“Waiting for the other flip-flop to fall” with Blake Marlow & The Dog’s Body
The Dog’s Body
Deer of Wisdom
gezellig records
GZR-033
released everywhere: July 4th, 2025
on tour: in August 2025
It was a weird feeling when the end of adolescence blended, & without notice, with the beginning of middle age.
It’s more than two decades on for me, but I remember transitioning into my career & something not unlike routine. In your heart, you’re still a teenager, but you also expected your 30s to reap particular rewards of what some call “adulting.”
For a lifelong rocker, maybe the career arc could extend adolescence indefinitely, or maybe, you have your first midlife crisis when you realize that it didn’t actually work out, at least not with the major record label, record sales, & notoriety that was always dreamed about.
On the brand-new album Deer of Wisdom, their first with Knoxville DIY label Gezellig Records, 34-year-old singer & guitarist Blake Marlow, the creative force behind Cookeville’s own The Dog’s Body, rips songs as screeds, with a poetic-punk ethos thrown head-on, grating the gears of partying in your 30s & accepting the more normcore realities of everyday life: a new marriage, a mortgage, a day job.
Don’t get me wrong, this record is by no means a final lap, nor a resignation to the 9-to-5. It’s as if Blake dared himself to make the album with a focus & abandon that it could be his first or last, & in doing so, it seems like he is opening up bold new beginnings for Cookeville’s forever experimental rock scene. Expansive sparkles of crisp production & gorgeous guitars & psychedelic choogles decorate the always dirty basement doxologies of this thoughtful set.
A former literature scholar at the university that makes Cookeville a college town, Blake Marlow is not a newcomer to the southern gothic tropes that tease & trap us in our storytelling. Without sacrificing the raging guitar punk heart of his music career, Marlow seems to flirt with the kudzu-tangled Appalachian literary threads that have always made punk & alternative from our region extra special, but also spacey & weird. Tokic’s production really brings out that spooky & psychedelic mood without ever retreating into endless noodles or jams. The record is full throttle & tight, clocking at less than 30 minutes.
Our English teacher is a fierce observer of his own internal narrative; as such, Blake Marlow can write some lyrics. Marlow’s waxing words & growling guitars have always burned with an outlaw’s sense of getting-away-with something, or of, as one track puts it, “Chewing Up Gravel, Spitting Out Blood.”
Sometimes such late-night living is impossible without help from an outlaw’s medicine bag. Case in point is the catchy “Gravity Bong,” with its weed & booze & shroom fueled-trip to the astral plane. Ever the master of haunting or hooky one-liners, Blake plasters our minds with what should be forever enshrined (& not even ironically) as a framed needlepoint or a painted pallet on his front porch: “In this house we worship the emo Gods of death.”
Marlow & I have been discussing this powerful 8-song-set over text message since before its July 4th release on vinyl & streaming everywhere, & this aspect of accepting life as it is, of finally growing-up, yet still throwing down, seems to hold Marlow in its spell.
He reflects, “You get to a point as a musician/songwriter where life catches up to you. You always wonder if you’re washed up, if the songs are any good, if you should hang it up, etc. I think that kind of moves through most of the songs. Could I have done more, done better, what if I had a do over?”
Like many, I have always had anxiety about aging, but that uncertainty is also most certainly coped with by contemplating a spacious mystery, a sense of understanding & acceptance, even if that gives way, not to formulas for life, but to yet more mystery. This sense of maturity & mystery swirls around the sonics & topics on this record.
The album title & title track seem to relish in this expansive & friendly chaos. There are deers of wisdom on the long hikes & backroads of middle Tennessee.
In describing the band, Blake has gravitated to the “y’allternative” tag. Although the image is often associated with more folkie Americana groups, The Dog’s Body have that spirit with louder, more amped-up fuel. This all tracks with the band decamping to the Bomb Shelter studio in Nashville to record in an “analog wonderland,” working with a seasoned engineer in Andrija Tokic, whose credits include Alabama Shakes, Langhorne Slim, Sunny War, Margo Price, Jeremy Ivey, & others. Rounding out this quartet on the record, & at their shows, are: the extraordinary bassist in several Cookeville bands, Grayson Cupit, & the brothers Aaron & Jake Phillips, on lead guitar & percussion, respectively.
I’ve known of Aaron’s extraordinary guitar work for years, & like so many rockers in the south, he has a foundation playing in worship bands, with family roots in our far-flung local religious scene. When I first digested that sixth track “New Moons,” with its refrain of renewal & hope, I half-joked with Blake over text message that it is a heavy worship song, but don’t tell Aaron. Lyrically, the track’s simple prayerful refrains actually reminded me of early CCM folkie Keith Green’s take on Psalm 51, but only if Keith Green were also a member of Sonic Youth or The Minutemen. Blake’s reply to my comment both surprised & enchanted me.
“It’s my version of a hymn,” he texted me. “I’m a fairly firm non-believer, but maybe it’s by design. It there is a cosmic, spiritual entity out there, maybe it’s Jesus or a combo of something. I wanted to write a song asking to be forgiven for questioning & not believing when I die.”
Heavy cosmic theology also shows up on “Little Sins,” which courageously serves papers on the very religion that might yet redeem us. “Bible belt wrapped around your neck like a noose” isn’t exactly an ambiguous line, & Marlow both smashes & accepts the duality with lines like “God needs the devil & the devil needs you.” Still, it’s not a metalhead manifesto, but a murky anthem with a metal heart.
Not that I was counting (okay, I was counting), this record references substance use in some form or another on at least six of its eight tracks, without glorifying the glories or denouncing the demons of said experiments, & perhaps the most devastating of these is the album’s final song, “Adderall.” Now several weeks into our sporadic text exchanges about this record, I asked Blake if that song, with its opening line “Without my Adderall I am nothing,” is autobiographical.
“Yes and no,” Blake wrote back immediately. “I had that line ‘Without my adderall I am nothing’ written down for a long time. Sort of a collection of experiences rolled up into one feeling. I wanted to explicitly describe the total depravity and bitterness of the spirit. Your big dreams become small dreams, your small dreams become ‘hobbies’ (a word I hate) and ‘goals.’ You have to do something you hate every day until you die and you blow off some steam and drink and run your mouth. [That last song] sort of bookmarks ‘DUI City’ with the theme of circular degradation. You get stuck in a pattern or place for too long and you wake up one day and realize the same conversations you seem to have are five years old now. That was the essence of the song.”
That’s a lot to unpack. That’s a low-key critique of late capitalism for the shrinking middle class. That’s a lot of inner darkness to purge in one-half-an-hour. But this album isn’t about the “potential” of this band turning its so-called “hobby” into a so-called “career.” This is the furious inner conviction that there’s something more to this life of perpetual degradation than day jobs & prescription medication.
As I messaged Blake that I was finally sitting down to write this reflection on this mesmerizing record, he reminded me of this theme: “Feel free to include how much I hate the word ‘hobby.’” As the possessor of countless avocations & side hustles, some that earn modest income, some that bleed me to broke, including all my music writing & blogging & fanzine publishing, I share Blake’s disdain. We do these things to pry life itself from the clutches of boredom & despair, the lifelong punk ethos. We spit on the unserious assumption that thinks these passions are cute hobbies.
It might be the apocalypse, we might be “stacking sandbags” & “Waiting for the other flip flop to fall” as we are on “DUI City.” But while Blake Marlow doesn’t necessarily embrace these end times, he also curses them. Despite their inner resignation to the “end of the world” on “Deer of Wisdom,” The Dog’s Body exalt in an unlikely exuberance, expressed throughout. We’re all going to die, but not yet, & not without a feisty fight of fulsome fire, a raging backyard bonfire of southern punk rock spirit.
-Andrew/Sunfrog is a music critic, DJ, poet, & teacher living in a Tennessee college town. Full disclosure: Blake is his neighbor & former student.
The new album on Bandcamp: Deer of Wisdom | The Dog's Body | Gezellig Records
The Dog’s Body
Deer of Wisdom
gezellig records
GZR-033
released everywhere: July 4th, 2025
on tour: in August 2025
It was a weird feeling when the end of adolescence blended, & without notice, with the beginning of middle age.
It’s more than two decades on for me, but I remember transitioning into my career & something not unlike routine. In your heart, you’re still a teenager, but you also expected your 30s to reap particular rewards of what some call “adulting.”
For a lifelong rocker, maybe the career arc could extend adolescence indefinitely, or maybe, you have your first midlife crisis when you realize that it didn’t actually work out, at least not with the major record label, record sales, & notoriety that was always dreamed about.
On the brand-new album Deer of Wisdom, their first with Knoxville DIY label Gezellig Records, 34-year-old singer & guitarist Blake Marlow, the creative force behind Cookeville’s own The Dog’s Body, rips songs as screeds, with a poetic-punk ethos thrown head-on, grating the gears of partying in your 30s & accepting the more normcore realities of everyday life: a new marriage, a mortgage, a day job.
Don’t get me wrong, this record is by no means a final lap, nor a resignation to the 9-to-5. It’s as if Blake dared himself to make the album with a focus & abandon that it could be his first or last, & in doing so, it seems like he is opening up bold new beginnings for Cookeville’s forever experimental rock scene. Expansive sparkles of crisp production & gorgeous guitars & psychedelic choogles decorate the always dirty basement doxologies of this thoughtful set.
A former literature scholar at the university that makes Cookeville a college town, Blake Marlow is not a newcomer to the southern gothic tropes that tease & trap us in our storytelling. Without sacrificing the raging guitar punk heart of his music career, Marlow seems to flirt with the kudzu-tangled Appalachian literary threads that have always made punk & alternative from our region extra special, but also spacey & weird. Tokic’s production really brings out that spooky & psychedelic mood without ever retreating into endless noodles or jams. The record is full throttle & tight, clocking at less than 30 minutes.
Our English teacher is a fierce observer of his own internal narrative; as such, Blake Marlow can write some lyrics. Marlow’s waxing words & growling guitars have always burned with an outlaw’s sense of getting-away-with something, or of, as one track puts it, “Chewing Up Gravel, Spitting Out Blood.”
Sometimes such late-night living is impossible without help from an outlaw’s medicine bag. Case in point is the catchy “Gravity Bong,” with its weed & booze & shroom fueled-trip to the astral plane. Ever the master of haunting or hooky one-liners, Blake plasters our minds with what should be forever enshrined (& not even ironically) as a framed needlepoint or a painted pallet on his front porch: “In this house we worship the emo Gods of death.”
Marlow & I have been discussing this powerful 8-song-set over text message since before its July 4th release on vinyl & streaming everywhere, & this aspect of accepting life as it is, of finally growing-up, yet still throwing down, seems to hold Marlow in its spell.
He reflects, “You get to a point as a musician/songwriter where life catches up to you. You always wonder if you’re washed up, if the songs are any good, if you should hang it up, etc. I think that kind of moves through most of the songs. Could I have done more, done better, what if I had a do over?”
Like many, I have always had anxiety about aging, but that uncertainty is also most certainly coped with by contemplating a spacious mystery, a sense of understanding & acceptance, even if that gives way, not to formulas for life, but to yet more mystery. This sense of maturity & mystery swirls around the sonics & topics on this record.
The album title & title track seem to relish in this expansive & friendly chaos. There are deers of wisdom on the long hikes & backroads of middle Tennessee.
In describing the band, Blake has gravitated to the “y’allternative” tag. Although the image is often associated with more folkie Americana groups, The Dog’s Body have that spirit with louder, more amped-up fuel. This all tracks with the band decamping to the Bomb Shelter studio in Nashville to record in an “analog wonderland,” working with a seasoned engineer in Andrija Tokic, whose credits include Alabama Shakes, Langhorne Slim, Sunny War, Margo Price, Jeremy Ivey, & others. Rounding out this quartet on the record, & at their shows, are: the extraordinary bassist in several Cookeville bands, Grayson Cupit, & the brothers Aaron & Jake Phillips, on lead guitar & percussion, respectively.
I’ve known of Aaron’s extraordinary guitar work for years, & like so many rockers in the south, he has a foundation playing in worship bands, with family roots in our far-flung local religious scene. When I first digested that sixth track “New Moons,” with its refrain of renewal & hope, I half-joked with Blake over text message that it is a heavy worship song, but don’t tell Aaron. Lyrically, the track’s simple prayerful refrains actually reminded me of early CCM folkie Keith Green’s take on Psalm 51, but only if Keith Green were also a member of Sonic Youth or The Minutemen. Blake’s reply to my comment both surprised & enchanted me.
“It’s my version of a hymn,” he texted me. “I’m a fairly firm non-believer, but maybe it’s by design. It there is a cosmic, spiritual entity out there, maybe it’s Jesus or a combo of something. I wanted to write a song asking to be forgiven for questioning & not believing when I die.”
Heavy cosmic theology also shows up on “Little Sins,” which courageously serves papers on the very religion that might yet redeem us. “Bible belt wrapped around your neck like a noose” isn’t exactly an ambiguous line, & Marlow both smashes & accepts the duality with lines like “God needs the devil & the devil needs you.” Still, it’s not a metalhead manifesto, but a murky anthem with a metal heart.
Not that I was counting (okay, I was counting), this record references substance use in some form or another on at least six of its eight tracks, without glorifying the glories or denouncing the demons of said experiments, & perhaps the most devastating of these is the album’s final song, “Adderall.” Now several weeks into our sporadic text exchanges about this record, I asked Blake if that song, with its opening line “Without my Adderall I am nothing,” is autobiographical.
“Yes and no,” Blake wrote back immediately. “I had that line ‘Without my adderall I am nothing’ written down for a long time. Sort of a collection of experiences rolled up into one feeling. I wanted to explicitly describe the total depravity and bitterness of the spirit. Your big dreams become small dreams, your small dreams become ‘hobbies’ (a word I hate) and ‘goals.’ You have to do something you hate every day until you die and you blow off some steam and drink and run your mouth. [That last song] sort of bookmarks ‘DUI City’ with the theme of circular degradation. You get stuck in a pattern or place for too long and you wake up one day and realize the same conversations you seem to have are five years old now. That was the essence of the song.”
That’s a lot to unpack. That’s a low-key critique of late capitalism for the shrinking middle class. That’s a lot of inner darkness to purge in one-half-an-hour. But this album isn’t about the “potential” of this band turning its so-called “hobby” into a so-called “career.” This is the furious inner conviction that there’s something more to this life of perpetual degradation than day jobs & prescription medication.
As I messaged Blake that I was finally sitting down to write this reflection on this mesmerizing record, he reminded me of this theme: “Feel free to include how much I hate the word ‘hobby.’” As the possessor of countless avocations & side hustles, some that earn modest income, some that bleed me to broke, including all my music writing & blogging & fanzine publishing, I share Blake’s disdain. We do these things to pry life itself from the clutches of boredom & despair, the lifelong punk ethos. We spit on the unserious assumption that thinks these passions are cute hobbies.
It might be the apocalypse, we might be “stacking sandbags” & “Waiting for the other flip flop to fall” as we are on “DUI City.” But while Blake Marlow doesn’t necessarily embrace these end times, he also curses them. Despite their inner resignation to the “end of the world” on “Deer of Wisdom,” The Dog’s Body exalt in an unlikely exuberance, expressed throughout. We’re all going to die, but not yet, & not without a feisty fight of fulsome fire, a raging backyard bonfire of southern punk rock spirit.
-Andrew/Sunfrog is a music critic, DJ, poet, & teacher living in a Tennessee college town. Full disclosure: Blake is his neighbor & former student.
The new album on Bandcamp: Deer of Wisdom | The Dog's Body | Gezellig Records
For all the up-to-date details, follow @thedogsbodyband on Instagram
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