Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws isn’t big on organized religion, but when the spirit does move him, it always has a soundtrack. And that soundtrack has come a long way over the last 16 years. You’d be hard-pressed to discern so much as a whiff of snarky 1996 hit “Popular” amid the bracing, impeccably crafted power pop the trio hammers out with breathless efficiency on its new release, The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy (Barsuk). The transportive power of music is something Caws touches on quite frequently on Astronomy—that is, when he can tear himself away from more pressing concerns for our fucked-up planet. Caws will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with him, and check out our cover story on Nada Surf in last month’s issue of MAGNET.
Caws: A decade later, when Elektra wouldn’t put our second album and we were waiting to get the rights back so we could put it out ourselves, we had a couple of years with relatively little activity. I’d been living in Williamsburg and going to Earwax Records since the early ’90s and asked them for a job. They started giving me a shift here and there, and I eventually began working a the shop quite a lot. All my co-workers had really interesting taste of one stripe or another, and it was another wonderful period in my life. Sundays were my favorite. With no mail, there were no orders to process (do you sense that I don’t like paperwork?), so all we had to do was sell records. My co-worker on those days was Alex Holden, an artist and musician who ended up drawing the cover of The Weight Is A Gift. A friend of ours at the Verb Cafe next door would occasionally bring us pecan pie, marching in and out without saying a word. Better times than eating pie while listening to Sleep’s Jerusalem at high volume are hard to find.
Video after the jump.
