The return of Superchunk
Superchunk singer Mac McCaughan laughs at the idea that the return of his band after a nine-year hiatus is somehow part of the current wave of ’90s nostalgia.
“I gotta find out about that,” he says, joking. “Everybody keeps telling me about it.”
Considering the lengthy recording process that led to Superchunk’s seventh album, “Majesty Shredding” (Merge), which hit stores last week, the band obviously had no way of knowing it would arrive in the same season where high-profile comebacks from other ’90s indie-rock heroes, including Pavement and Guided by Voices. [Newsday, 9.19.10 // Full story here]
It’s an odd coincidence, especially since nostalgia ends up being one of the main themes of the album. “A lot of this is about music and nostalgia and the power of both of those things and how they work together,” McCaughan says.
The standout track, “Learned to Surf,” is about that tension for bands like Superchunk, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, featuring a chorus of “When I learned to talk, I found words that weren’t worth dirt/Heavy like the rocks we carry, I stopped sinking and learned to surf.”
“It’s about both resisting nostalgia and going along with it when it’s useful,” McCaughan says, adding that the band didn’t set out to tackle the idea. “We don’t really know what the themes or ideas of a record are until after it’s done and we’re standing back and looking at it and listening to it.”
The hilarious video for the album’s first single, “Digging for Something,” makes the nostalgia point even more clearly, though, centering around a pretend “reunion” of Superchunk featuring one original member, only to have the rest of the band - McCaughan, guitarist Jim Wilbur, bassist Laura Ballance, drummer Jon Wurster - find out about it and resume their rightful places.
Though “Digging for Something” is part of the album’s broader idea of acknowledging your past while still looking to the future, McCaughan says it became the first single for a more straightforward reason.
“We just really liked it,” he says. “It has a chorus that someone I sent it to said was ‘almost too catchy.’ Hopefully, we didn’t cross over the line. It just sounds like a single, and we also had some bells and whistles on it, in the sense that there’s horns and that John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats sings backup on it. There’s just a lot of cool stuff going on in it.”
McCaughan pinpoints the argument that veteran acts use when they put out new material. “Are you enjoying something because of nostalgia or are you enjoying a really good thing because it’s a really good thing?” he asks.
And “Majesty Shredding” is definitely a good thing, offering both songs that remind fans how the North Carolina band built its following while always putting out albums themselves. “Crossed Wires” is a nod to their earlier albums that offered pop hooks played at punk speeds, with McCaughan’s distinctive vocals leading the way. “‘Rosemarie’ shows the effect of McCaughan’s side project, Portastatic, as well as the influence of Bruce Springsteen. [Full story here]
