HAVING recorded five albums in 10 years and toured extensively in support of all of them, Nada Surf — singer/guitarist Matthew Caws, bassist Daniel Lorca, drummer Ira Elliot and guitarist Doug Gillard opted to follow 2012’s cracking ‘The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy’ with a brief but well-earned hiatus.
So in January 2015, when Caws informed Nada Surf’s vociferous Facebook following that a new record was just about done, the news was greeted with explosive enthusiasm.
The music was in the can, he announced, and all that remained was to finish up a few lyrics and sing a few vocals; something he planned to do on days off during an upcoming solo acoustic tour. Caws even included a photo of the recording set-up he was bringing in the car.
“I was so eager to have an album done that I believed in it as it was,” Caws recalls. “But the great thing about being ‘finished’ is that you can take a breath and evaluate, because the pressure to ‘do it’ is gone.
“The more I listened and thought about it, the more I realised that I might want to keep working. Also, I’d sent the tracks to my friend Josh, who runs Barsuk Records, the label we’ve been on since 2002, and he said ‘It’s great,’ but followed that with a pregnant pause. I got the message. I didn’t take that as a critique as much as a belief that I could do better. It was very freeing.”
Caws added: “There were already a bunch of songs in the can that we all liked, so I could think more expansively about what the album could be.”
Caws’ instinct to heed his inner editorial voice proved to be spot on: he dropped a few songs, tweaked others, and wrote a few more that, “definitely feel different from what we’ve done before”.
Just before starting ‘You Know Who You Are’, Caws had gone to Los Angeles to write with Dan Wilson, who in addition to his success with Semisonic, has won two Grammy Awards for his songs with Adele and the Dixie Chicks.
And lo and behold, what would have been another really good Nada Surf album (their seventh since getting signed to a major in the 1990’s and scoring a worldwide alterna-hit with ‘Popular’) became what could well be the most representative collection of the group’s two-decade career.
After taking a detour with 2013’s Minor Alps collaboration with Juliana Hatfield, his first after 30 years of writing songs, Caws has returned as a writer more willing than ever to follow wherever his gut takes him.
Nada Surf are chasing their own worlds and their own kind of connections with listeners. “Sometimes it feels like, to our audience at least, we are two or three different bands at once,” Caws added.
“It seems some people are looking to feel better, for encouragement getting over their obstacles, for help figuring life out… not that I’ve done that myself, other people are looking for love songs, and then some others just want to rock.”
Nada Surf are Live at The Grand Social on Wednesday, November 2.
