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Dev Hynes and Julian Casablancas Interviewed Each Other for ‘Oyster Mag’

Update: New Community Management has issued an apology and explanation of why the Oyster interview between Casablancas and Hynes appeared in reportedly abbreviated form. Read it below.

From: New Community Management
Subject: Oyster Magazine Interview with Dev & Julian Accidentally Cut Short

In correspondences between New Community Mgmt & Life or Death PR, we’ve come to the conclusion that the Dev Hynes / Julian Casablancas interview was inadvertantly cut off in an email that we forwarded from Cult Records to Life or Death. Which was then forwarded to Oyster Magazine, who were assured it was the full transcript.

This was my mistake and want to apologize to Dev and Julian for omitting the rest of their conversation, and I’m sorry to our friends at Oyster who did not in any way censor their conversation.

-Bryan Ling, New Community Management

Update: Julian Casablancas just published the unedited transcript of his interview with Dev Hynes. Read the full thing here.

Last we heard from Dev Hynes, he’d just released 45 minutes worth of new music on Youtube and then, months later, joined Solange onstage at FYF Fest to help her cover a Nina Simone song. Now the musician’s joined Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas for a lengthy new conversation for Oyster Mag during which the men touch on subjects that include David Beckham, choreography, and more. There are some definite noteworthy tidbits in there:

  • Hynes on preferring dancing to singing — “Oh hell yeah. Oh my God, I hate singing so much. I mean, ‘hate’ is a strong word, but I just don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy singing.”
  • Casablancas on not drinking coffee — “No, ‘cos I would end up drinking ten double espressos and be up till five in the morning. I studied music in a class then all my free time was music, and I dropped out of high school to go study music full-time. So I went pretty hard, but it started late. I was, like, 15, 16.”
  • Hynes on bringing his girlfriend to the Rocky steps — “I was in Philadelphia recently with Samantha and she kind of notoriously has seen no movies ever. We were going to the Philadelphia Art Museum and I was making a joke like I was gonna run up the famous steps and she had a blank face and had no idea because she had never seen [Rocky]. Oh my God, I’m losing it… So I had to stand on the steps and show her on my phone that scene — for the first time ever in her life, I’d like to point out.”
  • Hynes on preferring Live or Smash Mouth — “Is this a real question? I’d say Smash Mouth. I feel like they have the better hits. I recently saw a signed Smash Mouth CD in a store in midtown.”

Read more of their back-and-forth here, and pick up this month’s Oyster for the full chat. Also of note: a Reddit thread points out that Casablancas — after noting last fall that he’d been working on inventing a folding electric bicycle — actually filed a patent application for the device several years ago. “Often times the distance one must travel is seemingly too short or too inconvenient to ride a bus or subway or to drive a car, but too long to walk,” begins the “Background of the Invention” section. Read on here for a full description and plenty of photographs of how the bike would work.