Grandaddy: Digital Nature (Interview with Jim Fairchild)

Recent advances in technology have certainly made life a bit more comfortable, but California’s latest industrial revolution and subsequent implosion have taken it’s toll on the delicacies of humanity and the environment in which we reside. We may all be closer, but ironically we end up further apart. It’s this ironic twist of contemporary communication that Jason Lytle has brought to the forefront of song.

Back in 1992 in his hometown of Modesto, California, former skateboarder turned singer/guitarist/keyboardist, Lytle formed the first stage of Grandaddy with bassist Kevin Garcia and drummer Aaron Burtch. Assembling crude demo tapes and playing the coffeehouse circuit, the novice trio pushed on like any aspiring band, but never garnered much attention outside their own circles. Then in 1995, with the additions of guitarist Jim Fairchild and keyboardist Tim Dryden, Grandaddy ventured outside of their own confines, refining their craft with an emphasis on expansive soundscapes rather than tightened, catchy songwriting. The momentum that began boiling upward pushed them to create a studio snapshot, and the end result, A Pretty Mess by This One Band EP forced the indie-rock media to finally pay attention. But it wasn’t until 1997’s follow-up full-length Under the Western Freeway that they broke the major label back and they were signed by V2 Records, a remaining relationship that has proven a creative fit for both parties.

Like any of the great bands in rock history, reinventing yourself is an essential ingredient. Though it’s the pushing of rock past familiar boundaries that is the key to becoming a truly legendary artist. When The Sophtware Slump was released in 2000, Grandaddy did just that, securing them a place in the ambient, electronic texture craze simultaneously shared by Radiohead with their acclaimed Kid A. Both albums are identifiable pieces that hold great significance in moving rock forward, and after Amnesiac was issued as a B-side version to Kid A, they were held by industry pressures to repeat the feat.

Ironically, the long-awaited creations by both bands hit stores the same Tuesday in June last year, with Radiohead finding strength in guitar once abandoned, and Grandaddy returning to the same hard-edged, yet equally sensitive expression in Sumday. Despite their rather tough guy appearance, Grandaddy appreciates melody over volume, and work diligently to create a sonic landscape of broad musical texture. This latest release is a signifying moment in a career destined for greatness.

s more music fans begin to pack Grandaddy into their stack of all-time favorites, we caught up with guitarist Jim Fairchild prior to sharing a Spring tour with Emo-Rock stalwarts Saves the Day.

Your guitar work is much more prevalent in Sumday, compared to your last album, The Sophtware Slump. Was the steering towards a more rock sound purposeful or just an evolution of the Grandaddy sound?

I guess in the sense that every record is an evolution of the sound. The only kind of overriding objective for Sumday was that it needed to be a little bit more optimistic, and represent the idea that life isn’t the most grim thing that can happen to a human being. And it’s always just a matter of trying to treat everything correctly, in terms of the compositions, and making sure the lyrics have space to do what they need to do. To be truthful, I’m honestly more than happy to not really play at all. I think everyone in the band feels that way. There’s no reason to be involved in it if you’re not willing to help the song along.

The importance of leaving space?

Yeah, where it’s required. And you know, having said that, I’d really love to make a straight-up rock record. ‘Cause we’ve got all these songs that have been sitting on the shelves for a long time and a lot of them are more guitar-y ones. I think live we tend to rock out a little bit more and Jason has tons of songs leftover. It’d be fun sometime to just go in and do this barrage of stuff. On our recordings, the proper full-lengths so far, it seems like [leaving those out] has been pretty necessary. Again, it’s just a matter of making sure that everything has room to breathe. The words Jason is saying and the way he is singing them are the focal points of the recordings, and then it’s a matter of trying to backup those as well as you can, and as beautifully as possible.

That seems true, because in the overall mix, you’re kind of muted in the background and Jason’s voice is right up front, which I suppose gives your records that signature sound we’ve grown accustomed to hearing.

I try to approach it a lot like you would cooking, or maybe landscaping your yard. If you landscape your yard with plenty of beautiful plants that exist in nature, you can throw as many as you want out there, but eventually, if you went down to the nursery and bought the thirty things that were the prettiest and striking to the eye, but you only have twenty square-feet to work with, your garden is gonna look like shit. And you’re not gonna be able to walk around in it. And your kitty isn’t gonna have a place to take a crap (laughs).

It’s just important to realize the space you’re working in and some of the more important aspects. But yeah, I would totally dig…I guess maybe we should do that at some point, just go ahead and give into it. Let ourselves have like three weeks and bang out a rock ’n roll record real quick. And not even release it, just go “whew, ok, we got that out of our system.”

Well that brings up an interesting point, because at this stage you’ve become an industry buzzword. In almost every rock article written this past year, there was inevitably a reference to Radiohead, Wilco or Grandaddy. So now that you’ve created a strong identity, how do you approach future albums? Because you’re in a unique position where you really could release a risky record and completely mess with people, or you can slowly continue to add building blocks to the catalogue.

I was actually talking about this with my buddy Aaron. We were listening to some song of this local band that played here or whatever, and I was reflecting back and thinking, if this was myself, like six years ago, I’d be really critical of what they were doing, or think “this is really stupid” or whatever. And it turns out it’s not stupid, that’s just what I would have thought back then. And I kind of felt like I had reached a certain critical plateau of myself, personally…like, “you know what, worst-case scenario, even if it is a stupid song or whatever, does it really matter to what you’re doing or somebody else is doing?” and I think the same can be applied to what we do as a band. We can sit around and beat ourselves up about what we think is cool, or what the perception of us is, or what people are anticipating for the rest of our lives, but what that would ultimately do is prevent us from moving forward or sideways or progressing at all. And it kind of gets to the point where you have to try to develop the ability to separate yourself from whatever, even the music your friends are making around you, or what so-and-so from the New Yorker says.

And I think it might be a little more difficult for Jason sometimes, ‘cause he has to deal with some pressures that I don’t necessarily have to deal with. Sometimes I even feel a little bit bad that I’m just allowed to be a musician, and I’m very happy to be working on the songs or whatever else we’re working on, but he’s the person who has to hear, I mean we all hear it, but he has to hear that so-and-so said this, or even someone who collects all our music and has bought all our records and has all the B-sides, he’s the one who has to hear, “well, if you just did this,” or “this song means this much to me.” Maybe that can be kind of paralyzing, fortunately, that hasn’t happened to him yet. And even better, he’s just really stoked right now rearranging the house and we’re gonna start recording again very soon.

Was there a concentrated effort to make Sumday more commercially viable than your last record, which immediately opened with a nine-minute track?

No, not necessarily. This one, again, it had to be more optimistic and it had to be more concise, and those were really the only parameters. Of all the demos that Jason wrote for Sumday, maybe thirty of them, the songs just tended to be that way, more to the point. A song like “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s The Pilot,” it’s still a pretty concise song [even at nine minutes]. As long as that’s the case, as long as it’s still listenable, and you’re not just up your own ass trying to compliment yourself by seeing how many different ways you can bridge sections together and chords. I think that’s when stuff gets tricky, when things are “epic” or “grand” just for the sake of it. Fortunately, we haven’t done that yet…I don’t think (laugh).

Jason’s lyrics revolve around the battle between technology and nature, but lyrics aside, what about the dichotomy in the music itself? The element of ambient/organic sounds struggling against the most sterile of digital effects?

That’s kind of what has elicited all of the conversation about how we feel about technology versus nature. Where we come from, Modesto California, it became very obvious to see the growing pains, and that’s more or less where that came from. There’s that song (off The Sophtware Slump), “Broken Household Appliance National Forest,” and literally, there’s been quite a few times Jason and I, or one of the guys in the band, would be out driving around in the middle of nowhere, just beautiful pristine wilderness, or great agricultural sections of the central valley of California, and there’s a refrigerator lying right amongst these trees. And that obviously gets in your mind like, “well, what are we really doing?” ‘Cause it’s not necessarily that technology is bad, but it’s when you see the ineffective integration of technological aspects of human life into the natural aspects. And I think it’s more of a commentary on it than damnation of it. Wondering how much of themselves people are actually losing due to the integration. I don’t know, we still hope that humanity is maintained in the face of all of this.

But in terms of the music, some components of my favorite records are, I like the idea of not knowing exactly what the source of the sound is. And obviously you can’t do that all the time. It would be really difficult to make a record that was all [random and unusual] sounds and still have it sound pretty and melodic. So in the “digital realm,” there are a tremendous amount of options, but acoustic guitar still has validity. And those are the gaps that are really fun. Trying to have a sound that is obviously digitally-generated, butted up against a snare drum and a tom-tom and acoustic guitar and see if they can work well together. A lot of times they can’t. So when you just pull up and say, “ok, we’re gonna be a band that incorporates digital and acoustic sounds,” and you get the keyboards, there’s the digital, acoustic guitar, ok, there’s the acoustic sound, great, you’ve done it. But you haven’t really done it effectively. You haven’t done it sensitively. And that’s a pretty big thing for the band…to try and do stuff that we’re not supposed to be able to do, but do it sensitively.

And Jason’s lyrics solidify those sentiments – singing emotional ballads, but using words like, “desktop,” and “email” and “fax.” No one is approaching intimate social issues in such a contemporary way like he is.

All I can say is I agree with you. Or I shouldn’t say no one, but honestly, I’m tremendously blessed to be in a band with him. In my opinion, he’s one of the ten or twenty best songwriters of our generation. He’s just really good at it, he’s done it a lot, and he has a sensitivity to detail, more than most…

“El Caminos In the West” is a great example. A tongue-in-cheek nod to 60s folk, but instead of “come on people now, shine on your brother,” he’s singing that there’s no hope and things are futureless.

Yeah, I agree with you. That’s one I know for certain, we’ve talked about it, that Jason’s not sure where that song came from, but I do sense a lot of that. I think there’s a part of him, maybe because of where we all grew up and the situation, to a degree, that we’ve all been presented with, I think that it’s tough for Jason sometimes to present something in a completely happy or optimistic way. Whether he knows it or not, he has to sort of throw it off-kilter enough. [That song starts off], “there’s my baby, laughing at me in the sun,” which is a beautiful image, but then things kind of go awry.

Having your name thrown around with Radiohead and with Sumday on numerous best of 2003 lists, is it scary – the potential for serious mainstream success that seems to be teetering on the horizon?

You can only really work so hard at that kind of shit. And then you start to reach this point where there’s this strange alchemy that occurs somewhere behind the scenes or maybe doesn’t even deliberately occur, it just springs up, and you’re either the product, or the beneficiary, or the victim, depending on what your approach was. We’re definitely fine with the songs being played on the radio, and we’ll go play on David Letterman, or Conan O’Brien…we want people to hear the music and know it exists. We’re really proud of the fact that we’re doing what we’re doing, and have done it for as long as we have. But it gets to the point where, I kind of think what’s gonna happen is what’s gonna happen. And I’m willing to do as much work as possible, and support it, but ultimately people are gonna see through it if you’re just blatantly pimpin’ it to become something. And if we ever did sell like, 500,000 records or whatever, we’d all be really stoked ‘cause we worked really hard, but also because we’ve never done it in a way that’s promoted any discomfort internally.

Do you feel we’re getting back to a point where mass popularity doesn’t necessarily have to be a derogatory stigma?

I was talking to somebody about this the other night, the idea that you can always see right through stuff. I don’t think that popular music has ever been like a damning characteristic. There are certain people that I hear and I think, “ok, that’s bullshit, it’s manufactured, they did that for an exact purpose to sell records and be on TV.” But then there are guys like The Neptunes, and I watch the way they operate, and I listen to the music they’ve created…and I think they have a genuine hunger to get something out of themselves. And Outkast who I’ve been a fan of for years…I think that those guys are really doing it because they want to make good music. There’s something inside of them that has to get out. And that’s the characteristic to me that’s always the most illuminating. Like, “why are you doing this? Are you doing this because you’re on a quest for fame?” And truthfully, I don’t know if we could ever get to that point, ‘cause we’re not pretty (laughs).

What about the recent crisscrossing of genres? Last summer you were supposed to play Bonnaroo NE which was canceled, and now this summer you’ll be performing at Bonnaroo in Tennessee – a festival that essentially has you opening for The Dead.

I actually love it. We’re doing [a Spring] tour with Saves The Day and The Fire Theft, and Saves the Day is supposedly an emo band, and Fire Theft is a band that kind of falls in that category too. I don’t know, I think that good music is good music is good music, and I don’t like the idea that everything has to fall into a precise file. First of all, ‘cause I don’t think we do anyway. I think there are all of these components that we’re a part of and utilize. And secondly, why not blur things a little bit. I like good music and I like being surprised, and the best thing that could happen on a tour like that or a festival like Bonnaroo is you surprise people and they go, “whoa, I only listen to The Dead and Widespread Panic, Gov’t Mule,” and now suddenly Sonic Youth is in their palate of desire.

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