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Artist Interviews
Q&A: Superchunk
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 6 October 2010
Formed in 1989, punk-influenced indie-rockers Superchunk released their debut single, ‘Slack Motherfucker’, the same year, via Merge Records, a label founded by frontman Mac McCaughan and bassist Laura Ballance (and subsequently home, of course, to the likes of Arcade Fire and The Magnetic Fields). They went on to release three albums through Matador, before moving back to Merge in 1994. The band released their eighth album, ‘Here’s To Shutting Up’, in 2001, and then followed their own advice for nine years, well and truly shutting up. But now they’ve got round to making a follow-up, ‘Majesty Shredding’, which is out this week in the UK via One Four Seven Records. We spoke to McCaughan to ask the Same Six.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
My little sister had an acoustic guitar she was supposedly taking lessons on; she never played it but I did. I wanted to be Angus Young. This was 1980. Then I was in kind of new wave bands in high school (doing covers of bands like Athletico Spizz 80, Echo And The Bunnymen, etc – basically anyone on the ‘Urgh! A Music War’ soundtrack!) and then more punky things later on, more hardcore bands, until those things morphed into early Merge stuff, pre-Superchunk bands like Wwax and The Slushpuppies… then Chunk.
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
I think the same things that have inspired all our records, only now with more things since it’s nine years since the last one! Punk rock, art, being in a band, kids, North Carolina, nostalgia, anti-nostalgia, my family, travel, time, all kinds of stuff!
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
For this record, the process was different from our last few records, wherein we would start with nothing and the four of us would play for hours, just jamming really, and create songs that way. Then I’d add the vocals/lyrics on top.
No one wants to work that way anymore, nor has the time to, so I approached it more like the early records, only now armed with 20 years knowledge of how the four of us play together. I wrote songs and recorded demos at home and sent them around to everyone via email. Then we got together a couple days before recording and learned the songs quickly and then tracked them in a couple days. We were sort of on the verge of really knowing the songs, which I think lends some extra energy and urgency to the performances.
We did the basics to tape with Scott Solter producing, then dumped them into the computer and I worked on them at home for awhile, then sent them on to Scott to mix. We went back and forth on mixes via email and I think the stuff came out great. Punky but with a bigger sound than many of our records.
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
Wow, too many to mention, because I think probably everything you listen to is doing that in some way, right? I listen to a lot of jazz but I can’t play jazz; still, listening to Andrew Hill or Bill Evans or Jimmy Giuffre or Ornette Coleman, you ingest a certain way that musicians leave space where it’s necessary, or play the intentionally awkward ‘wrong’ thing in a way that wakes you up and is beautiful. Painters like Philip Guston do the same thing, awkwardness and energy that’s funny and sad and all these things.
Soul music is often playing in our house, sometimes when I’m working on a song and it’s just getting a bit unnecessarily complicated or roundabout, I’ll put on a song by Joe Simon or James Carr or someone, and try to keep the power of that simplicity and classic melody in mind. But musically I don’t think it’s terribly hard to tell what the roots of what we’re doing is – punk rock. And it still informs Superchunk, perhaps more on the new record than the last couple, though not in a completely doctrinaire kind of way.
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Don’t judge us because we’re beautiful.
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
Not having put out a record in nine years, one goal with this one was to have the pace be pretty relentless from start to finish. The kind of record where you get to the end and want to start it over again. I find that as I’ve gotten older, and so much music is available now, I don’t often have those records that I had when was nineteen or 20, where I would leave an album on the turntable – The Fall’s ‘Wonderful And Frightening World Of The Fall’, ‘Life’s Rich Pageant’ by REM, Big Star’s ‘Third’, Hüsker Dü’s ‘Zen Arcade’ – for weeks at a time, just playing it over and over. A goal with all our records is to make a record like that.
MORE>> superchunk.com
