In the past few years, nothing has dominated indie music like nostalgia. Band after 90s band has reunited, providing a key draw at festivals from Pitchfork to Coachella to Taste of Randolph Street and kindling memories of the inglorious glory days of 1993, when a major-label signing frenzy briefly turned the underground into the mainstream—and this time around, even the also-rans of the alt-rock boom can hope to cash in. Back in that era Superchunk helped define and popularize indie rock as we now know it, and like many of their peers—Pavement, Polvo, any group that put out a seven-inch on Teenbeat in 1995—they’re back in action.
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Right now, I am literally looking at a set list for a band I was in in high school. I always forget to grab the set list, and I wish I didn’t, because we try to keep track of what we played the last three times we came through a city, just so we don’t play same set. Of course I have a trash bag of Superchunk shirts, going back to the ones we made ourselves, but I’m not about to wear them around. I want to have them, give ’em to my kids when they’re big enough to wear them. And flyers and posters, certainly. [Laughs.] You know, the 90s were a terrible time for poster art, but we still have some good ones. I have tapes of practice, demos I suppose I could have transferred. I guess I save a lot of it. For [the Merge Records book] Our Noise, it made for a lot to go through.
Who do you imagine showing it to? Or is it just for the thrill of coming across a laminate from some weird tour you did and remembering?
To them it’s just my job. I don’t think they contemplate it. It’s not exotic to them. It was funny—we went to the Primavera festival in Spain . . . my daughter asked about it and I found a video on YouTube. Because it’s a festival, there’s this big stage, big light show, strobes and spinning lights—I didn’t notice at the time, really, but watching it, for her, that was the most impressive thing. “Dad, you guys look like rock stars!” I guess that’s all we need now. A light show.
Can you?
The idea is not to be too purposeful, not to overthink it. You have to be your own critic; you want it to be good. You do have a filter. If it’s good, it’s great if it’s the first thing you put down to tape. We don’t set out to convey or present. It has to feel good—in that sense it’s the same as when we started the band. We weren’t trying to break ground, just make records like the ones we loved. We didn’t go to vocational school; it’s what we loved, it was what we were doing. In some ways, how we made the record gets back to that—before now, we practiced hours a week, worked on songs from scratch, and some of the songs on the last record became overworked in that process. This time we didn’t have time. [Drummer Jon Wurster] would fly down from New York, we’d rehearse for one day and then record the song. That was a fun way to do it. I think you can hear that.
There were a good couple years where it felt really exciting to try and track down and hear every record, obscure or new, that I read about on blogs, but it burns you out. Now I prefer going to the record store, just like I grew up doing, and asking “What’s good? Would I like this?” of the people there I trust, who know my taste.
