In the video for Herman Dune’s excellent ‘I Hope That I Will See You Soon’, David Ivar Herman Dune is wearing a big furry pink animal mask.

He sings the song about a girl he left behind but with whom he is still smitten to a bunch of kids who sing along and run around, playing with puppets and brightly coloured letters that bounce around the room.

Néman Herman Dune and David’s sister, Lisa Li Lund, join the gang and the whole video has the atmosphere of the happiest party possible. But when Lisa sings “Do you really think she will wait for you?” David replies, “I have no way to say and there is nothing I can do” and the joyous reunion seems less certain, not that anyone seems to notice.

This sums up Herman Dune perfectly. It is difficult to imagine a more joyous experience, a band that could lift spirits and bring a smile more effortlessly. But there is a wistful undertow, a hint that things aren’t as rosy as they seem but that optimism is prevalent. For newcomers, the closest reference point in the last few decades would be Jonathan Richman.

“I like Jonathan Richman so much,” David says emphatically, “he’s a fantastic writer and a fantastic songwriter. I guess I learnt a lot from listening to him and watching him play. What’s funny is that he took a lot from Lou Reed who is a hero of mine as well so sometimes I don’t know who of them influences me the most.”

Richman is frequently credited as a major influence on The Moldy Peaches and their frontman, Adam Green, in particular. However, the biggest difference between Green and Herman Dune is the overwhelming sincerity and complete lack of posturing in what Herman Dune do. Green always seems as if he is winking at the audience, saying “How quirky and ironic is this?!” whereas that was never part of Richman’s routine. It really felt as if he cared about that abominable snowman in the market. There’s no doubting that Herman Dune do too.
The band’s latest album Next Year In Zion is their first without founding member André Herman Dune. André had previously shared songwriting duties equally with David so his departure meant the latter was landed with the burden of writing all of Herman Dune’s songs. “I’ve always had too many songs anyway,” says David, “and some of our albums together were too long, I thought, because we wouldn’t let go of this or that song that we each had written. The time had come to end a collaboration and, as much as I loved working with Andre, I needed to work alone. As an artist, I find it very important to respect your own vision of what you should be doing. The feeling of working on an album as the sole songwriter was great, a little scary at times, but awesome overall.”

Next Year In Zion is also a departure for David in other ways. It would not set him too far apart from other writers to acknowledge that he always found it much easier to write while melancholy. As he himself agrees, when you’re happy, you’re far too busy enjoying that happiness to sit down and write a song about it. When the misery hits, there is precious little to do but wallow in it and turn it into creativity. But with Next Year In Zion, David Ivar Herman Dune discovered the liberation of writing while happy.

“Three years ago,” he says, “I met someone that I care for more than anything, and I started reading the Torah all year round and trying to learn from it. Both are the best things that happened to me, and I went from being bitter and angry as a writer to really working for the beauty of the Word itself. The Word, its shape, its sound, became like an image of the happiness that I could feel inside. It’s wonderful, and it’s a blessing for me, to be able to arrange words according to their meanings, the way they sound, or the images they create in my brain.”

The stereotype of the tortured artist is generally one that many aspire to and any miserable songwriter will mumble for hours about how happiness is less dignified than sadness. Yet, David’s obvious joy and the fact that Next Year In Zion stemmed from that joy are enough of a rebuttal. And while sad songs definitely have a place in music, every ying needs its yang. And Next Year In Zion is that ying.

“When a happy feeling inspires me,” David says, “and I write a good song out of a happy feeling, then I really enjoy singing the song, a lot more that a sad song that would put me back in the state of mind that I was in when I wrote it.”

David places a lot of emphasis on the craft of songwriting. The nucleus of the song – the lyrics, the melody – matters most. The process for Next Year In Zion didn’t stray from this ethos. “I think about the songs,” David says, “And I work on the songs. That’s kind of what I do for, let’s say, a year before I think we have enough material for an album. When Neman and I both thought we had the right selection of songs, then the recording sessions were about getting the best version we could possibly play of those songs. We called the best musicians we knew and our favorite engineer and recorded all in the same room, together. The feeling was great and everybody was working for the songs, more than for their own instrumental parts as musicians. It was fantastic.”

Herman Dune’s recording process makes them an organic experience, for want of a less horrifically hippy term.
“We record live all together,” David says, “and I try to leave a lot of space to the musicians in the studio. But there is a fine line that I never want to cross, where the song ends up in the background of the instruments, or where the sound of the recordings takes more attention than the lyrics, or the melodies. I also have my own sort of principles while recording, I don’t like when people add electronic effects to the natural sounds that come from their instruments and voices.”

If the papers are to be believed, there are a lot of things to worry about at the moment: the world’s economies collectively nosediving into the depths of silliness, poisonous spiders in your grapes, murderous youths whose only major conundrum is whether to kill you with a gun or a knife, everything can give you cancer except for the things that will give you a heart attack instead. It’s difficult to see the joy in the world sometimes. Listen to Next Year In Zion. If you’re not smiling and forgetting everything worrisome by the end of ‘Try To Think About Me’ then keep listening. ‘When The Sun Rose Up This Morning’ will do the trick.

Herman Dune are living proof of the therapeutic power of simply letting a little sun in.