Dave Tierney is a musician who is always evolving. From the Sharp Lads to The Sweet Things, and now perhaps is most unique project, Plastic Manmade Sunshine Machine. This new record sees Dave embracing the psychedelic fuzz of the late 60s and combining it with a modern rock sound.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Dave Tierney interview –
On who joins him in Plastic Manmade Sunshine Machine – We’ve got a great band of New York City veterans. All people I’ve known a long time. So, Hitomi Nakamura is on drums. She’s, I don’t know, maybe one of the best drummers in New York City. Guy Fiumarelli on guitar. He played with Fiona Silver a long time. That’s where I met him. And then Megan Rose on bass who plays with a number of projects around town. Probably her top band these days, or for the last few years has been Monty. Then we had a couple extra people join us in the studio who aren’t regular members of the band. We had Kim Lewis join us on flute for a great little cameo, and then Beck Lauder came to help us with some of the backup vocals, just to make the sound a little bigger.
On how the band came together – The origin is I actually had the idea for this band a long time ago, and I wrote the lyrics forever ago when I was in this band, The Sharp Lads that I was in before The Sweet Things. I wrote the whole thing as 10 song concept. It emerged out of an inside joke between me and my friend John from the band Hussy, who’s a Southern New Hampshire band, although I think now they’re bicoastal. Great band by the way. Hussy, they just put out some new stuff, so look em up. But he and I were just kinda joking around about a psychedelic concept, and I ended up writing a whole set of lyrics out of it. I’d been sitting on it forever after. Then after The Sweet Things broke up, I was writing a lot and trying to figure out what to do next. I ended up picking up this old notebook and just writing music to all the songs. I was gonna make it just a recording project at first, and then I decided it would be fun to play it live. So, I started reaching out to local musicians and put the band together.
On the story – it originally came from an inside joke. John came up with a band name actually, but we were joking around. He said something about his old psychedelic band and he named it, but he didn’t have an old psychedelic band. That was the joke. Then I emailed him that later and said, “Oh, I found your old record”. I had put the track listing together. We just joked around with that for a while. I had a dedicated writing night every Thursday, and I would go to bar Matchless in Green Point, Brooklyn, and I would sit at the bar with my notebook, and I would drink beers and I would write until I was too buzzed to be writing anything decent. That was my process for a long time. Like I said, I was in the band, The Sharp Lads, and I didn’t feel like writing Sharp Lads lyrics this one night, I was just not in that headspace. So, I was like, “You know what, I’m gonna write this because this has been amusing me lately”.
I wrote that over two or three nights. I wrote the whole record. So that’s where it comes from. It’s definitely, like I said, a concept. It’s meant to be listened to in order. We played the record live in order when we performed. There’s a storyline, it takes you through a day or maybe like a history of a universe, all condensed into 45 minutes.
On influences for the record, including the Moody Blues – That’s funny. I never thought about the Moody Blues thing, but my parents played so many Moody blues records when I was growing up, so apparently that seeped in and now it’s affected me…I didn’t think about that. My parents listen to Days Of Future Passed all the time, and there’s that little opening with that spoken word section, and then it goes into “Ride My Seesaw”…That’s actually, you know what, I didn’t think about that at all, but, and I was joking when I said that I was infected by it, but no, I think that’s in there. So that’s cool. Originally the jumping off point for me was Syd Barrett Piper At The Gates of Dawn. That was the first thing I thought of when I was trying to write it. I wrote the song “Tripping Down a Hole” first. So, that was the most consciously trying not even to be like Syd Barrett, but to be similar in a way to 1968 British psychedelic.
I’m really into a lot of those 1968 era British bands. So not just Floyd, but also the Soft Machine and Kevin Ayers’ solo work after that. I really love actually The Pretty Things and they did S.F. Sorrow and then their next record after that. The Pretty Things also was where I got the idea to name The Sweet Things. I said, “We need a name like that”. That was the closest thing I could think of. But yeah, I was trying to at first make it like a 68 British psychedelic thing, but then it, from there, it just moved and it’s a million different influences, seeped in and like I said, even things that I wasn’t aware of probably until right now.
On if his writing changes depending on the project – I love that question. I have a million ideas and I always have, and I’ll never have enough time to do all the ideas that I have. So, I have a lot of ideas that are just like conceptual or I have a lot of things I’m just sitting in notebooks written out, or I have plenty of songs that are fully written that I’ve just never done anything with. So, I have lots of different ideas. Like I was saying back in The Sharp Lads, there was like an idea of there’s a certain thing that is a Sharp Lad song. I actually don’t really love that idea anymore. That was a long time ago, but whatever, we were a certain kind of band. We were like a lot, a high energy rock and roll punk band, and so there was a certain kind of song we couldn’t really bring.
So, starting The Sweet Things for instance, right after that, we had a whole different thing. We were just like a rock and roll band and we embraced that. We thought of ourselves as someone once said, “The New York Doll is playing Exile on Main Street“, and that’s kinda how we thought of ourselves with a little bit maybe of Replacements mixed in. We experimented at times in that band with like different sounds. I don’t know if it’s always embraced, so people come to expect a certain thing from each band. It’s almost easier just to start a new project than you can do anything you want.
On if Plastic Manmade Sunshine Machine exists past this record – Yeah, it exists and I’m hoping to do more with it. I’m writing the follow up album and most of the lyrics are done for the next record. So, there is another album but I’m also writing a few kind of standalone singles. I think I’ll most likely tackle those first. One thing that occurred to me is the show ends and we’ve had some cool shows, but the band doesn’t have anything that could be an encore. I do love encores in music, but I hate fake encores, which are what most of them are. But I love, like a real genuine encore when the crowd just can’t get enough.
I remember back in college I was playing in a band, and we were playing this party. Our show would end and it was late and then we’d get off the stage, it wasn’t even a stage, but, and go mix into the party and people wouldn’t let us go back to the party because they kept wanting one more song and that went on for four songs, like stretched over like 40 minutes. That’s like a real encore. So anyway, the next thing I’m writing is hopefully something that would be, in a sense designed to be a good encore song after the album.
On plans to play live – There’s nothing planned right now, but yeah, we’re planning on playing live again this spring, so hopefully spring, summer, fall we’ll be back. I haven’t played since 2025. A little bit of a break, but at the same time trying to get a little bit of writing done, so we can come back and maybe if we do get an encore at our next show, we’ll have something to play.
On what the band plays live – We keep it to the album. But we don’t play it quite as rigid as it’s recorded. We do build in a lot of space for improvisation. For instance, we do open every show with improvisation and then the album emerges outta that. Some of the songs are pretty straightforward, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus songs. Those tend to stay the same, but then there’s a few songs like for instance the opening of what would be side B if we pressed this on vinyl the “Plastic Manmade Sunshine Machine Suite”. That song is different every time. It’s got some riffs and some lyrics and sections that it’s based on, but the live version of that is pretty exploratory, even actually the studio version is as well. I think we just captured a really cool exploratory version of that made it on the record.
On if The Sweet Things will ever reunite – I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. We’re still all really good friends and we still all talk all the time. So yeah, there’d be nothing stopping that if everybody was lined up. Right now, everybody’s just in such different places, either in life or creatively or both that I wouldn’t expect it to happen in 2026. But yeah, that certainly could happen somewhere down the road.
On any other plans for 2026 – I don’t think so. I’ve been playing drums for How Tragic for the last couple years. So that’s been pretty fun. My friend Paige Campbell, who’s a really great songwriter at some point a couple years ago was having trouble getting a full-time drummer. It was right as I all of a sudden had a lot of time in my schedule and I ran into her to show and I was like, “I could drum for you”. The other two guys in the band were two of the guys I played with in The Sharp Lads before The Sweet Things. So, we’ve been playing together. I think we’ll probably have more shows coming up. Other than that I’m still always writing and thinking of other ideas. Who knows, something else could pop up.
