With Dragon Inn 3, SSLYBY’s Phil Dickey leans in to blockbuster synth pop — and life in Kansas City

Phil Dickey is most associated with Springfield, Missouri, where his band Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin was based for more than a decade. But he lives in Kansas City these days — he moved here about a year and a half ago, with his wife, Grace Bentley, and their young son. They were in Waldo for awhile, and they’re currently renting a place in the historic Northeast. Grace works for the Johnson County Library, and Dickey is a stay-at-home dad. 

“The toddler scene in KC is legit,” he told me recently. “Much better than Springfield.” 

SSLYBY achieved medium indie-rock fame in the mid-2000s, recording a handful of well-received albums (Broom, Pershing, and — my favorite — Let It Sway) and inking some nice licensing deals, including one that landed the band’s song “Oregon Girl” on the then-quite-popular teen drama The OC. By 2012, though, SSLYBY was ten years old and beginning to slow down. (The following year, John Cardwell, the other songwriter in the band, left the group.) Dickey was working at Moxie Cinema, the small art-house movie theater in Springfield. One of his coworkers was a young filmmaker named Brook Linder, who had made some of SSLYBY’s music videos. 

“Brook was working on this school project where he was making kind of an ‘80s movie, and he wanted it to have an ‘80s soundtrack,” Dickey says. “This is before Stranger Things. We kinda missed our chance to cash in on that, I guess. But anyway, we started writing the soundtrack for it while we were at work. I would make the popcorn, and he would start the movies, and then there’d be nothing to do for two hours, so I’d bring a keyboard into the breakroom and we’d make music together.” 

Linder moved to Los Angeles shortly after that — he’s since directed videos for Grimes, Beck, and Spoon, among others — and the project fizzled out. SSLYBY released a couple more albums, then Dickey moved to KC. Doing the dad thing gave him some free time to comb through old demos, and one day Dickey stumbled upon the movie-house tracks. He tinkered with a few of them and sent one of the songs, “Bad Boy,” to Linder, who was working on some promo videos for Ryan Adams’ Beats 1 Radio show at the time. Linder snuck the song into one of the spots, and management seemed to like it. 

“People were like, ‘What’s this song?’,” Dickey says. “But we couldn’t tell them. We didn’t even have a name for it or anything. So that was a moment. I told Brook, ‘We really need to finish this project.’”

With the help of Bentley and Dickey’s sister, Sharon Bowie, they began culling songs and refining the sound of the project, which they dubbed Dragon Inn 3. (The name comes from a Springfield Chinese restaurant where Dickey used to hang out.) Though Dickey sings in SSLYBY, he ceded vocal duties in Dragon Inn 3 to Bowie and Linder (who sent in their vocal tracks from Springfield and L.A., respectively) and Bentley (who recorded her spots in their Waldo garage). 

Double Line, the resulting album, is out this Friday, August 17, via American Laundromat Records. True to its ‘80s inspiration, Double Line is heavy on synthy earworms — a little bit John Hughes, a tad chillwave, a touch of Swedish pop. (I’m particularly fond of the saxy adult contemporary turns in “Murder in the Third.”) And in keeping with the project’s cinematic roots, each song on Double Line has an accompanying video. Some of those videos were made by Kansas Citians: Conor Tierney directed “Bad Boy” and Pat Vamos directed “Murder in the Third.” 

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On Saturday, Dickey will be down in Springfield for a screening of the Double Line videos at the establishment where many of the songs were conceived: Moxie Cinema. He’ll be back in KC on Tuesday (the 21st) for a Double Line listening party at Up-Down Arcade — part of the bar’s Local Tuesdays series. But that’s the extent of the Dragon Inn 3 tour. Then it’s back to the parenting grind. 

“I know, like, 10 people in Kansas City, and most of my friends are toddlers,” Dickey says. “But we love it over in the Northeast. I just figured out where the Crossroads is. It’s great!” 

♦

Dragon Inn 3 listening party for Double Line. Tuesday, August 21, at Up-Down Arcade Bar. 6 p.m.