After spending the ‘00s in such established Philadelphia punk bands as Paint It Black and the Loved Ones, Dave Hause has decided to mellow things out a bit with a solo career, and he has no intentions of looking back.

“After my first solo record [Resolutions] in 2011, I started touring and gained a significant amount of momentum, especially in Europe,” the 35 year-old says.

“I was on the Revival Tour with Brian [Fallon] from the Gaslight Anthem, Chuck [Ragan] from Hot Water Music and Dan [Andriano] from Alkaline Trio, and all of those guys pulled me aside and said ‘Hey, you’d be crazy to go back to playing in a band right now. You have a ton of momentum and you have a very clear vision of what you want to do musically. Don’t cloud that by doing what people are expecting from you.’

“It just became abundantly clear that I had to go forward on my own.”

Hause released his second solo effort Devour in October 2013 through Rise Records. He says he approached it quite differently than his debut.

“With Resolutions I had a nice batch of songs I felt good about and I just gave it a try thinking I’d go back to The Loved Ones,” Hause says. “With Devour it was clear that I wasn’t just doing it as an experiment, I was doing it as if my life depended on it and I think because of that I was really clear with the themes and had a grander vision for the record.”

While he assembled a band in the studio with drummer Dave Hidalgo Jr. (Social Distortion), bassist Bob Thomson, guitarist Mitchell Townsend and keyboardist Bo Koster (My Morning Jacket), he’ll be performing the Canadian shows with his younger brother Tim and says he probably won’t do a full band tour until later this summer in Europe.

The fact that Hause can call all of the shots is one of the reasons he prefers performing on his own.

“One thing I really like is I can play the songs any way I want. I can do them with a limited amount of instrumentation or I can bring in a band depending on what the circumstances are,” he says.

“With a band I think the audience expects you’ll play just like the record and for some odd reason, maybe because of guys like Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, I think the audience is more willing to take whatever you bring to the show when you’re a solo guy, and that’s more attractive to me.”

That spontaneity resulted in Hause covering “One Great City!” by the Weakerthans when he played the Pyramid Cabaret back in June 2011, but he doesn’t promise there will be a repeat this time.

“Covers you just do whenever the spirit moves. I want to move forward with every show. Matt Goud [Northcote] and I might cook up our own cover of something, but who knows what will happen.”

Published in Volume 68, Number 19 of The Uniter (February 5, 2014)