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Mac McCaughan: Ready To Start

MacMcCaughan

Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan finally releases his first record under his own name

Echoes of the 1980s permeate Non-Believers (Merge), Mac McCaughan’s first LP under his own name, particularly the gauzy, Cocteau Twins-like guitar swirl of “Real Darkness” and the sugary synth-pop of “Wet Leaves.” The Superchunk frontman wanted to emulate that era’s sounds, as well as create a pseudo-concept album about “a couple of social misfits navigating the waters of high school through music.”

“I was mainly thinking about people who don’t feel like they fit in with where the mainstream is going,” says McCaughan. “Not necessarily rebels—that would be a little too aggressive for the people I’m thinking of. ‘Hologram,’ the first song, is set in the present looking back, but is also set in the early ’80s. That song and ‘Come Upstairs,’ the last song, are kind of bookends about retreating into music, both listening to it and making it.”

Cobbled together in his Chapel Hill, N.C., basement studio, which he described as “one room, plus a closet full of crap,” starting early last year, Non-Believers is arguably the best effort of McCaughan’s solo career—one, under the Portastatic moniker, that dates back to 1993’s I Hope Your Heart Is Not Brittle. Asked the painfully obvious question—why is Non-Believers not a Portastatic record?—McCaughan, Merge co-owner, put on his businessman cap.

“There’s not a Portastatic album that I’m not happy with, but there was a feeling of diminishing returns in terms of the name itself,” says McCaughan. “In the crassest terms, it’s not like putting the name Portastatic on a record meant selling more records than my own name, despite the history.”

Another theme running through Non-Believers is the attraction that young people have to willfully being scared. Stunning centerpiece “Real Darkness” features the haunting refrain, “Smile, kids, smile until you know a real darkness.” Not meant to be hopeful or bleak, McCaughan, the father of two, said the line refers to acknowledging that a child’s thoughts and fears mean something.

“We’ve all heard it and maybe said it ourselves—telling a kid to cheer up or get over something that’s bothering them,” he says. “I overheard someone say, ‘Wait ’til they grow up and know real darkness.’ It was said tongue in cheek, but they kind of meant it. So, that song is more about trying to respect whatever darkness it is that kids have in them—or see in the world—for being real since it’s real to them.”

Non-Believers’ occasionally gloomy tone brings to mind “You Blanks” (from 2006’s Be Still Please), on which McCaughan mused, “All my songs used to end the same way/Everything’s going to be OK.” Personally and professionally, McCaughan straddles the line between being an optimist and pessimist; he no longer calls himself the former and embraces the latter role in his art—to a point.

“‘You Blanks’ was from a time when we’d started two never-ending wars and the people in charge were just craven, amoral assholes,” says McCaughan. “Most of what they started is still happening, or worse, but like most terrible situations, you can get used to a lot and you go on regardless. I don’t know if the nature of my songs has changed since, but there’s only so long you can dwell on how fucked up people in power are, because you could write about that forever, and it’d be boring as hell after a while. It’s better to look at the smaller details around you and try to find something positive to focus on now and then.”

—Matt Hickey