimental heart of the show: What if you got it right early and then screwed up, and then you were trying to get back to what was right?” Mr. Duchovny said.
Hank and Karen’s path was a tormented one throughout the dark comedy, with several attempts to get mend fences only to be torn apart again — often due to Hank’s misanthropic, self-centered behavior. Mr. Duchovny was publicly quoted as saying he wished Hank to die at the end of the show, which caused a bit of an exchange with Mr. Kapinos.
“Tom was like, ‘Oh, you don’t like the way the show’s ending?’ ‘No, come on, I love the way you ended the show,’” Mr. Duchovny recalls of his interaction with Mr. Kapinos.
With Hank Moody now put to rest, Mr. Duchovny will be reviving Agent Mulder for a 10-episode resurgence of “The X-Files” to begin airing on Fox in the spring. Mr. Duchovny first put on his FBI badge in 1993 alongside Gillian Anderson as Agent Dana Scully. The sci-fi investigation series, barely promoted upon its debut, became a cultural phenomenon of government conspiracies and alien invasions, running on the small screen until 2002 and spawning two films in 1998 and 2008. It is the latest in a bevy of canceled shows seeing second life on TV and online.
“I’ve seen a couple [of completed] episodes, and they really work. The show feels alive and relevant to me,” Mr. Duchovny said of returning to “The X-Files” universe beside fellow cast veterans Miss Anderson, Mitch Pileggi and William B. Davis — as well as series creator Chris Carter.
Much like in his music, however, the passage of time was evident. For all of the cast and crew who returned to the Vancouver production, there were many who were absent.
“There wasn’t a day when somebody wouldn’t come by and say ‘Hey, remember so and so?’” Mr. Duchovny said, adding that the “X-Files” family member in question had either moved on to other work or passed from this mortal coil.
However, he feels that even though time has had its way with the cast and their fictional counterparts, he believes the moment is ripe for the return to that milieu of alien forces and Washington conspiracies.
“I’m very excited about that and that it’s a new beginning,” he said. “I’m not sure if this is farewell — we’ll see.”
While waiting like the rest of us to find out if Mulder and Scully will return beyond Fox’s 10-episode spring return, Mr. Duchovny said he will continue to work on new music.
“I’ve never sat down consciously to try and imitate someone or write a song like someone, but when I hear [my] music, I certainly hear influences of the songs that I do love,” Mr. Duchovny said. “My POV is that … if you hear a successful sad song, it doesn’t make you more depressed. So it’s not a depressing evening, even if the songs often deal with loss.”
Mr. Duchovny and his band will take the stage at Howard Theatre in Northwest Monday at 8 p.m. Tickets are still available and can be purchased for $35 at Ticketmaster.com.
“It is rock ‘n’ roll, and it is loud, and we are there to make music and have fun,” he said. “If we get to make another album, that’s great. If we get to keep touring, that’s fantastic. But I get a little nervous when I think ‘Oh, I’ve gotta write a song for the second album.’”
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