Michael C Hall: ‘We’ve tried to lead with the music’

The debut album from goth-pop newcomers Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum is piled high with killer tunes. And “killer” really is the word. The New York three-piece is fronted by Michael C Hall, best known for portraying the world’s favourite serial slasher Dexter Morgan in TV thriller Dexter. How much of Dexter is in Hall’s rock ‘n’ roll persona?

“There are lyrics that have emerged here and there,” Hall (50) says over Zoom from his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “I could see how people might appreciate the parallels. But I didn’t have him consciously or subconsciously in mind.”

Dexter – a relatable sociopath who tries to use his murderous urges for “good” – is back on our screens in a new Sky Atlantic mini-series, Dexter: New Blood. Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum are meanwhile about to take their LP, Thanks For Coming, on the road, with a date at Dublin’s Workman’s Club on Wednesday, December 8th. For Hall fans, it’s a season of plenty.

“It felt good,” he says of reviving Dexter after an eight-year hiatus (and to atone for a 2013 finale widely agreed to be one of the worst ever). “It felt like the time was right. And the story was right. It felt weird but mostly because it didn’t feel weird, after spending eight years away, to go back to it. ‘Oh yeah . . . There he is.’ And he [Dexter] was right there.”

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There is a long and bleak tradition of actors inflicting their rock star fantasies upon an unfortunate public. Hollywood’s rock ‘n’ roll hall of shame is a broad church, including everyone from Johnny Depp to Russell Crowe via Scarlett Johansson, Kevin Costner and Lindsay Lohan.

Collaboration of equals

Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum are something else. The group is not a monument to Hall’s ego. Instead it is a collaboration of equals between the actor and Blondie touring keyboardist Matt Katz-Bohen and drummer Peter Yanowitz, who has played with everyone from Natalie Merchant to Andrew WK (this is called covering all your bases).

“We’ve tried to lead with the music and not be too preoccupied with the inevitable assumptions or preconceptions that go along with that dynamic,” says Hall, asked if he understands why audiences might be cynical about yet another actor launching a rock career. “I think once people take a listen or check us out, it may help dispel whatever expectations they may have had or didn’t have.”

The name “Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum” was suggested by Katz-Bohen’s then four-year-old daughter. It has a dark and slightly pretentious quality. The same might be said of the band’s music, which wears on its sleeves a debt to Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, 1990s David Bowie, Giorgio Moroder and the Sisters of Mercy.

“Best to relax and focus on your breathing,You’re gonna feel a tiny sting . . . No sense fighting, stop resisting,” coos Hall on the single Nevertheless. His deep, expressive voice whips the tune into a thrilling claustrophobia. The effect is compounded in a video in which his huge dismembered head chases his understandably terrified bandmates. You may or may not buy Hall as the second coming of Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor. But you won’t forget the song in a hurry.

We’re in similar territory on Too Cool To Care, which conjures with Radiohead’s The National Anthem before layering in Sinatra-style crooning and a chorus that proceeds from The National to Arcade Fire. It’s both familiar and very strange. And a lot better than Johnny Depp fantasying he’s the second coming of Keith Richards.

Punk opera

“We love Bowie, we love Nine Inch Nails,” says Katz-Bohen. “We love a lot of things. We love a lot of music. We don’t set out to sound like a particular thing. But of course our influences will find a way in.”

The future members of Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum met on a 2014 Broadway production of punk opera Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Hall played the eponymous lead singer with Katz-Bohen and Yanowitz portraying members of his backing ensemble. They knew they had chemistry. All three made a mental note to find a way of working together again.

“Matt and I had come off the Hedwig tour,” says Yanowitz. “And we started writing some instrumentals. And I had dinner with Mike and brought him back to the studio and played him a couple of tracks. And having been on stage with Mike, I knew what kind of singer he was. So it was definitely in the back of my mind that maybe he’ll be inspired by the music.

“I would say I didn’t have to lobby to be in the band,” says Hall. “The band didn’t exist. Until it did. I was lucky to be in there in the right place.”

The biggest difference between acting and being in a rock ‘n’ roll group is that with the former you are interpreting someone else’s vision. As a songwriter you are, by contrast, giving voice to your own creativity. Was that an attraction for Hall?

“It wasn’t that I had any conscious desire to do that or made some formal decision about it,” he says. “But there was maybe some sort of desire that emerged to express myself with these guys. And to have the experience of not being some sort of messenger. But to embody the message. There’s no hanging out with interpreting someone else’s idea or vision. You’re just sort of presenting your own.”

Hall is synonymous with Dexter. But even before he thrilled us as a killer he had achieved acclaim as tightly wound David on HBO’s Six Feet Under (perhaps the best family soap of all time). Just last year, he memorably portrayed John F Kennedy in Netflix’s The Crown.

Confessional and diaristic

As he acknowledges, his lyrics with Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum have an occasionally Dexter-ish quality. Yet he can be confessional and diaristic, too. Pixies-esque Angela Peacock is about Hall’s “girlfriend in kindergarten”. And Ketamine,from the band’s 2020 debut EP, refers to a “therapeutic ketamine” course undertaken by Hall and his wife, author and editor Morgan Macgregor.

“Ketamine is never lyrically said in the song. But my then girlfriend – now wife – and I did a therapeutic ketamine treatment,” he says.

“You’re injected [with Ketamine] and basically sent on a mind adventure for about an hour. It’s a song about my awareness during those sessions of being on a parallel but very different trip. And so I think maybe it was more about the experience of being in a relationship with someone that you love and craving a shared experience. But being aware that inevitably those experiences are going to be divergent as well.”

The Bowie influences on both Thanks For Coming and the three-piece’s self-titled 2020 EP are not coincidental. After Dexter ended, Hall collaborated with Dublin playwright Enda Walsh and David Bowie on Lazarus – an avant-garde musical inspired by Bowie’s songbook and by the Walter Tevis novel The Man Who Fell to Earth (Bowie having, of course, starred in the 1976 Nicolas Roeg movie of the same name).

“He [Enda Walsh] is amazing, he’s a wonderful guy,” says Hall. “I think David Bowie handpicked him to write the script and also provided him with, like, 60 songs from his catalogue and said, ‘whatever you see fit to include . . . go ahead’. It must have been a heavy assignment.”

Lazarus was coming to the end of its off-Broadway run when Bowie passed away from cancer in January 2016. His death hit Hall particularly hard; the actor’s father died from prostrate cancer at aged 39, when Hall was 11.

Hall was himself diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma at 38. In Lazarus, he moreover plays a David Bowie-adjacent alien fallen to earth. There’s certainly lots of Bowie in Hall’s vocals with Princes Goes to the Butterfly Museum. Did some of the Thin White Duke get under his skin?

“In hindsight everything seems to make sense. Playing Hedwig maybe activated some sort of appetite or pushed some sort of button that led to the Lazarus experience and Bowie and singing those songs. And I think that experience gave me some sort of licence, that led to this.”

Thanks for Coming is out now. Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum play the Workman’s Club, Dublin, on Wednesday, December 8th