No Skips: Phil Dickey of Dragon Inn 3 deep dives into the band’s newest album Trade Secrets

Courtesy of Dragon Inn 3

In our series No Skips, we sit down with an artist or band and go track by track through their latest release. For some of us, the banter in a concert where a song gets explained is our favorite thing in the world, and we’d just like to keep living in that. Every song has a story, and these are those stories, in the order you’ll encounter them on the record. In today’s No Skips, Phil Dickey of Dragon Inn 3 shares the group’s ‘Trade Secrets’ with an in-depth look into their newest album.

Dragon Inn 3 was formed when Phil Dickey discovered how much he loved the 80s-style synth-pop while he was creating a soundtrack for a friend’s horror film. Combining the musical talents of himself, his wife Grace, his sister Sharon, and David Hill–Dragon Inn 3 was created.

Their most recent album, Trade Secrets, was released in April of this year and, according to Dickey, has been a long time in the making. The Pitch was able to sit down with Dickey and go through the process of creating each song on the album, how they turned songs about mozzarella sticks into an album-worthy tune, and everything in between. 

The Pitch: How did the title Trade Secrets come to be? 

Dickey: I’m really bad at naming things. But, in this case, I texted my friend Brooke whose movie I created the soundtrack for, and he actually has a list of names for either bands or movies and things like that.

I asked him if he had any good album name ideas and he gave me Trade Secrets. At first, I thought I just liked it because it sounded cool, but the more I sat with it, the more I realized it reminded me of my mom. 

In the ’90s, she created this thing for babies called the Cuddle Bug–it’s essentially a snuggie for babies.

I remember she had this patent lawyer and she would always talk about how she couldn’t tell anyone about this idea because she had to be careful with trade secrets in case someone was out to steal her idea.  

What was it about “Can’t Stop” that made you want to make it the first track on this album?

It’s one of those songs that, while it’s less than three minutes long, it took us about three years to make. It has this sound that reminds me of the French band Pheonix if they wrote “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and something about it just made us think it had to go first to set the tone for the rest of the album. 

The next track “Out of Control (Bad Boy 2)” stands because there’s a song on your first album called “Bad Boy”. What is it about this song that makes it feel like a sequel to that? 

Bad Boy was the biggest hit off of our first album. In the past when I’ve played in other bands we always tried to do something completely different for the follow-up record. But this time, I thought we had something that worked so why not try and use the same formula? So it has the same drum instrumentals and also has this saxophone solo at the end, which adds something really cool.

“Not Enough” is a song on the album that doesn’t have too much going on lyrically but has a really cool hook in the chorus. How did that song come together for you guys? 

That song is one of the ones written by my sister. She wrote it as a joke song originally. At first, it was called five mozzarella sticks and it was about how she didn’t have enough mozzarella sticks to create an actual appetizer. That hook in the chorus is what actually made us want to put it on the album, and we thought about just keeping the original lyrics and putting it on the tracklist as “Five Mozerella Sticks,” but ultimately, we decided to change the lyrics a bit and put it on there as “Not Enough.” 

“See it Your Way” seems to be representing what it’s like to be in love with someone and wanting to view the world through their eyes, is that how you would describe the song? 

That’s exactly what we were going for. And there’s another side to it where it could be from the perspective of not seeing something the same way as a family member or a friend and wanting to be able to see it their way so that you can understand how they’re feeling. Something about that song that I really like is that we collaborated with a group in KC called Salvation Choir and that was really awesome to be able to work with them. 

“I Could Never” has a lot of interesting sounds going on in it. You’ve got this strumming that breaks up the vocals and just so many sounds that end up meshing so well together. How was this song to produce, and how did you get all of these sounds to work together? 

This was another song that I had been working on for a very long time, I think I was working on this one for five years. I had tried a lot of different approaches. It was almost a piano ballad, then I tried to make it a 90s trip-hop song. I think all the different sounds that are happening in the song are all the different versions working together to create what became the version that’s on the album. 

You’ve created what sounds like a great anthem for long-distance relationships with “Teleport”, was that the goal with this song? 

I can see people interpreting it that way, but it’s actually based on my son.

He’s in third grade and when I wrote this song I was just thinking about when he grows up and leaves our home and how I’ll miss living in the same house as him. In the song I say ‘when I get a lot of money’ and that’s relating back to when he was younger and he was obsessed with trains. He grew really attached to these collectible trains that were really expensive and he didn’t understand that they were expensive so I’d always tell him that when I get a lot of money I’d buy him the trains.

The song encapsulates how much I’ll miss his childhood when he’s older and how I know I’ll want to teleport to him. 

“I’ll Be Right Over” feels like I’m watching the beginning of an 80s teen movie or a getting ready montage and you’ve talked before about how the sound of the earlier 80s is something that really inspires you, are there any bands with that sound that you would say inspire you as well? 

That’s another song my sister wrote and we produced it together. We were really going for that early 80s sound and we look to Depeche Mode and New Order for that sound a lot of the time. My sister lives in Springfield and she’s working on a music video for that song right now. She’s filming it at a roller skate rink and it’s turning out really good and looks like it came straight out of the 80s. 

“This Party Sucks” feels like a lot more than just your normal breakup song as maybe some would take it on their initial listen. What’s the story behind this track on the album? 

We live next to a couple of families in our neighborhood and we got to be really good friends with them and our son was friends with their kids. Then they moved. So the song is about when you have a neighbor who becomes such a good friend and then they move and you see their house and it’s empty. It’s a very sad feeling. There’s a party but the street is dead really sums up that feeling. 

Naming “Trade Secrets Theme” as though it’s supposed to be the all-encompassing theme for the album, what made you decide to choose this song as that theme? 

It calls back to my favorite chord progression which is the same one used on I Could Never, so the fact that it reuses that chord progression made us feel like it would be a good theme. It also connects back to our first album, with the lyrics being about a missing persons case that a lot of people refer to as the Springfield Three that happened in the early ’90s, which is where a lot of our inspiration comes from whether it be music, movies, or just things that happened at that time. I think the fact that it’s about that sort of ties everything together. 

The next song on the album is a cover of the Yazoo song “Only You.” What made you decide to put this cover on an album full of original songs? 

I’ve always loved that song and it has a lot of cool synthesizer sounds in it so I wanted to see if I could recreate it and get as close to the original as possible. It started as something I was just doing for fun and then I ended up getting pretty close so I decided to ask my wife to sing on the track. At first, she didn’t want to because she had a cold at the time and her voice wasn’t at its best but I convinced her to just try. We somehow managed to catch her at a time when her voice was just starting to come back so it was there but just a little raspier and lower than normal and now she thinks it’s like the best her voice has ever sounded. We ended up putting it on the album because of how good her voice sounded on it and how close we were able to get to the original song with the synth sounds. 

We’ve made it to the final track of the album “Finally Going Down.” How did this song earn its place as the final note on the record? 

Honestly, it was kind of an easy decision because it was the last song we wrote. We thought that we needed one more fast song for the album so this is what we came up with. We did try a few different orders of the tracks but we settled on the one we did because it just flowed the best. It also connects back to other tracks on the album with some of the lyrics so it ties everything together really well. 

You can listen to Trade Secrets anywhere you stream music and follow Dragon Inn 3 on Instagram or check out their website to keep up with their career.