Pete Droge

Center Stage: An Abandoned Albums Podcast

Pete Droge

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Pete Droge

Gets personal.

Keith R. Higgons

Oct 08, 2025

Transcript

It’s a tricky thing to do a podcast because to cover a career like Pete Droge’s, you’d need at least two hours, and I limit my show to one hour of interview, leaving room to cut in songs. Accordingly, as disappointing as it is, there will inevitably be some gaps in the conversation.

Such was the case when Pete Droge recently stopped by Thunderlove Studio to discuss his life, career, and new album, Fade Away Blue, a collection of deeply personal songs.

For the uninitiated, Pete Droge emerged from the Pacific Northwest in 1994 with the album Necktie Second. This debut delivered the hit “If You Don’t Love Me (I’ll Kill Myself)”.

Pete Droge's songs are wry, tuneful, and often surprisingly tender, adult pop without the smarm.

This made Hollywood take notice. In addition to his scoring work, his tracks, such as the aforementioned “If You Don’t Love Me (I’ll Kill Myself),” appeared in Dumb and Dumber. He also wrote the title song for the movie Beautiful Girls, “Two of the Lucky Ones” from Zombieland, and contributed “Small Time Blues” to the film Almost Famous, where he even managed to get a little screen time.

Droge has also been a collaborator (with The Thorns, featuring Matthew Sweet and Shawn Mullins), a producer, and a general musical handyman, staying busy even when out of the spotlight. With his new album Fade Away Blue, he returns to the spotlight and proves, decades later, that he’s still at the top of his game. Droge continues to write with the kind of plainspoken emotional clarity that outlasts trends.

And there’s a lot of emotional clarity on Fade Away Blue.

I don’t want to give away too much in the preamble here, but Fade Away Blue is a deeply personal album about dealing with some of his experiences around his adoption, growing up, his chronic fatigue syndrome, and depression.

Lest you be concerned, Pete is much better now.

As a bit of an album sequencing nerd, Fade Away Blue is sequenced to tell a story, almost like a musical documentary. I won’t reveal too much here, but we covered a lot of ground in a short time, and our conversation was both candid and upbeat.