Superchunk Indierock | Alternative 7 Items

The first single from Wild Loneliness, "Endless Summer," features the harmonies of Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley. The 7-inch single contains a cover of The Glands' "When I Laugh" as the B-side, originally released as part of Merge's Going to Georgia benefit compilation.

The first single from Wild Loneliness, "Endless Summer," features the harmonies of Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley. The 7-inch single contains a cover of The Glands' "When I Laugh" as the B-side, originally released as part of Merge's Going to Georgia benefit compilation.

Like every record Superchunk has made over the last thirty-some years, Wild Loneliness is unskippably excellent and infectious. It's a blend of stripped-down and lush, electric and acoustic, highs and lows, and I love it all. On Wild Loneliness I hear echoes of Come Pick Me Up, Here's to Shutting Up, and Majesty Shredding. After the (ahem, completely justifiable) anger of What a Time to Be Alive, this new record is less about what we've lost in these harrowing times and more about what we have to be thankful for. (I know something about gratitude. I've been a huge Superchunk fan since the 1990s, around the same time I first found my way to poetry, so the fact that I'm writing these words feels like a minor miracle.) On Wild Loneliness, it feels like the band is refocusing on possibility, and possibility is built into the songs themselves, in the sweet surprises tucked inside them. I say all the time that what makes a good poem_the "secret ingredient"_is surprise. Perhaps the same is true of songs. Like when the sax comes in on the title track, played by Wye Oak's Andy Stack, adding a completely new texture to the song. Or when Owen Pallett's strings come in on "This Night." But my favorite surprise on Wild Loneliness is when the harmonies of Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley of Teenage Fanclub kick in on "Endless Summer." It's as perfect a pop song as you'll ever hear _ sweet, bright, flat-out gorgeous_and yet it grapples with the depressing reality of climate change: "Is this the year the leaves don't lose their color / and hummingbirds, they don't come back to hover / I don't mean to be a giant bummer but / I'm not ready / for an endless summer, no / I'm not ready for an endless summer." I love how the music acts as a kind of counterweight to the lyrics. Because of Covid, Mac, Laura, Jim, and Jon each recorded separately, but a silver lining is that this method made other long-distance contributions possible, from R.E.M.'s Mike Mills, Sharon Van Etten, Franklin Bruno, and Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura, among others. Some of the songs for the record were written before the pandemic hit, but others, like "Wild Loneliness," were written from and about isolation. I've been thinking of songs as memory machines. Every time we play a record, we remember when we heard it before, and where we were, and who we were. Music crystallizes memories so well: listening to "Detroit Has a Skyline," suddenly I'm shoutsinging along with it at a show in Detroit twenty years ago; listening to "Overflows," I'm transported back to whisper-singing a slowed-down version of it to my young son, that year it was his most-requested lullaby. Wild Loneliness is becoming part of my life, part of my memories, too. And it will be part of yours. I can picture people in 20, 50, or 100 years listening to this record and marveling at what these artists created together_beauty, possibility, surprise_during this alarming (and alarmingly isolated) time. But why wait? Let's marvel now. - Maggie Smith

Like every record Superchunk has made over the last thirty-some years, Wild Loneliness is unskippably excellent and infectious. It's a blend of stripped-down and lush, electric and acoustic, highs and lows, and I love it all. On Wild Loneliness I hear echoes of Come Pick Me Up, Here's to Shutting Up, and Majesty Shredding. After the (ahem, completely justifiable) anger of What a Time to Be Alive, this new record is less about what we've lost in these harrowing times and more about what we have to be thankful for. (I know something about gratitude. I've been a huge Superchunk fan since the 1990s, around the same time I first found my way to poetry, so the fact that I'm writing these words feels like a minor miracle.) On Wild Loneliness, it feels like the band is refocusing on possibility, and possibility is built into the songs themselves, in the sweet surprises tucked inside them. I say all the time that what makes a good poem_the "secret ingredient"_is surprise. Perhaps the same is true of songs. Like when the sax comes in on the title track, played by Wye Oak's Andy Stack, adding a completely new texture to the song. Or when Owen Pallett's strings come in on "This Night." But my favorite surprise on Wild Loneliness is when the harmonies of Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley of Teenage Fanclub kick in on "Endless Summer." It's as perfect a pop song as you'll ever hear _ sweet, bright, flat-out gorgeous_and yet it grapples with the depressing reality of climate change: "Is this the year the leaves don't lose their color / and hummingbirds, they don't come back to hover / I don't mean to be a giant bummer but / I'm not ready / for an endless summer, no / I'm not ready for an endless summer." I love how the music acts as a kind of counterweight to the lyrics. Because of Covid, Mac, Laura, Jim, and Jon each recorded separately, but a silver lining is that this method made other long-distance contributions possible, from R.E.M.'s Mike Mills, Sharon Van Etten, Franklin Bruno, and Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura, among others. Some of the songs for the record were written before the pandemic hit, but others, like "Wild Loneliness," were written from and about isolation. I've been thinking of songs as memory machines. Every time we play a record, we remember when we heard it before, and where we were, and who we were. Music crystallizes memories so well: listening to "Detroit Has a Skyline," suddenly I'm shoutsinging along with it at a show in Detroit twenty years ago; listening to "Overflows," I'm transported back to whisper-singing a slowed-down version of it to my young son, that year it was his most-requested lullaby. Wild Loneliness is becoming part of my life, part of my memories, too. And it will be part of yours. I can picture people in 20, 50, or 100 years listening to this record and marveling at what these artists created together_beauty, possibility, surprise_during this alarming (and alarmingly isolated) time. But why wait? Let's marvel now. - Maggie Smith

Black Vinyl In Jacket W/ Vellum Overwrap + Bonus Cd "Bestial Warning" (Acoustic Demos For "Here's To Shutting Up").To Write The Songs For Here's To Shutting Up, We Gathered In Jim's Garage (He Lived Way Out In The Woods) A Couple Times A Week For What Seemed Like Months. We Started From Actual Scratch With No Demos Or Concepts, Just Playing Instrumental Music With Our Usual Gear Plus A Casio. Sometimes One Of Us Would Play The Keys Instead Of Our Normal Instrument, Or Jon Would Hop On Guitar And We'd Use The Casio Drum Machine For The Beat. We Ended Up With A Lot Of Ideas And Plenty Of Good Names For Them_"Frank's Bath," "There's Something About Marvin," And"Bestial Warning" To Name A Few. We Recorded Practice Onto Minidisc Or Cassette, And I Would Ride Around Listening To These Demos And Thinking Of Words. The Subject Matter, In Retrospect, Has A Lot To Do With Touring And Travel ("Out On The Wing," "What Do You Look Forward To?"), Coming Home ("Rainy Streets," "Act Surprised"), The 2000 Election ("Florida's On Fire"), And Late-Stage Capitalism ("Late-Century Dream," "The Animal Has Left Its Shell"). Once We Wrangled The Songs Into Recognizable And Playable Shapes, We Re-Created Them In Acoustic Form And Recorded These "Demos" At My House So We Wouldn't Forget How They Went And So We Could Learn How To Play Them. Some Have The Whole Band, Some Are Me Learning Jim's And Laura's Parts From The Practice Tapes And Playing Them On Acoustic Guitar.We Recorded The Album In The Cabbagetown Neighborhood Of Atlanta At Zero Return, The Studio Built By Brian And Rob (Aka Birdstuff And Coco The Electronic Monkey Wizard) Of Man Or Astro-Man? Brian Paulson Came With Us To Produce It. The Studio Itself Was Amazing. We Also Slept There In A Dorm-Like Setting And Stayed Up Too Late. We Had Some Great Guest Players On The Record Including The First Appearance Of A Pedal Steel On A Superchunk Album, Played By John Neff Of Athens Band Japancakes. Local Chris Lopez (The Rock*A*Teens) Came Over To Sing Backup Vocals...

Our original idea for an all-acoustic album was for it to be a selection of songs from all our albums, played in the style of an acoustic performance in a record store or a radio station, which we have done quite a bit of over the years (and documented on the first of our "Clambake" series in 2001). But with 2019 being the 25th anniversary of the Foolish album, it seemed weirder and more interesting to record an acoustic version of one whole album. I didn't want this to sound like "acoustic demos recorded 25 years after the fact" or a band trying to "rock out" except on acoustic guitars, though to be fair we do some rocking out. Once we got into the process of learning how to play the songs on acoustic guitars_some of which we had never performed at all_it made sense to make this record its own thing altogether. We are lucky to have Allison Crutchfield, Matt Douglas, Peter Holsapple, Owen Pallett, and Jenn Wasner lend their great talents to the record and also lucky that Jon has an arsenal of small bells and a vibraslap.