Greg Puciato Names His Five Favourite Songs to Perform Live

Former Dillinger Escape Plan frontperson Greg Puciato is heading to Australia for a run of solo headline shows in January 2024. The tour will visit Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth over five consecutive nights. Puciato will be supported at all shows by Trace Amount, the industrial-noise project of Brooklyn artist Brandon Gallagher, while American trap-metal artist King Yosef is on board for all shows except Perth.

Puciato has released two solo records since Dillinger broke up in 2017: 2020’s Child Soldier: Creator of God and last year’s Mirrorcell. He also released the pandemic-era livestream Fuck Content a few months after Child Soldier. Puciato will be performing material from these albums on the upcoming tour, for which he’ll be joined by a full band.

Ahead of the visit, Puciato tells Music Feeds about his five favourite songs to perform live, emphasising the difference between the studio and the stage.

Greg Puciato’s favourite songs to perform live

1. Deep Set

Greg Puciato: There’s a song called ‘Deep Set’ on my first record that I really like because it’s the song I can put the most personality into vocally. It’s not as delineated, there’s not as much, Here’s a really strict melody that I have to sing or here’s a really strict phrasing that I have to stick with. There’s a lot of leeway for me to sort of lean into it as a character.

That song, to me, feels like an elastic kind of morphing. It’s almost like improv. I can get a lot of improv with it, but the lyrics stay the same, and the song structure is the same. It just feels like there’s a lot more room for expression for me vocally in that song. It’s really fun, and it’s also a little sinister. I always like leaning into that vibe live.

2. Lowered (feat. Reba Meyers of Code Orange)

Greg: I like playing ‘Lowered’ when Reba Meyers can be around. It’s fun. I’ve never done a duet before like that onstage, and having that back and forth with another singer is really cool. And she’s been able to be there a decent amount so far, so that’s been a real highlight every night.

3. A Pair of Questions

Greg: ‘A Pair of Questions’ from Child Soldier: Creator of God is a song that I really like. It’s almost romantic, it’s like a pop song. It’s completely electronic on the record but we do a live band version of it that is a lot more jammy, almost with some funk.

Playing songs with a band live that were electronic on a record is always a different thing. The first time I ever saw that, I was in London when Justin Timberlake was doing his first ever tour. And I remember someone being like, “Hey, if you want to go see this Justin Timberlake show, we can get you and whoever else in.” Me and a couple of the other Dillinger guys went, and I’d never been to a show like that. I’d never seen a pop artist ever. Since then I’ve seen a bunch and a lot of them are just singing in front of their tracks. But some of them have a whole band on stage and they’re doing live band versions of these pop songs. And that’s what Justin did.

I think he had The Roots as his backing band at that point, so it was really full on. It was like, “Holy shit!” They were doing these longer versions of the songs and jamming and it was a really cool thing. I never took pop music that seriously before then. And then when I saw that, I realised what you can do to differentiate those kinds of songs live.

So, when it came time to do ‘A Pair of Questions’, it was like, Okay, I can either do this really sort of boring version of it where I just play, everyone walks off stage and I just sing in front of tracks – which fucking sucks – or we can reinterpret it as a band and make it more kind of earthy and organic. That changes the way I sing it – I can sing it with a little bit more power and push and it just changes the feel of the song. So, that’s become a highlight of the set.

When we last played in LA, Jerry Cantrell was there, he’s our buddy. He had never seen me play solo before, he doesn’t know all of the songs and shit, he’s not sitting around listening to all of my stuff. And after the show, he was like, “Hey, what was that one song called?” And he started humming it and I was like, “Oh, that’s ‘A Pair of Questions’.” And he was like, “Yeah, that one was really cool.” And I was like, Damn, that’s the song that I would expect Jerry Cantrell to relate to the least, this kind of romantic pop song. But it’s cool that he even detected that we were having fun with it.

4. Don’t Wanna Deal

Greg: Fuck Content was this livestream I did over COVID. I put four new songs on that livestream and one of them, to me, felt like a single, but it just got buried on the record and didn’t really get much attention, we didn’t really push it. It’s called ‘Don’t Wanna Deal.’ We decided to play that song live, even though it wasn’t a streaming hit or anything like that. And when we played it live, it just gave it this whole new energy, and it became a highlight of the set every night. That’s a really fun one.

5. Evacuation

Greg: ‘Evacuation’ is another fun song. Like I mentioned earlier, things become a different thing live than when they’re in the studio. I liked ‘Evacuation’ in the studio and I thought it was a good song, otherwise I wouldn’t have put it on the record, but definitely when you start playing things live, they hit a little harder – or not.

Some songs I love on record, but it would not have enough energy. Or maybe it just doesn’t translate live the way it does on the record and that’s totally fine. You don’t have to write everything to be this really fucking high octane live song.

But for whatever reason, ‘Evacuation’ has taken off more live. And even when we did some live recordings, I liked the live recordings of that song better than the studio recording because I can hear that there’s an energy to it live that really wasn’t quite captured on the studio version.

There’s a lyric in there that’s like a Dillinger throwback lyric that I think people kind of catch onto. It’s also got a good mix of The Black Queen vibes in it too, which comes from the atmospherics and electronics. It touches on a lot of other stuff that I do in a way that still makes sense as a solo song.