Devlin McCluskey had been on a Sopranos kick that sent him down a music rabbit hole. Remember the episode where Christopher relapses, with carnival lights twinkling and Fred Neil’s song “The Dolphins” playing in the background? “That set off me obsessively listening to that song and then trying to find more songs that sounded like that,” McCluskey says on a recent video call from Cathedral City, where the formerly L.A.-based musician now lives.
That Sopranos needle drop prompted McCluskey, previously of The Dead Ships and now of Devlin and the Harm, to dig into more sounds of the 1960s and 1970s that were unfamiliar to him. There was “Something on Your Mind” from the bluesy singer Karen Dalton and Scott Walker’s “The Old Man Is Back Again” and playlists loaded with Donovan tunes. “I’m the kind of person who will listen to one song over and over and over or start my morning listening to one song every morning for months and months,” says McCluskey. That was the case here.
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