To celebrate our return to publishing the print version of MAGNET three years ago, we will be posting classic cover stories from that time all week. Enjoy.
Still thriving in their mid-40s, the members of Nada Surf are that much closer to unlocking heaven’s gate.
By Hobart Rowland
Photo by Gene Smirnov
Apparently, the rumors are true: Matthew Caws is never more than an offhand comment away from an impromptu live performance. Right now, he’s launching into a punchy acoustic rendition of Echo & The Bunnymen’s “Do It Clean” as his Nada Surf bandmate, Daniel Lorca, follows along on acoustic bass. The smoke from a pair of cigarettes forms a twisty plume above two bobbing heads as it drifts to the vaulted ceiling of the Sitcom—the band’s loft-style rehearsal space, makeshift studio and, if need be, place for expat friends to crash—situated in the once-bleak, now-hyper-hip Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
The song punctuates Caws’ giddy reaction to the suggestion that New York artist Graham Parks’ overexposed, mustard-yellow cover art for Nada Surf’s new album, The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy (Barsuk) bears a passing resemblance to that of the Bunnymen’s 1980 debut, Crocodiles. “Beautiful,” he gushes. “I’m an Echo & The Bunnymen freak.”
At 44, Caws is still as aw-shucks smitten with music as he was in his teens, whether it’s the classic rock and punk he grew up on, or his more recent infatuation with influential folk guitarists Elizabeth Cotten and Bert Jansch, who actually inspired some of the picking on Nada Surf’s latest batch of music. And even with plenty of other things vying for his attention these days—including a seven-year-old son living in Cambridge, England, Caws’ new home—he still embraces the clichéd notion that music is the ultimate remedy for pretty much whatever ails him.
“I’ve tried to meditate, because I know it’s supposed to be really good for you,” says Caws, between sips from a can of PBR. “I’ve tried to sit there in the morning for 10 minutes and think about nothing—and it’s very fuckin’ difficult.”
After a brief jaunt in Spain to film a video for Astronomy track “Waiting For Something,” Nada Surf has assembled at the Sitcom on a chilly December afternoon to discuss the new album and other recent developments, including an extensive international tour that’s a little more than a month away. Conversation begins in the kitchen area, but with a PBR 12-pack within easy reach, digressions are plentiful. Talk turns to the time Lorca was free-diving in Mexico and found a scorpion in his wetsuit, then onto the rhythmic merits of Neil Peart vs. Charlie Watts, the time Joey Ramone sang with Nada Surf at Coney Island High shortly before his death and the rigors of deciphering the Teutonic tongue. “I did at least four years of German,” says Lorca, who’s fluent in English, Spanish and French. “My girlfriend’s Austrian; I have an apartment in Vienna. I can order a beer and buy a pack of cigarettes, and that’s about all. It’s impossible.”
Things eventually shift to the lounge area, with its modest smattering of recording equipment, after Caws suggests an “Astronomy unplugged” preview of the new music. Caws takes a seat on the couch with Nada Surf’s Queens-bred drummer, Ira Elliot, who, without his set, briefly resorts to tapping away on an iPhone drum app. At 48, Elliot is the band’s most seasoned musician. “I played in reggae bands, goth bands, heavy-metal bands—all sorts of crazy-ass things,” says Elliot of his pre-Nada Surf work, which included an ‘80s stint with garage-rock purists the Fuzztones. “As a drummer, if you do your job properly, everyone will ask you to play. I said yes to everyone.”
The dreadlocked son of a retired Spanish diplomat, the 44-year-old Lorca is gregarious and free-spirited where Caws is more measured, meticulous and thoughtful. Both are exceedingly gracious and forthcoming, and it’s easy to see why the two have been so close since first meeting up as grade-school students at the exclusive Lycée Français de New York, a French-focused private institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The very definition of a healthy coupling, the two couldn’t be more different, yet they complement one another perfectly.
Lorca has a passion for soccer—something Caws couldn’t care less about. It explains Lorca’s brief disappearances throughout the afternoon, as he heads to a nearby bar across the street to catch portions of a Spanish league match between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. After one such trip, he arrives just in time to grab his Guild B-30—a purchase inspired by a Violent Femmes show and paid for with a tiny inheritance he received from his grandmother—and join in on Astronomy’s lead track, “Clear Eye, Clouded Mind.” It’s a bracing start to an album of deceptively complex power pop produced by Chris Shaw (Super Furry Animals, Ted Leo + The Pharmacists).
“This is our Rocket To Russia,” Elliot quips, referencing Astronomy’s breathlessly efficient 38 minutes.
“Clear Eye, Clouded Mind” is one of a handful of new songs to address environmental concerns, though in a way that’s fairly cryptic. “The wind blows no good/It tells of a change that might rearrange,” sings Caws in that gauzy, boyish delivery that’s become as much a part of Nada Surf as its wistful multipart harmonies.
“It’s kinda like The Road—very Cormac McCarthy,” says Elliot, chiming in with another semi-serious assessment.
The track also contains the lyric used for the album’s title, though Caws won’t take credit for it. “It’s something my father’s been saying in class for a long time,” says Caws. “It’s a point he makes to his students about our relative insignificance.”
A professor of philosophy and human sciences at George Washington University in D.C., Caws’ dad, Peter, offers his take: “It’s to remind people that, although we know a lot about the world, the world doesn’t know that we know about it. A dog doesn’t know it’s a dog, a bird doesn’t know it’s a bird, the stars are indifferent to astronomy. The world goes on its way.”
***
Nada Surf knows what you’re thinking—and it’s not always cool. Love without sex, sex without love, crummy bars and the equally crummy clientele they serve, social missteps, boredom, depression, mortality, our increasingly precarious spot in the food chain. Stuff that inhabits the minds of most reasonably intelligent, scared-shitless post-30-something dudes staring middle age in the face. The members of Nada Surf have covered it all, stripping their mini-revelations of cliché, cynicism and needless melodrama as they hardwire their dead-on sentiments and frightfully efficient wordplay to melodies the band resonates in the brain’s recall centers and rocks with an assuredness that can’t help but leave you in awe.
“With each passing LP, they’re better able to utilize all their collective influences, from French pop to the Stooges to Flamin’ Groovies to Bert Jansch,” says onetime Guided By Voices guitarist Doug Gillard, who adds a classist ‘80s heft to The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy as an unofficial fourth member of Nada Surf.
When he’s not addressing the sorry state of the planet on Astronomy, Caws seems locked into an irreconcilable tug-of-war between the blissful cluelessness of youth and the looming reality check that is impending middle age. “When I was young, I didn’t know if I was better off asleep or up,” he sings on “When I Was Young,” the surging, acoustic-to-electric anthem that nicely sums up the album’s pervading reflective mood. “Now I’ve grown up, I wonder what was that world I was dreaming of.”
“Once in a while, out of nowhere—even though I still have a pretty complicated life—I just feel good,” says Caws, explaining the overall vibe of the song. “I think it’s the peace that comes with age, where your body’s like, ‘Well, I’ve made this far, so maybe everything will be fine.’”
In truth, Nada Surf has been going on about this maturity stuff for several years now. It was the fuel for the band’s unlikely resurgence in 2003, when Let Go introduced fans to a wiser, gentler Nada Surf, more completely exposing and efficiently exploiting the group’s pop leanings and emerging craftiness with texture and arrangements. By all accounts, it’s an astonishing leap forward after a spate of label woes and aborted attempts to get past its one-hit-wonder stigma.
Nada Surf’s brief brush with mass success came in the form of 1996’s “Popular,” the spoken-word rant whose brash sarcasm today sounds a little like a third-grader trying to pinch out a fart to make his pals laughs—especially in light of what the band is doing now.
“They’re a master class in how to do it,” says the Long Winters’ John Roderick, a friend and labelmate. “They never get cynical. They never resort to those tropes because they truly don’t believe them. It’s not a put-on.”
Maturity and rock ‘n’ roll can be a toxic mix. Simply bear witness to the countless bands whose reputations with fans and critics took a drubbing once the mortgage payments, early-morning feedings and commercial-jingle offers came along. So how is it that the members of Nada Surf continue to dispel that notion with each batch of fresh music? They get older, and their output grows richer and more nuanced as they continue to state the painfully obvious with increasing eloquence.
“They have the ability—and the courage—to incorporate their life experiences into their music,” says writer and former working musician Michael Azerrad, who first met Nada Surf in 2006 while touring with his group, King Of France. “So, as they personally grow and change, so does the band.”
rowing up, Matthew Caws spent his summers in the south of France sleeping in a tent. “There was no room for the kids,” says Caws about the vacation home his parents purchased in Provence for a mere $2,000. “It was basically a stone hut. It had two floors and no stairs. When we moved in, there was six inches of horse manure on the bottom floor. We had no telephone, no TV—and our house was full of scorpions. My older sister and I shared a tent. When there were big storms, my dad would be like, ‘Are you guys OK?’ I slept in this cot, and one night I woke up freezing, and I find the end of my blanket in half a foot of water.”
At the time, his parents were both professors at Hunter College in New York City. If anything, the family’s sabbaticals in Paris were an opportunity for Caws to hone the French that occasionally emerges in Nada Surf’s back catalog. Upon his return to New York, Caws joined the Cost Of Living, a band formed at Lycée Français that also included Daniel Lorca, a self-described “diplo-brat” who’d spent the first five years of his life in Brussels before his father was assigned to the U.N.
From its humble beginnings, the Cost Of Living grew into a viable band, releasing an album, playing CBGB and landing a video on MTV. But Caws and Lorca had a falling out in 1987, prompting the group’s dissolution and Lorca’s departure for Madrid, where he sampled law school before hitting the road for a tour with proto-punk legend Johnny Thunders.
A year and a half later, the two reunited in the band Because Because Because, which did some recording with Paul Kolderie at Fort Apache Studios in Cambridge, Mass. “Our singer was kind of a cocky fellow, but a really, really good songwriter,” says Caws. “He was into networking, so we had a fancy manager, a fancy lawyer. We were doing all these showcases, and it was no fun.”
“And I didn’t get along with him at all,” adds Lorca.
By 1993, Caws and Lorca had quit to form Nada Surf. A year later, pooling resources with friend Joe Hobaica, they issued a debut single, “The Plan”/“Telescope,” on Stickboy Records. Lorca took it to Spain, where it caught the interest of a small label there. Aaron Conte, the band’s drummer at the time, was working the desk at NYC’s famed Power Station. “We cut 19 songs in two nights there,” says Caws.
Back in Spain, the label loved what it heard and wanted to release the album worldwide. “But we didn’t want to be their guinea pig,” says Caws.
Conte left, and Ira Elliot was hired just as the group’s European deal fizzled. “I have some old video footage of the Fuzztones playing at Irving Plaza and the Peppermint Lounge, and there’s no mistaking Matthew in the front row,” says Elliot. “We met again when I was a drum tech for the Smithereens.”
Back in New York, with Elliot in the band, Caws was feeling confident enough to slip Cars frontman Ric Ocasek a tape outside a show at the Knitting Factory. He called two weeks later. “Ric invited me over, and I was sitting there in his breakfast nook next to Paulina (Porizkova),” Caws says now, still with some measure of disbelief. “He’s making coffee, and she’s like, ‘He likes your phrasing.’ My mind was blown.”
Ocasek offered to re-record the material he’d heard for “next to nothing,” says Caws. Quickly thereafter came a deal with Elektra. “Meanwhile we’d sent this thing to Matador, Merge, Touch And Go—all of our favorite labels—and got no response,” says Caws. “We didn’t really want to be on a big label.”
The Ocasek-produced High/Low begat “Popular,” a surprise summer hit in ‘96. “I was trying to rip off Sonic Youth,” says Caws of the song’s more dissonant moments.
In the end, Nada Surf’s initial suspicions about Elektra proved to be spot-on. When execs failed to hear the Weezer-lite single they were looking for among the tracks for High/Low’s follow-up, things got messy. Produced by Fred Maher (Lloyd Cole), 1998’s The Proximity Effect was released in Europe before the group split from Elektra, and the album was shelved. In the meantime, the band members took other jobs to make ends meet. In and out of college before eventually earning a degree in general studies from Columbia University, Caws worked as an editor at Guitar World and Guitar School for a short time.
It took Nada Surf two years to buy back the rights to The Proximity Effect, which the band then reissued on its own label in 2000. “It’s definitely a stepping stone between High/Low and Let Go,” says Lorca, in reference to the album’s schizophrenic mix of timeless pop smarts, and the shouted verses and grinding guitars that defined college rock in the latter half of the ‘90s.
With an engineer from The Proximity Effect sessions, Nada Surf produced Let Go on its own dime in Los Angeles with money made from touring and T-shirts. Barsuk signed the group, releasing Let Go in ‘03. “It was almost like having a first album all over again,” says Caws.
“We made it in a total vacuum,” adds Lorca.
Many of Let Go’s songs were written during the period when the band was working to secure the fate of The Proximity Effect. That goes some way in explaining the cooped-up, fidgety, introspective themes that crop up on tracks like “Inside Of Love,” “Blonde On Blonde,” “Fruit Fly” and “Treading Water.” Aside from the obvious refinement of the band’s musical approach, Caws literally found his voice on Let Go. “He realized that he could control the upper register in a way that’s really pleasing,” says Elliot. “That’s the payoff now: his voice.”
“I was enjoying it more,” adds Caws. “Before, I was singing by default.”
Nada Surf took its time squeezing out 2005’s The Weight Is A Gift, bringing in labelmate Chris Walla of Death Cab For Cutie as producer. Until now, it was Nada’s Surf most fully realized bundle of tunes—firmly anchored by deviously catchy shoulda-been hit “Always Love.” Amazing when you consider that Nada Surf had just two songs to go on when the band entered John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone in San Francisco.
“One night, I went out to dinner with a friend and left my bag in the studio,” recalls Caws. “I came back to get it, and Chris was there. The next day, I came in and he was late, and on my seat there’s a CD with a note that says he’ll be in at 2 p.m. We put it in, and it’s a song that he’d written, recorded and mixed that night about us. His message was, ‘Dudes, get it together.’”
Pretty much the opposite was true with 2008’s Lucky, produced by John Goodmanson, a prolific go-to guy who’s worked with Death Cab, Sleater-Kinney, the Posies, Team Dresch, Wu-Tang Clan and many others. “At one point, John was like, ‘OK, guys. We have like 18 basic tracks, and you want to record seven more. Um … ’” says Lorca with a laugh. “We went in there with like 30-some songs.”
In the end, 11 made the album, which features contributions from Ed Harcourt, Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard and members of Calexico and Harvey Danger. “We were taking our willingness to break away from straight garage-band pop songs even further,” says Caws of Lucky, which is easily Nada Surf’s moodiest and most experimental album, and pretty difficult to absorb in one sitting. “We felt we had something to prove—like, how ambitious, how expansive can we get?”
To keep busy while waiting for the next round of original music to materialize, the group assembled 2010’s if i had a hi-fi, a covers album that feels so effortless mostly because the band didn’t sweat the song-selection process. “It was clear that we weren’t going to play covers of tunes that changed our lives,” says Lorca. “I’m a Clash nut, and no one even thought of playing a Clash song. Why would you want to play your favorites? They’re already perfect.”
“The fun of it was to do things that kind of felt like we wrote them ourselves, so it was fresh,” says Caws. “The idea was to not make it feel like homework.”
Winnowed down from what Elliot estimates was up to 60 possibilities (some of them online suggestions by fans), 12 tracks passed muster, including songs by the Moody Blues, Kate Bush, Depeche Mode, Spanish rockers Mecromina and others. “I thought it was a very interesting choice on their part,” says Dwight Twilley of hi-fi’s soaring version of “You Were So Warm,” a collaboration with the late Phil Seymour from the Dwight Twilley Band’s 1976 debut. “Phil was a super talent. I think he would’ve been happy with the performance.”
***
Getting past the hokey name can be struggle. And for that, the members of Nada Surf would like to apologize. Sort of.
“It’s a ‘dude’ sort of thing,” says Caws. “Daniel was like, ‘Let’s just call ourselves nothing: nada.’ But there was a band that had that name. I had this image of surfing in your mind, being lost in space. In retrospect, it wasn’t chosen so well because we had no conception that this would be a band anyone would listen to.”
Truth is, Nada Surf makes the sort of music everyone ought to be lapping up like so many caramel frappuccinos. Emotionally fractured, uncannily self-aware and subversively tuneful ought to be a pretty attractive combination for the Starbucks-swilling minions. Supplementing album sales (anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000 a release since Let Go), Nada Surf tunes have found their way onto TV shows and mainstream movie soundtracks. Even The O.C. (Granted, it was a cover of OMD’s “If You Leave.”) That sits fine with Caws, who’s long since dismissed the idea of doing anything else with his life. “There’s no higher power than nature for me, but I still want that feeling of being lifted—that rapture,” he says. “My little way of worshipping is making music and trying to create.”
The 12-pack kicked, Caws and Lorca have finished their run-through of Astronomy’s 10 tracks—and not a throwaway in the bunch. With a seven-month-old daughter waiting at home, Elliot has since left, and discussion turns to “No Snow On The Mountain,” the second-to-last track. An underhanded dig at global-warming deniers, it’s Astronomy’s sleeper, initially presenting itself as pliable power-pop meringue before growing a backbone in a chidingly perceptive final verse punctuated by Gillard’s chiming lead guitar. “They’re on every Broadway/The liar, the friend, the curious, the cold of heart,” Caws sings. “We did it our way/We used, we burned, we logged, we shipped, we scarred.”
“The first time we had a rough mix of that song, I must’ve played it 10 times on the headphones and cried for a good 40 minutes,” says Lorca. “I was devastated by it.”
Tears aside, it appears Nada Surf has finally found its happy place.
