Bandsplain - Teenage Fanclub with Ben Gibbard

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Teenage Fanclub emerged from the fertile Scottish rock scene of the late 80s as a fully formed power pop band and went on to lead a long, prolific, and often surprising career; from beating out Nirvana to land the top spot on SPIN's best albums of 1991 list to teaming up with De La Soul for a song on the legendary Judgment Night soundtrack to being anointed Liam Gallagher's second favorite band (after Oasis of course) and so much more. Joining Yasi to discuss his number ONE favorite band is Death Cab For Cutie and Postal Service frontman Ben Gibbard You can follow Death Cab For Cutie on Twitter @DCFC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, what's with this band anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? Wait, like, Bansplain? Hello and welcome to Bansplaine. I am your host, Yassie Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to explain a cult band or iconic artist to me and to you. Today's episode is about Teenage Fan Club.

If you've never heard Teenage Fan Club, just sit back by, let us. everything flow. This is what teenage fan club sounds like. My guest today is one Ben Gibbard of bands you might have heard of, death cab for cutie and postal service. But most importantly, known teenage fan club Stan. Welcome to the program, Ben Gibbard. Thank you for having me. I am indeed one Ben Gibbard. I mean, are there other Ben Gibbons? Have you ever done that thing where you like connect with the other Ben Gibbards of the world via Facebook? I haven't. Well, I was never on Facebook.

But I have looked up other, there are other gibbards in the world, but there are not many of us. And I think most of us are probably from Michigan originally, at least in the States, and probably related. I'm sure there is another Ben Gibbard in the world, but I've never met one. If you're another Ben Gibbard, drop us a line. Bang our line over here. We'd love to talk to you.

Ben, I'm really excited to have you on. I think that you are maybe the most vocal proponent of teenage fan club in modern day music. Tell me a little bit about your teenage fan club fandom, like how you found them, what impact they had on you, etc., etc. So I must have been 14, maybe 15, when bandwagon. when bandwagon-esque came out. And growing up, my dad always had records on Beatles and Stones and Beach Boys and stuff like that. And I always grew up, I grew up a big fan of pop music. But being a teenager is kind of the time when you're supposed to be into punk.

You know, you're supposed to be listening to aggressive music because you're a 14-year-old boy and you're upset and angry about a lot of things, which I was. but, and, you know, I went to hardcore shows and went to punk shows and everything like everybody else, but I never, that music never really resonated with me very deeply. And when I heard bandwagonesque, it felt as if this band was beaned down specifically for me. And what I really reacted to was just how melodic and the songs were, the harmonies were so beautiful. But there was also this kind of, like, grime in the guitars and everything felt a little. filthy in a way that was just filthy enough to feel a little dangerous, but not so dirty and grimy

that it lost any of its melodic sensibility. So it was, that record just meant everything to me. I felt like I'd found my band. And at the time, I hadn't heard Big Star or, you know, any of the birds' records that, you know, they were influenced by. I hadn't listened to Orange Juice. I didn't know Gene Clark. You know, I was, I was a young suburban kid who didn't know. know that much about music. But it was because of T. H. Fankle that I found myself delving back into the music that they were influenced by. So not only, you know, did I become a fan of this band that would, you know, to this day has traveled with me my entire life. But it also gave me a musical history lesson of the things that were important to them that I was then able to go back on

and discover myself and form my own relationship with. that's like to me sorry to be a nerd but that's the coolest part about music to me and always has been I don't again I'm a hundred years old so I don't know what the kids these days do with the bands they learn about and if they I mean they do have access to the entire internet to find out whatever they want but like I had a similar experience as you with Nirvana because I'm a little bit younger than you so that was the big mind-blowing band for me and I was just open doors to so so many other things I would never have heard of. I mean, circuitously back also to Teenage Fan Club through Nirvana, but like so many other things. And yeah, I just feel like that's such a

special thing where like you're on, these bands are on a continuum. And if you just want to spend a little time, like they'll give you so many gifts of a million other bands that you get to love to. Absolutely. And Nirvana is a perfect example of that. I mean, one of the things, the many things I appreciated about Nirvana as a kid was that they brought the raincoats and the Vaseline's and, you know, a number of other bands into the public consciousness in a way that we probably would have not known those bands at that age if they had not been championing them. And that, you know, that's, as you said, there's a wonderful gift that bands can, bands can give you if you choose to to look for it. So you're a 14-year-old tender heart was witnessed and touched by Teenage Fan Club, and now we have Death Cab for

Cutie. Yeah, I mean, we don't really sound a lot like Teenage Fan Club or at all like Teenage Fan Club, which is maybe why the fact that they are my favorite band might come as a surprise to some people. But the interesting thing about Teenage Fan Club that I found in my musical travels is that people who you never would think would be fans of this band. are massive fans of this band. I remember years ago, there was a band from Seattle called Kinski that were, they're still active to a certain extent, but they, you know, very like a noisy kind of instrumental, experimental kind of band that I remember going down to San Francisco to see T.H fan club in 2001 because they were not actually playing in the Northwest. So I drove

down because they were doing two shows at Slims. And I saw the guys from Kinski like out at a show and I was like, somehow we ended up talking about what we were doing. I was like, well, I'm actually going down to San Francisco to see this band called Teenage Fan Club. I'm a huge fan of theirs. And they were like, we're going too. And I was like, what are you talking about? What, how could you guys possibly be fans of this band? And I've had a similar kind of interaction, you know, in this commonality with Teenage Fan Club with a lot of musicians and that I never would have thought would be fans of them.

And also people who kind of might be categorized as like music snobs. the kind of people who are only listening to like obscure Crout Rock or whatever are like, oh, and I love, only Noi all the time. I like Ashraud Temple, Noi, and Teenage Fan Club. Those are the bands that I like. Yeah, they are very much like, I think they had like a brush and we'll get obviously into it as we go along. They had a brush with almost being really famous, right?

It was like, it was within grass. but it didn't happen. And it probably is a blessing and also probably would never have happened given their temperaments and their desires and ambitions. But I think that sort of preserved them also in this amber of coolness to people because they never became such a big household name. I think that might be true. I think that it almost starts with the 1991, I believe, year-end issue of spin. Oh yeah, we're going to get into it. Where bandwagon-esque was named Album of the Year over Hen and Nevermind and Bad Motor Finger.

Yeah, but that move is, that's a classic rock writer move, right? I mean, T.H fan club was a band that could have almost been, you know, put together in a laboratory for heads, you know? Absolutely. It's the kind of band where it's like, oh, no, they are influenced by all the cool, obscure things that I, listen to and I am hearing both the music that was my special music that nobody knew about in this band that is gaining popularity. And while I certainly think that, you know, of all those albums, bandwagonesque is my favorite. But it also seems like a very calculated move on the part of the editors of spin to kind of be that guy. And it was probably a guy, you know?

Oh, I think it's a deep investigative journalism on this. I mean, I waited until today, but I did contact every person I could find that worked at Smith in 1991. I got some goss. Oh, my God. I can't wait to hear it. It's a great time for me to let you and everyone know that 13 is my favorite album. And no one says this. And I, it's wild.

And we need to get into that because I have a lot of opinions about 13. Yes, I know. A lot of people do. And I just don't understand them. Okay. Let's start from the top. I did maybe, as is my want, go a little. deep into a few rabbit holes here because I do think teenage fan club is on this like really

important arc of the journey of Scottish indie music which is like a huge it's a huge thing it was really blowing my mind when I was like opening up all the rabbit holes again and getting back into it and I was like damn for such a little country this these Scottish people babe talented talented wankers, if you will, just one band after another. But, you know, I think it's, I don't want to get ahead, but I think it's like, it's both the talent, but it's like these creative communities that started with a couple of people and created the like environment that was inviting for other people to do things that maybe didn't pop up other places.

So let's just take it from the top postcard records, Glasgow, founded in 1979 by Alan horn. Everyone's like, what are you talking about? This is important, though, because you mentioned them earlier. This was the label of orange juice. Famously, for those of you, if you don't know, Edwin Collins' first band, and also Aztec camera. They had other bands, too, but those are probably the two biggest ones. This was, like, kind of a big deal because prior to this, according to, like, a bunch of interviews I read, no one didn't go to London to start a band. Like, if you were going to try to get into the music business and you were in the UK and you wanted to be in a band, you had to move to London. And these bands were sort of like, no, we're just going to stay right here and make the music

in Glasgow. And that was like a big deal to yield all the future people who also sat their house in Glasgow and picked up a guitar. When you got back, you know, through your threads of teenage fan club to like Orange is an Aztec camera, were you super into those bands? I think there's this phenomenon that happens with a lot of indie rock that if you were not there to experience it, it doesn't, it tends to not resonate as much as it would if you were there. A perfect example is I was running with a friend of mine who's a big music fan who's in this early 30s. Oh yeah, because you go on these like 50 mile runs. I learned when you were on my call's podcast, How Long Gone? I was like, oh, I didn't know Ben Gibbard was an extreme. Yeah, I do. We could do a podcast on that, but I won't bore anybody with that stuff. But he's a big music fan, and I was talking about Slint and how important Slint was to me. And I sent him some music to listen to, and he was kind of like, yeah, I don't know. It's cool. And I've noticed in my life and travels that there are some things that are fairly universal throughout indie rock that if you put on, I don't know, Dinosauri, junior or like, you know, I mean, Nirvana, of course, things like this. The replacements, I think, are a good example.

There is like a timelessness to it that resonates with anybody who likes music. But, you know, when you get into certain eras of indie rock, it's almost like you kind of had to be there. You kind of had to be a part of it. You need the context. I think that, like, is such an important thing with, I mean, music in general, but like, scenes and aesthetic and stuff, like, really does a lot of heavy lifting in terms. terms of your experience as a fan for bands like Slint and so on, but not for bands like Teenage

Fan Club, right? Teenage Fan Club was a timeless band. They are timeless, yeah. But I think that that stuff was before my time to the point where, you know, as I've kind of, you know, checked it out over the course of my life as a music fan and listener, there's been things that I've been like, oh, that's cool. But I haven't gone down a rabbit hole with any of that stuff. It was kind of like, I recognize its importance. I recognize how it was a precursor to a lot of the music that honestly is my favorite music from the UK is all Scottish music for the most part. It's at least all northern music. It's all Manchester and above, right? Totally. So I recognize it's importance, but it's kind of one of those

things like, yeah, it's like it's cool, but it's never kind of really hit with me. Yeah, it's kind of particularly 80s in a way that I think is like hard if you came up in the 90s to like get past how 80 sounding it is, you know, for me. Anyways. But yeah, anyways, all that to say, those were important bands. And it's, it was kind of like, I just, the episode before this was The Clash. So it's kind of funny how, I don't, I don't think it really struck me how close together these things were, right? Because in 1979, the Clash is like in the middle of their swing.

Punk has just started in 76 in the UK. So it's like truly coming off the tail end of, not even the tail. and the mid-end of bands like the Damned and the Buzzcocks and all these bands sort of like creating this scene that then just like exploded all these other very unique and different scenes out of it. But, you know, it's just crazy to me that was like 19, three years after the clash and this is happening right up in Glasgow. Yeah. And I think one of the things that has always struck me about Glasgow to this day, but certainly in a, you know, pre-Broclinification of music era. Right. Is that, you know, as a kid who was becoming a fan of a lot of these bands from Glasgow, I would envision it being a similar kind of insular connected scene the same way I would think about Seattle was in the early 90s or Chapel Hill or Louisville or Chicago,

like any of these kind of American cities where people played with each other. They hopped on stage. They guessed it on people's records. And in my musical travels, when I ended up getting to Glasgow for the first time and making friends up there and kind of getting the behind the scenes, you know, kind of view of the scene, it was exactly like that. Yeah. It's legit eight people that were friends. Yeah. And as we would travel through the UK, you know, it never felt as if bands were friends with each other. It never felt like every man for himself, every man for himself, every. band for themselves trying to, you know, be noticed, get signed. Every band had a manager and like five roadies and they're playing like a first of three on a Tuesday at some shitty pub. Like, it's just a very odd culture of music in the UK that was so different. Being independent, being an indie band in the UK, it was like a very different thing that

it was in the States. But in the UK, it is, still is, and certainly was so, so much more similar to the way American indie rock formed and the networks that had kind of connected it. And being in Seattle, you know, we feel a particular kinship of Glasgow, not because of just the weather, but because, you know, we're these, you know, were these like these like outposts at like the top of the country that. Right. Not LA. Yeah. I mean, now in 2022 with Amazon and Google and shit like that, like, you know, people from all of the world come to Seattle and work and live here and, you know, overstay their welcome. But, you know, at the same time, time, it's like, you know, in the 90s, like, nobody came here. Like, bands didn't tour here. They didn't,

they, you know, they did sometimes, but not, not really. And, and I think Glasgow, everything I've been able to garter from the scene and people I know there is it was a very similar kind of thing. Like, Scotland was this weird, you know, no pun intended, no, like, pun intended, red-headed stepchild of the UK. I mean, a lot of, a lot of ginger's up there, of course. But, you know, it was just, people, we would be going to Scotland and somebody in London would be like, oh mate why are you going up there and it's like because it's fucking awesome and it sucks here so i mean from the from the jump i just i felt this you know as a kid i felt like i want to go there and i bet you it's cool and sometimes you go to those places and you're like actually it's not that cool right

but glasgow was and still is that cool it uh it met your expectations yeah so so this is this orange juice aztec camera kind of gives way to the c86 scene right c86 being um for those that I'm sure Ben knows, but for those I don't know, was a cassette compilation that was released by the NME in 1986. And we're not quite there yet, but it had all the bands, right? Primal Scream, Mighty Lemon Drops, the pastels, the wedding present, like shop assistants, great band, shop assistants. The pastels were kind of this, like, extremely cataclysmic, I guess, band for Glasgow. They started in 1981. Stephen Pastel was very like, we can just do it. Let's just do it. And sort of like, I think, stoked that spirit and all the people that he would meet in Glasgow that, you know, he came across. And then sort of separately, there's Bobby Glaspi and is it East Kilbride? I'm so sorry to my Glaswegian listeners. I love Scotland. I would like a Scottish husband. So if anyone wants to tutor me, you're a hot Scottish.

man, just drop the line. Bobby Gillespie is just a weirdo wanting to be involved in music. He becomes best friends with Alan McGee, who goes on to found creation records. But at this point, he's just a guy who's a year older than Bobby Gillespie. And Bobby Gillespie wants to go see Finn Lizzie. And his dad won't let him go unless an older boy takes him. So he just knocks on the door of Alan McGee and says, can you take me to see Finn Lizzie? And a lifelong friendship is born. So this is all kind of happening on, again, it's not that big. These are just suburbs of Glasgow, but like I guess it's not L.A. So for them, that's kind of far. It's like 30 minutes away from the city center. New towns, I guess they call them. The Jesus and Mary chain

is sort of starting there too. That's like the two brothers that were also friends with Bobby Glasby that Reed brothers. Now, this is one thing I just wanted to talk about as we, before, you know, we get into Teenage Fan Club. In 1983, NME published this big piece on Julian Cope from the Teardrop Explodes called Tales from the Drug Addict. And in it, he name checks a bunch of these psych bands that now we all know everyone knows, you know, the 13th floor elevators, the creation, the chocolate watch band. This was sort of like, these kids are reading this. They love Julian Cope and they're like, I think I thought all 60s music was like lame or whatever.

Let me go check this out. And their sort of minds are blown. And psych music obviously makes it way way more into like the Jesus and Mary chain. But I do think, like, at least there's a hint of it kind of that ends up coloring teenage fan club's music, too. Would you agree? I would totally agree. But it's kind of the more soft psych stuff. I think of, like, you know, like West Coast experimental pop art band or those words in some kind of,

that's the right order of those words, but they're all in there somewhere. And yeah, there definitely seems to be an affinity for like Donovan's, like, psychedelic. period or whatever. I mean, I don't know if that was, I don't know if they cared about that, but stuff that's in that vein, that's kind of, you know, it's melodic and there's little elements of psych in that, but it's, it's really, it's psych light kind of, you know. Even if we don't talk about the music, it's this like affinity for weirdos, right? Because like the weirdos that we had at home were the punks. That's what's going on, right? And maybe like much like you at 14, they were like,

okay, yeah, but I don't, like, I don't want to make music like the damned and spit on people or whatever. Like, that's one way to be a weirdo. But then sort of having your eyes open to this like whole other like R-D way of being a weirdo, you know, like, I think this created sort of this like inspiration of like how to be. So I'm going to start with Norman Blake. Would you agree that's a good place to start as the. That's a wonderful place to start. Nucleus of. I'm going to say this early on, but we'll talk about it again when we get to the, to the,

first album. The thing about Teenage Fan Club that I think people don't really think about is that they were like playing music for quite a bit of time before Teenage Fan Club became Teenage Fan Club. So they were like a little ahead of the curve. They weren't just like picking it up and doing it in some ways. Because they had played in these other bands. I just feel that's a little important because they were, they sort of emerged fully formed in this way. That's so striking. But then when you think about it, you're like, oh, that makes sense. They've journeymen musicians in Glasgow, if you will. So Norman Blake, born October 20th, 1965, he is a Libra. In Bells Hill, North Lanarkshire, Scotland. Bells Hill sounds like it's just sort of like a factory town. It's famous for

this tramp swine called Buckfast. Apparently gets you really drunk and is very bad for you. I think it's racist to say that Scottish people drink a lot, but there's a lot of stories of Scottish people drinking a lot in this story. I'll just say that. So he's childhood friends with Douglas Stewart. And then they're also become friends with this guy, Sean Dixon. So they start a band called The Pretty Flowers, Norman, Douglas Stewart, Francis McKee, who has become friends with Douglas Stewart.

She later famously will go on to Form the Vasselines. and Sean Dixon, who will go on to form the Soup Dragons. Another band that was, like, weirdly actually very famous during their tenure, but now no one remembers or talks about. The Soup Dragons? The Soup Dragons? Yeah. Yeah, I saw the Soup Dragons in high school. You did.

I loved the Soup Dragons, yeah. But they seem to have kind of fallen through the cracks of 90s revivalism, at least to this point. No one talks about them. It's very, it's interesting. Even the BMX Bandits, even with Kurt Cobain, like, so hugely championing them, like, wearing the t-shirt, saying in an interview, like, if I could be in any other band in the world, I'd be in BMX Bandits. Still not really a household name. Like, not like, even Teenage Fan Club's way more famous. Okay.

So, I'm saying all this to say, like, they're all kind of playing music together. The BMX Bandits is happening. Norman Blake wants to make his own band, so he makes this band called the Boy Hairdressers. From what it sounded like, it was just like 10 people playing in different iterations of different bands where they would just move people around. And I saw in the documentary, they were like, yeah, we would have like back-to-back practice, like BMX bandits and boy hairdressers, and just like the drummer would get up and go sit in the chair with the bass. And then this other guy would come and sit in the drums when it was time for the next band. They were just like creating their own scene. Okay, important question for you, Ben Guburn.

So one reason I want to just bring up the boy hairdressers, because they, you know, they do a little moment. They put out a single called Golden Shower. On 53rd and 3rd, the Scottish indie label that was named after that Ramon song. And they open for dinosaur, pre it becoming dinosaur junior. I feel like this was a hugely pivotal moment because I feel like, kind of to echo back to what you were saying earlier, where like teenage fan club is these like beautiful melodic songs, but then sort of like dipped in some grime, like dipped in a little, little edginess. It feels like Dinosaur Jr., dinosaur, if you will, back then, playing with them

radicalized Norman Blake in a way that was like, oh, you can, you can do this, you know, like this is a possible thing. Like, what do you think about that? Because Dinosaur Jr. has just been ahead for, so long. Well, I think if you listen to the boy hairdresser's single, it sounds more like Grand Prix-era Teenage Fan Club than it does a Catholic education or bandwagon-esque. Which Grand Prix is when they sort of ungrunge themselves, if you will. Yeah. It's like the boy hairdressers, I mean, I love that single. It's like, it is very, it's very lush and, you know, there's nothing really noisy or

kind of grimy on it. And it's great. But, you know, in the advent of teenage fan club and their first album, Catholic education, that piece of information that they played with dinosaur and that there must have been some kind of, this must have been this pivot moment for them, certainly seems like a viable theory given the sound of a Catholic education, which is, it sounds, I mean, it's in the parlance of its times. It kind of sounds like a record that was made in like 89, 90 on an indie label, right? Right. And it's, it's very clear that they're kind of going for like a gassed up, kind of big star sound through what one must assume is a heavy dinosaur junior influence at that point. Totally. I think what Norman said about it was that they showed it was okay to play

guitar solos and rock out. I think when dinosaurs started, a lot of people maybe saw it as a new type of music. People who'd maybe never heard of Neil Young and thought of turned up the volume rather than keeping it down. I was like, okay, sick. So the single that you talked about Olden Shower, this is on Stephen Pastel's label, 53 and a third. BMX Bandits also puts out, I think, an EP on 53 and a third.

The boy hairdressers is sort of they don't really get a good press. I guess they were Sounds magazine, which I just learned this from a Scottish friend. Shout out Drew Pierce, who I came to for all my Scottish questions. Apparently Sounds was like the more metal

of the various music publications. in the UK, like the enemy was the big deal, there was melody maker, and then sounds was like a little more hardcore. So they absolutely did not like the boy hairdressers. They called it post-Anorac. Anorac was a mean slur about music. Did you know this?

I did not know that. Yeah, they were like a fucking park-ass music, basically. I mean, I guess you can imagine with that. Just twee. Probably meant twee. Yeah, yeah. They didn't like it. So the boy hairdresser sort of fizzles out and they sort of like meld into teenage fan club.

At the same time, like I said, Norman is in the BMX bandits and he plays with them when they're writing that first album. So there's a bunch of songs on the first BMX Bandits album that Norman Blake wrote. He gets McGinley, Francis McDonald, and then he meets Gerard Love at a show. And it was very funny because all I could figure out was that he just like maybe thought he looked cool. And we just went up to him and was like, do you want to be in my band? Just apropos of nothing. And Gerard Love was like, yeah, I'll be in your band. I mean, Jerry is a pretty striking looking human being.

You know, he's got the big, like the ice blue eyes and he had the big curly kind of long hair at the time. So yeah, I would imagine if you saw that guy, you'd be like, yeah, I want that guy in my band. You know, it totally is possible that he was like, we need a hot guy. You know what I mean? Right, yeah, yeah. Like, we have, everything is in place, but we just need one more thing, which is a hot guy. Because my friend Drew told me that at the time, I can't remember the name of the magazine, but they had their, like, own version of, like, Teen Beat or Tiger Beat or whatever over there.

And they were trying to sort of push Jerry Love as, like, the heartthrob of teenage fan club. So lucky for them that the hot guy could write songs. It was not a clash situation where they were like, oh, we need this hot guy Paul Simon, and he actually can't play his instrument or write any music until much later. So Norman Blake walked out on the hot guy that he picked. I want to read you this quote from Norman. I was really into punk when I was young, but looking back, I resent the fact that I was never allowed to listen to Neil Young

and other great music from the early 70s. Punk was totally Stalinist. 1976 became year zero. If I listened back to the stuff I liked during punk, groups like the Cortinas, it sounds really terrible. I found that really interesting, right? Like, you don't have that now, right? Like, this sort of Stalinist scene music thing where, like, if you like, I don't even

know what could you like now that wouldn't allow you to listen to anything else. It seems like everyone's sort of a polylaw, right? It's like you're listening to everything. But the idea that, like, okay, punk is. so cool and it's supposed to be so like freeing and radicalizing, but it also means that like, how dare you listen to Bruce Springsteen? Yeah, I mean, that was certainly my experience growing up. You know, I would go to these straight edge hardcore shows that were 98% male and be told what to eat, what to wear, how to dance, how to not dance, you know, how to think. And, you know, I'm not going to make,

I wouldn't make a Blake's statement about straight edge or punk in general. But I've always found it interesting that these movements that are meant to be iconoclastic and individualistic tend to have a conformist element that is like joining the military. Yeah. I mean, being a straight edge kid was like, you might as well be a Marine. I mean, it's seriously. It's like, I mean, I guess it's a little more, I mean, you know, I mean, look, my dad was in the military.

I'm not going to talk shit on the military. You know, it's like you're a soldier, that's a job, or you're like, you know, in shelter or something and you're proselytizing for like Krishna and veganism and stuff like that. And that's your vibe. That's great. But as a kid, I always felt like the most punk thing you could do or be was not what everybody else was doing. Or just like be yourself. To be yourself. Exactly. And so I often found it kind of ironic that the way to be an individual was to be like exactly like your 10 other friends that you guys would form like a cell. and, you know, you would, there would be rules for rules of conduct, there would be a dress code, there would be all these kind of things you had to do. And, you know, I don't want to kind of try to sell some false mythology about myself that I was like this iconoclastic person who was always doing their own thing. But I certainly, even at a young age, I was like, I just never been a joiner. Like, I didn't want to join your fucking club. I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted to start my own

band. I wanted to make my own kind of music. And I, so I can really relate to that quote from Norman because it just seems insane that we grew up with like a particular kind of, you know, like discography that we were supposed to like and that anything outside of that was uncool. And I'd like to hope that for the most part kids don't feel that way anymore. I'm sure there are still, you know, small punk scenes where kids are doing all the same dumb shit that we did. But it definitely seems like when all this music is accessible to young people and they're able to kind of amalgamate it in a way that makes it makes sense for them, I think they're probably

off to a much better start than we were. I don't know, man, sometimes I feel like, shout out my brother, Chris Black. I feel like just sometimes gatekeeping is good, but I don't know. I don't know if eternal access to everything has actually yielded what we thought it was going to. Well, I'll say this. I, you know, I think that we're living, we're living in the egalitarian dream of music that we always wished, we would have killed for in the. 90s, which is that it is very easy to make your own recordings and distribute them. You don't need to go to a recording studio. You don't have to press CDs or records. But this glut of music and culture has not produced more amazing artists. It hasn't produced... Things should be a little

hard. They should be a little hard. And also, there's only so many brilliant people in the world. There's only so many great bands in the world. Just because there's more you can listen to, it doesn't mean... Say it a lot of people in the back, babe. It doesn't mean that there's more great music. And I think that... Just because everyone can does not mean everyone should. Everybody should do it because they like to make music. But I think that... I think there's just one thing that I've noticed has changed is that people's expectations for releasing music has gotten a little blown out.

Totally. That people think that, like, if I put out this, you know, EP on band camp that I should be making a living and touring in a tour bus within nine months. Literally. And you're like... And that's not how... That's not how it works. It's not. Let me, this is a perfect segue, actually.

So when you wanted to first start making music, I'm presuming in junior higher high school, the barrier to entry was a bit higher, right? Like, what did it take for you to, I mean, I know you can write your own music with a guitar and three chords in the truth or whatever, but like what about surpassing that, right? Like putting down demos, stuff like that. Like, what did you have to do to get there and how hard was it and how did you make it happen? Well, when I was a kid, you know, when I was in junior high and high school, I mean, the barrier of entry was a guitar and an amp and like a distortion pedal, right? So, you know, once you save up for that or beg your parents to buy you the, you know, strat copy, shitty, shitty guitar at the music shop that they can afford for you, which is what happened in my case.

you know, I just, I just immediately started looking for people to play music with when I move back to Bremerton, which is like an hour outside of Seattle. And, you know, within, within like six or eight months, like, had this little band that we were playing in and stuff. But, you know, I think once I got into college and I was in this band called Pinwheel, we were starting to get, I wouldn't even call it heat, but just like a flicker of warmth from some people in the local music industry. And that was just from playing shows. Playing shows in like a demo tape. We had like, we, our college had a recording studio that if you went in at two in the morning, you could record for free because you weren't telling the professor that you were in there or whatever.

But I think it really wasn't until Death Cab started doing stuff and we made our first tape. And that started circulating. And we started to realize that there was like, in every band I'd been until that point, our friends would come and they would support us. And they'd be like, oh, that was good show. I like that one song or whatever. And you could tell that they were being supportive. And I just kind of took that of like, oh, they liked the music. But it was only when we made the first death cab tape that I had people who had been supporters of mine, friends and whatever else for years, be like, no, this is, no, this, you don't understand.

This is really good. They were like, this is actually good. And you're like, what do you mean? Like, I will listen to this not out of obligation. I will listen to this because I enjoy it. And it was like this thing where I could, it was like a switch that flipped. And we're like, oh, well, not that. I'm going to be sitting here 25 years later making a podcast, which the first question would be like,

what is a podcast, right? But more so that like, oh, okay, this is how a band starts. This is how a buzz starts with a band. Like people start wanting to do things for you and people want to help book your shows or manage you. People start coming out of the woodwork that wanted to be near us and work with us. And whether that was putting out records or help us get shows or whatever. And from that point on, it just kind of things just kind of continue to, thankfully for us, like slowly build and grow in a way that I just don't think happens now. Totally.

I mean, is there a greater curse than being close friends with someone in a bad band? Can't think of one. We talk about going, my wife and I talk about going to see Friend Rock. It's like tonight is a Friend Rock show. And you just hope that there are enough people at the Friend Rock show that if you need to or want to leave early, they can't see you leaving. Sure. Yeah. Which is rough when there's like 10 people at a show and you're like, now I have to stick this whole fucking thing out.

I'm here at the end. There's nothing I can do. One of Dante's nine circles of hell. Well, Ben, for the lads of teenage fan club, what happens is one important thing. Raymond McGinley's old lady neighbor is on death store. And his mom convinces the old lady to give him the refrigerator and the stove because she's will not be needing it in the afterlife. And he sells them and uses the money to get a Portra studio, which is a task cam, who's the first four-track recorder. And then Raymond used this dead lady's

utility money or whatever. It was a fridge and a washing machine, excuse me, to book some studio time at this place called Pet Sounds, which was the studio that belonged to the band Wet Weptu. Wet, wet. There's a great band name. Great band name. Not maybe a great band, but that's neither here nor there. They would, like, rehearse every day in Norman's grandma's house in a bedroom where they would just close the door and put a little towel under the door to make it full drum kit the whole thing. Grandma did not mind.

So Raymond McGinley said, getting the portrait studio led to that process, and that led to going. in and doing it in the studio. Francis MacDonald, who plays drums with us now and plays drums in the boy hairdressers, was up for doing the record with us. I can't remember if we booked a studio before we asked Jerry if he wanted to play or if it was after that, but it all seemed pretty rapid. So basically, like, the embryonic part of Catholic education is born in Norman Blake's grandma's house and brought to life, partially at least by the dead old lady neighbors,

you know, betrothing them the things. They had never played a show. They were just, okay, we're at Catholic education now. I let's, we need to first and foremost hear everything flows. Obviously, I think you would agree. That's the tune. That's the fucking track. And then I needed to talk to you about how it's illegal that this could be a first song of a band on their first album.

Absolutely. That was everything flows. I mean, I'll say it. That's right. You guys are all waiting for a goddamn gorgeous beautiful song. Every time I hear it for the past 30 years. It's a stab right in the heart. It's beautiful and it's so sad.

And it's such a poignant and wise lyric about people growing apart. And it's a lyric that you'd expect somebody to write at 50. Literally. You know, you get older every year and you don't change about, I don't notice, I don't notice you changing, you know. I'm going to think about it every day, but only for a little while, I'm in a feeling. I'll never know which way to flow. I'll never know which way to flow set a course that I don't know is also, like, it's like both what you're saying, right, the wisdom beyond the years, but also like, what's more fucking 25 years old sentiment? I don't think I could have put it as articulately a 25 was probably writing some like just horrific

poetry that was trying to get at this but could never get close. But like, yeah, like when you're 25 and you're like, I literally don't know how I'm going to do this, like this big life. Yeah. Banwagoness could come out and I had bought it. And, you know, I was living in, as I said, Bremerton, Washington, which had a sort of record store, but really it was like the mall. That was where the records were, you know, at the mall.

or the CDs and cassettes, I guess. And I had to go to Seattle to the cellophane square in the U district near University of Washington to get a copy of a Catholic education. I bought it on CD and, you know, I took it home and I was listening to it. And, you know, when everything flows kicks in, there's just this moment of like, just like, you know, I was just awash with teenage feelings, like awash with this sense that this record and this song particularly was, I was alarmed at how much I seemed to relate to it at 15 or 16 years old, that this sentiment was something that I could understand and see in my own life at that point was probably not. I'm alarmed how much I can relate to it.

Now I'm 40 years old. I need to seek God. Why? Do I still? This song is still resonating with me, you know, and as I was kind of going back on these records in preparation for this podcast, and I was listening to a Catholic education, and I was struck with two things. One, there's often this narrative around seminal bands that they come out of nowhere with a brilliant record and immediately are on everybody's radar, and people are like, where do these guys come from? They've come out fully formed. And Teenage Fan Club, you know, was not that. A Catholic education is not by any. means their best record. There aren't a lot of memorable songs on it, in my opinion. As least, there are songs that are still in the catalog that people are still screaming for. I mean, everything flows is, of course, one of them. But it definitely seems like this is a record made by a

band that is still trying to figure out who they are. And the second part of that is like, Jerry Love is in the band, but there are no Jerry Love songs on this record. This is all Norman and Raymond. Because he was asked to join, as we just said, like, after the basic writing of the album, which is so crazy. Yeah, so it's like, so it's this, you know, in the arc of teenage fan club, which I'm sure we'll get to or the course of the show, you know, this has been a, this band has kind of come full circle in the sense that since Jerry is no longer in the band now and it's just Raymond and Norman, it feels like it's kind of where it was at the beginning at this point

where this definitely feels like a record by a band that is in its early kind of gestation period and there are brilliant moments on it. It's so crazy to me because, like, I could really see, like, it's a sliding doors moment almost, right? Because, like, I love this album. I know Controversia Pins. This is probably my third favorite teenage fan club album. Whoa. I know.

Okay. Peak, I love their earlier stuff moment. But you're so right, right? It doesn't have as many standout songs. Like, but just, like, as a piece, it's such an. experience, like I put it on and I just vibe. Everything flows, if you will. I could see that they could have easily gone Jesus and Mary Chain direction if you just started with this album, right? Because it has some of those like elements, which is the songs are crafted pop songs, just drenched in this sort of,

I don't know what you want to call it, feedback vibes. They talk about how much they liked Sonic Youth at the time. So, like, that sort of makes sense. With a Catholic education, it feels like they're reaching for an outfit in the closet that doesn't quite fit them. Sure. It's like that they are going for a louder, souped up at that time, modern indie version of, like, crazy horse or something. Right.

Like, they've heard Dinosaur Jr., they've heard Sonic Youth. Yeah. And they're like, we should do that. Right. But in their attempts to do that, they are failing at doing that. But in failing and doing that, they are creating the sound of Teenage Fan Club. 100%. So basically, they record most of this at the Pet Sounds, which is just an absolutely wildly ambitious name for your studio, wet, wet, wet.

And then they just are like, they decide that they want to re-record some of the songs because Francis McDonald leaves to go, he goes, He wants to go back to uni, babe. He doesn't see this as a viable path forward. Can you blame him? So Brendan O'Hare comes and joins the band, and they're like, oh, we want to re-record some of the songs with Brendan O'Hare and also, like, in a better studio. And they go to Peter Hook's studio called Sweet 16, and they stay with this guy, John Robb from

the membranes. He was like, you can stay at my house. There's a sauna on the roof. And they slept on the benches in the sauna, but it wasn't working. So it was just freezing cold and it wasn't like a proper structure. It was just like a thin hut on the roof. And they're just like on the sauna benches sleeping. It really touched my heart.

I also loved. So I always, I've just for whatever reason never looked into it. I always thought the Catholic education was like, yes, Catholic, Scotland, of course. You know, whatever. And they were like, no, it was that. but also we meant it the other meaning of Catholic, being eclectic and bringing a lot of influences to the band. And we just thought it sounded good. And I was like, oh, okay, smarty-pances.

I didn't realize that, yes, a little known definition of Catholic is eclectic. God, I just have to also mention the brilliance of starting your album with a sort of like dense instrumental track. And then when you're just like, what's happening? fucking comes in everything flows. Yeah, just being like, you know, we really, people are going to be hearing our band for the first time. Should we lead with arguably one of the greatest songs, you know, of the 1990s? No, let's lead with some bullshit of us just kind of fucking around for like two minutes.

And then if you're still listening, we'll hit you with everything flows. This is Teenage Fun Club in a nutshell. This is exactly who they are, and they never changed about their career, and I love it so much. I did, again, some boots on the ground investigative journalism in which I talked to two Scottish people and asked them if it was a sort of hallmark of being Scottish to not want to succeed, and they were like, absolutely. They were like, it's embarrassing to have ambition or to outwardly want to. You can make probably the argument that, like, that's your culture that you're steeped and raised in.

But they did really surprise me at every turn where they just didn't care. Like, you want to talk about slacker rock? Like, I haven't read about a more or less ambitious band, right? Their ambitions lay solely in making the kind of music they wanted to make. Outside of that, they didn't seem to care one fucking way or another. they weren't going to play the game or do the thing that would, I mean, they probably could have been really big, right? They were so close. Like, they were attached to Nirvana.

They were the album of the year 1991 in Spin. They were, they played fucking Saturday Night Live, you know? But they continue to make a bunch of choices that prioritize their integrity, if you will, and their, like, artistic vision over everything else. and you could argue that putting a two-minute song called heavy metal before your like perfect gorgeous pop song is also that. They're like, yeah, that's cool. We're going to do that. It doesn't matter.

At that point, no one's telling them that, I don't think. But, you know, they were from the beginning. I think that's one way to put it. I think, but I think another way to put it is that I don't think it's that teenage fan club did not care. I think it was more that they didn't approach their choices musically. in terms of a career or to do things in a calculated way that would maximize their success in the traditional definition of success. And I think that's something that a large part of the culture in Seattle certainly in the pre-grunge years, but certainly in the years after as well. I think it's,

I think it's one of the reasons you have these kind of conflicted characters like Eddie Vedder and Kirk Cobain, where you have, you know, the ambition at least seemingly was to, you know, tour with Sonic Youth and have Sonic Youth think you were cool, right? I mean, Teen H Fan Club, if they didn't care, they wouldn't have toured, they wouldn't have signed a DGC or creation. They would have just kind of done their thing, right? But, you know, it was like they, they tour to this day, they put out great records, they do interviews, they make videos, they're still doing all the things that bands do. But I get the impression from knowing Norman that, you know, they were first and foremost heads. Like they were just, they were heads. They

loved records. They were record collectors. They loved music. They loved music that was kind of left of center from the things that were popular at the time. And, you know, in what world would you think in 1990? Like, just think of what was happening in popular music in 1990. It was a lot of life as a highway. Yeah. And like, and like a slaughter album going triple platinum. Right? I mean, this is what's happening, right? And you drop a song like everything flows as a single. Like, what the fuck did you think was going to happen? Right. But also, like, you drop it as a single, I'll try to dig it up, but there's like a great interview where they're like, the idea that we would have a career at all beyond anything with science fiction. Like, that didn't even cross their fucking mind.

And Catholic education, like, obviously with bandwagon, that's a bit of a different story. But, like, at this point, that's not even on the fucking table. We've just sold the washing machine. We're going to put out an album. It's a gorgeous coincidence that Stephen Pastel, their buddy, who had had a baby who had a. bit of success passed their tape over to Matador, who at this point, I mean, now, like, you know, you hear Matador and you're like, ooh, Madador, but at this point, Matador was like nothing. I mean, they had put out, what, like, two records or something.

Like, they were very much a baby indie label. I feel like Catholic education was, like, one of, like, the first, like, five records they put out. Yeah, and if my understanding is correct, that it was, you know, Jared Coslow was coming off of running Homestead. Yes, that's correct. And wanted to do his own label. Exactly.

And started Matador. So this is, this is like the early Matador. years. This isn't like the inner pole. Exactly. Or like pavement even. Like it's like we're still even before that. And they put it out in the UK on paperhouse also through Stephen Pestall.

I also do think that also some people get a little lucky, right? Teenage fan club they cared. I agree. Like they absolutely cared about the music. They wanted to play. They wanted to sure. I also don't think it was thrust upon them the way it was thrust upon Nirvana. or Pearl Jam or any of this, right?

Of course. And it's partially because they're not hot. And I don't mean that they're totally cute boys. But this is a thing, right? MTV is king at this point. Yes. And they're just like guys in clothes with hair and they make this stunning, beautiful music, right?

And that doesn't give pop culture something to hang its hat on, right? You can go see pictures of Kurt Cobain's standing next to Teenage Fan Club. Kurt Cobain standing next to the Vaseline's. And you're like, oh, wow. Like, you were such a singular-looking person, and these people are not quite a singular-looking. And that changes the game for you because on top of everything, they made Kurt Cobain this heart throb. And he had this, like, very unique style of dress and, like, that blew it up, right? Where that didn't happen for Teenage Fan Club.

And that's, I think, partially why. They weren't like fashion guys. Again, they cared about the music and the rest of it was like, maybe I'll grow a beard. There is some controversy around the beard later. Right. Yeah, I think, you know, that, I think there might be some truth of that as much as I wouldn't like to. You hadn't thought about their hotness? Well, no, I do think, I often think about, I often think about the hotness of Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and Chris Cornell, who are all astonishingly beautiful men.

They have a supermodel. As a kid, that didn't register for me in the same way that it does now. They registered for me a bit about me, but I'll tell you that. I bet you it. I bet you did. I think there might be an element to that. I mean, I hope this comes across the right way. I would say the same thing about myself, so I feel okay saying it about Teench Fan Club that there's nothing about Teenage Fan Club that screamed charisma and sexual energy coming off of that band. There's an incredible quote. were like they're interviewed and they're like

One of our songs is about sex people seem to think that sex isn't a Scottish thing so we don't do it in Scotland they go over the border Actually funnily enough the most charismatic member was Brendan O'Hare

and when you watch the interviews like he's sort of the star even though he has like probably the least to do with the music the last thing I will say is that also I think prevented them from becoming very big and we'll talk about it when we get into bandwagoness

is they also had no edge by 91, 92, but you needed to have a little bit of edge. That was the currency. Like Kurt Cobain, very edgy, Soundgarden, Allison Chains, that man was a heroin addict. You know what I mean?

Like it was just... Absolutely. You know, there was an edgy darkness that really emerged in the 90s that was sort of tantamount to cool. And teenage fan club did not have that. They're drinking pints at the bar. They're probably doing speed.

and, you know, like everyone else, like Glasgow, they like to party, babe, but like, not in any sort of dangerous way, just in a fun-loving Scottish way. They're more interested in knowing if you can take them to the cool record store in town. They're more interested in that. They're not trying to score. They're not trying to score. Yeah, that's not their thing. But, yeah, I would agree completely. I mean, it's whole smashing pumpkins ranging his machine coming a couple of years later.

It's like, you know, there's all, it's the currency of the early 90s was. almost a reaction to the vapidness of hair metal, at least in America. And that after, you know, almost 10 years of just songs about like getting women, basically, eventually people were like, yeah, I actually would like to know more about life than, you know, your sexual escapades. That's more interesting to me, you know. But, but yeah, I think, but that is very true about Teenage Fan Club. They, they have virtually no edge. Their attempts to have an edge, which is like having a song called Heavy Metal. or Satan on Van Magnetiscus.

Like, that's a cute attempt at punk, you know. But that was one of the many reasons that I was so attracted to them as a teenager, is that I had my fair share of angsty feelings, but I also felt a deeper, just sadness and melancholy. And that was probably a function of, you know, growing up as a military kid and having to move every couple years and never feeling like I had a home. Like, never feeling like I had a place that was really where I belonged until I honestly got back to Seattle as a teenager.

And this kind of coalesced with, you know, Seattle becoming the center of the universe and, you know, me really discovering independent, you know, I loved all the big bands, but most importantly, like the underground bands, the independent bands that were existing at that time underneath the grunge phenomenon. And then also, you know, bands like Teench Fan Club and pastels and Vasselines and things from, you know, Scotland that felt so much more up my alley than any of the aggressive punk adjacent. bands that I was being dragged to see in Seattle. Well, now that we've solved the mystery of teenage paint clubs, hotness, and charisma, do you want to pick one other song? I would love to. I would love that. Hell yeah. That was every picture I paint.

Producer Nica said such a dinosaur song, and I'm like, no, no. Honestly, could hear that more thickly done by a dinosaur junior. I love that song. Kiss her lips. They're wet with spit. Great lyric. Amazing. Just like what a brilliant chorus.

Like your very presence turns me blue. It takes 100,000 colors to paint you in every picture that I paint never captures you. Like what a fucking great lyric, you know? So great. So Matador had given them like five grand or something, right, as an advance for Catholic education. And they use all that money, kind of back to what we were saying about them not caring, caring. They did care. Because they used all that money for plane tickets.

So they could come and play their first U.S. shows. there's like a Maddador label show at CBGBs. They have no money, right? As they would say in the parlance of the UK, they're skinned. They sleep on the floor of the Matador office. This room, again, really made me laugh because I think Matador at the time was in an office building, right? And like the kind that shares like a bathroom with the floor of other people that are in your office building. And they would literally like get up and brush their teeth.

And like there would just be other business. men in there, like Mary and McGinley said, I can remember having a full wash over a sink in there, and someone came in and said, what's he doing? I just love just doing a little shower in the... This is really important, right? Not just because they're playing in America, but because this is where they meet Don Fleming. Obviously, a big deal as Don Fleming kind of shapes the sound of the king, which we'll talk about briefly, and then Banwagon-esque. How deep have you gotten into Don Fleming? just being a teenage fan club fan.

I danced with gumball. I'm familiar with gumball, and I'm familiar with that Don Fleming is currently the archivist for Lou Reed, or one of the archivists for Lou Reed, and was responsible for this amazing record that just came out on Light in the Attic of unreleased demos that Lou Reed recorded with John Cale in 65 or something like that, that Don Fleming kind of came across.

But yeah, I got to Gumball from Don Filming. I never spent any time really with the Velvet Monkeys or anything like that. He's a true weirdo, right? I mean, that's just like true outsider art weirdo musician, briefly was in half Japanese great band. And then just sort of, you know, played in a million bands and then was producing a lot of bands. So they get on with him, again, in the parlance of the UK. And within like a couple of days there in the studio recording the single God knows it's true.

They did like a four-song EP and then they also released a cover of the ballad of John and Yoko. No? Bold. An odd choice. I mean, kind of circling back to a point that you were making earlier that, you know, they didn't care. the idea of, hey, let's cover a Beatles song. Let's choose one that must have been fairly contentious within the band itself. That like, hey, guys, we're working on a record. I wrote this song that's just about me and my new wife, who you guys don't seem to really like that much right now. And I'm insisting that we record it and put it on the record. It's just such an odd choice of a cover. And of course, when we get to the king, we can talk about other odd cover choices. But this seems.

to be the first time, and they're like, we're just going to start dropping these things in here. We don't care if you think it's cool or not. We think it's cool. So we're going to, we're going to cover it. And that's all that matters. So they do this with Don Fleming, these four songs. It's the same year, Don Fleming produced goo by Sonic Youth. So he's out here. He's in these streets doing cool stuff. Now it's 1991. As we all know, sort of an important year for music. It is. That's right. The year that punk broke. But huge, right? Gish comes out this year by Smashing Pumpkins. REM's out of time, which is a massive album in 1991. I mean, we talk so much about Nevermind, but like if you really think back at

1991, like it was losing, isn't it losing my religion one? Yeah, I mean, what's wild about 1991 is I have to check myself when I think about how important that year was in that. Do I just think it was that important because I was 15 at the time? Or was it truly that powerful of a year? I think I've come to the conclusion that, no, indeed, it was one of the most important years in rock and roll history as far as the number of seminal genre-defining, decade-defining albums that came out that year.

Just like everything was sort of leading up to this, right? And the money is there, the interest is there. And because of those two things, right? Because, like, it's not that this couldn't have happened before, right? It's just that there was no one backing it. And then the major labels start to get sort of a taste for, things that are a little more offbeat, a little weirder, and you start getting everyone and their mom signed, and we get really cool albums.

The rumor is that they scrapped this together as like a contract fulfillment moment to get out of Matador. But from everything I read, that's not true. Like, they just happened to be making music with Don Fleming, and they kind of made this essentially at the same time as they made Banwagon-esque, and Matador didn't want it. Well, my understanding, too, is that Matador was also, if I feel like I remember reading a quote from Jail Cosloy, like, at the time, like, really, a really derisive comment about Banwagoness. Yeah, yeah.

That it was, he thought he was really disappointed with it and thought it wasn't a good record for reasons that I still, to this day, can understand. But yeah, it would make sense that if you were handed this record, the king, and you're coming off of a record like a Catholic education, which, you know, I think as we've determined, is certainly a, it's a starting point of sorts, but it's definitely, it wasn't a successful album. It wasn't, it wasn't bleach. You know, it wasn't a record that was like, oh, shit, these guys are going somewhere, right? And then you're like, yeah, here's a 32 minutes of like us fucking around high in the studio and a couple covers.

90% non-lirical. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you're like, okay. And, you know, even if you're trying to be like a cool guy about it, I'm sure you're like, I'm sorry, who's going to buy this record? Right. Why am I putting this out?

I don't know, babe. This is, look, do I go over to YouTube and put it on? No, not usually. but sometimes I remember the like a virgin cover. I was trying to figure out if that was sort of like also Sonic Youth related because of Chiconi youth, you know, like, or like not related but inspired maybe, you know, and Don Fleming had just done good with them. So I don't know, but I did read that Norman Blake just said, like, they had a tradition in the studio of when they didn't know what to do. They would just do covers and they had a game where they would like see if they could do it without. like looking up the lyrics.

And I think that's what yielded the Like a Virgin cover. There's also a cover of Interstellar Overdrive by Pink Floyd. Don Fleming just really loved that they would drink a bunch, so he would have them drink whiskey and do their thing.

They were both on Matador, and then at this point, they are with creation, right? So creation in the UK. So creation is, Alan McGee, being a visionary always, was like, yes, you guys come here.

And they had, they thought this album was kind of a joke, right? So they were like, oh, we went to Alan McGee and said, we'd love to put it out as a limited edition thing and make like 500 copies. And he said, sure, let's do it. And then they pressed like 10,000 of them. And then it became a real album for no reason. Which does sound like an Alan McGee type thing to do. Now it's time for bandwagon-esque. Ben Gibbard's favorite album of all time.

And maybe the most pivotal album in the story of Teenage Fan Club. comes out a smooth three weeks after Nevermind. Also on DGC because after Matador passed, I think Alan McGee got them signed to Geph. I had read that the Teenage Fan Club signed to DGC because Sonic Youth was on DGC and Sonic Youth didn't make mistakes. That might have been why they made the decision,

but I think Alan McGee is the one that brokered the deal because he was sort of like at this point flying high on the success of the Jesus and Mary chain, who he had put out and was managing. And so I think he was being taken very seriously in America as like this visionary. So they make bandwagon-esque in one month for, I read, and there's no way to prove this, but 10,000 pounds. Do you feel one month feels short to you for an album like this? Or what do you think? That sounds about right. I mean, I would even believe it if you told me they had made it in like two weeks. 12 days.

And I would say that because the songs are all clearly performed live in the studio for the most part. You know, Brendan O'Hare doesn't seem to be playing to a click track. There are very few overdubs. I think if there's one thing where we've gotten out of hand with modern recording is the unlimited tracks. And it's very clear that this record's being a 24-track record. they've got, you know, a bunch of mics on the drums. They need a bunch of mics for, they need a bunch of tracks for vocals. So, you know, it's, it seems like every song is like, you know, two, maybe three guitars.

You know, it just feels a very, it's a very organic feeling record. It feels like it was just, they set up the mics and they just went for it and made the record. It doesn't feel overproduced by any stretch of the imagination. It sounds kind of gritty and, you know, kind of filthy in a very appealing way. But it doesn't come across as overthought or overproduced or that they spent too much time on it. So if they said they made this record in two weeks, be like, yeah, I believe that. Which is really funny considering, right, the whole thing that they're always most associated with Big Star, right, as like they're the big star tribute band, if you will. And Big Star famously, they were tinkering and making it perfect over such a long time.

time. And it's just funny that while like sort of like this band is meant to be like always compared to big star in that sense where it's like they weren't operating like big star, right? They just heard some big star songs and they liked them and they decided to make some other songs. But journalists, as you know, you tell them one thing. That's it, Ben. That's the story. Exactly. Well, and I think also this record is coming at a time where, you know, now, due to a number of reasons, you know, big star is a band that a lot of people who maybe aren't even like heads know about. They've become a part of the, you know, cultural mosaic of music, right? But in 1991, that really wasn't the case. Like, you know, if, you know, nobody, nobody had big star records. Nobody was reissuing big star records. They were still. like collectible items that only, you know, nerds and heads had. Norman Blake said something in one of the old interviews where he was like, we said to a journalist that we liked Big Star and the man had literally never heard of that

band and the next thing he turns around and says like, we're a Big Star copy band. And I was like, you don't even know what Big Star sounds like, babe. How do you know that we're a copy of that band? Do you've never heard them? It's funny. But in fairness, I mean, me knowing what Big Star sounds like, there's at least one song on Bandwagoness where I'm like, this is a big star song. This is just a really a bassist.

Absolutely. But, you know, I can only kind of view it through my own experience with the record as a kid. Sometimes a band that is so heavily influenced by another band becomes the doorway by which you can walk through and get to that band. And, you know, whether it's Teenage Fan Club or the Posies or whomever else in the 90s that was kind of championing this sound and making people. like me go, I wonder what the, I want to hear that band. If they, if, if my favorite band thinks this band's cool, I should probably listen to them too. Yeah, totally. I just don't fucking understand. Okay, I don't understand. You're in this random village in Scotland and there's happened, what, there's three men who become friends who can all sing like this and can all write good

songs. Fuck you. What the hell? I don't understand. I mean, it's the same thing could be said about, you know, Liverpool in the early 60s, right? I mean, the fact that these three dudes just are like this hydra where like, how is it possible that, you know, when you listen to a Catholic education, you have mostly Norman songs and some Raymond songs, but really it's a Norman record. Yeah. And, you know, you put on bandwagon-esque and you get the concept and you're like, oh, yeah, classic Norman song.

What a great song. And then you get this little noisy thing. And then December kicks in. and it's just this beautiful, just open-hearted, like, wonderful song by Jerry. And you're like, I'm sorry, who's this guy? This is the bass player? He's writing songs now, too? The hot guy?

You let the hot guy write songs? Yeah, and then the hot guy writes all the singles, basically, for the record, you know? Just crazy. Okay, let's play the concept, obviously. We need to. That was the concept. Let me ask you a question. Why is this song so sad?

I think it's all in the chorus, you know. It's like you have, it's, it's this kind of character study of this woman. And she just seems pretty wonderful, you know, it's like, you know, she wears denim wherever she goes, so she's going to get some records by the status quo. The status quo was like corny and whack, right? Right, but I'm saying like, you know, kind of, yeah, but at the same time, it's like this idea of like, you know, she won't be forced against her will. She don't do drugs for she does the pill. That's the best lyric of the entire album, I think. It's incredible.

And then the second verse, you know, it's like, it's incredible. second verse, you know, it's like, it's just kind of creating this kind of great picture of this kind of, you know, what I must assume is kind of like a scenester, you know, like a woman in the scene. But the chorus is just, I didn't want to hurt you. Oh, yeah. You know, like, and it's just so, it just is this like simple sentiment that just pulls you right into the center of the song, which is, yeah, I've been talking about this person and you don't really know where the song is going, but it's clear that I've done something to hurt this person. I just want to let them know that I'm sorry. Do you want me to just wash the

the stars from your eyes right now. Okay, so Norman said. Am I wrong? Is that what you're going to tell me? I'm completely wrong about this? No, no, not that you're wrong. I think I just made it up about 20 minutes before recording the song. With that album, we definitely wrote a lot of lyrics in the studio. I think I just wanted to write something with a narrative, actually. I had this image of a person, and I love the idea of getting the name status quo in the song.

I'm calling bullshit. I say bullshit. I don't say, I don't know that, I don't dispute the fact that he wrote it in 20 minutes. But as a songwriter myself, I have to say it's very rare that you pull something this evocative out of your ass without having anybody in mind for it. I'm sure this is about somebody. Ben Givert, I want to believe you, but I've told the story on the show before. As a serial musician, Dator, and that's my own issue that I do need more therapy about. Well, that's a problem. You shouldn't be doing that. Absolutely. I need to go to a 12-step program for a lot. But I remember the first time, my ex-perman was like, Like, oh no, I just need to find some word that fits in here.

And I was like, excuse me? What do you? What do you? Just some word that fit? I've been hanging my whole life on these words. And you guys are just out here like shoehorning in some shit that this works. It's fine. This is scripture to me, these lyrics.

Don't you dare, Ben Gibbard. If you bring up the lightness right now and you tell me that's a fake. I'll walk away right now. That's a very real song. But, no, I guess I would dispute. I think that it's, you know, only Norman knows, only Norman tells. I know. Norman is an unreliable narrator. I'll be honest with you.

I think he's taking a this. I think he is too. But I think, like, I think it's much easier. It's easier to kind of have an aloof dismissiveness of what something you've written is about then to unload the significance of the song on whoever you're talking to. And having said that, whether or not Norman literally just made this up because he had 20 minutes left on the clock and had to write a song, it doesn't change the fact that it's an incredibly evocative and kind of sad story. And the fact that he was in a place that he was able to write

this makes me think that there's something in the song that is truly within him as an individual and is based on his own experiences, whether or not this person is actually real. It absolutely could be an amalgam of a number of people, which is how I've written a lot of songs as well. There are songs I've written specifically about somebody, and then there are songs that are an amalgamation of, you know, a number of people, but the emotion that I felt about them is the same. And I have to think with the song like the concept that there is like a deep sadness within

Norman at the time of writing the song about hurting somebody, you know, to the point where he felt he had to sing, like, I didn't want to hurt you, you know, that that's the, the central and most important. That's the conceit of the song. That is the conceit of the song, yes. I have to agree with you because there's just no way that even just the music, take away all the lyrics is so emotionally evocative that it couldn't have come from a place of like, I'm just going to manipulate your feelings, bitch, you know?

Yeah. Norman would not do that to me. He wouldn't do it to me either. No, he would never do that. Norman loves me. Norman, and like I've always said, Stephen Macbess, who is making no sense, but these songs do make sense to me, and they're about me. So I would just hold that to myself. What's really kind of nuts is they're not signed to creation, per se, while they're making this album.

They sort of get signed to creation mid-making the album, and I don't think they even get signed to Geff until the album's done, and they don't have a manager. So it's just Raymond McGinley at his mom's house. making long-distance telephone calls and brokering deals, which, again, I just love it. And they're like, what, 26, 27 here? A little old. They are geriatric second record makers. At this time, creation records, is funding the primal screams Screamadelica, fucking My Bloody Valentine's album, Loveless.

this is what's going on and they're like the owners of the label are like mortgaging their homes to like make I think a little bit partially because my bloody valentine they secretly took two years

to finish that album really slow workers my bloody valentine I mean worth it you know I mean worth it but thank God for creation being like hey

are you guys doing yet and then being like no mate and I'm like okay I'll check back in in a month but anyways that's all going on And just like, what a wild time. When you, so this is the first album you found.

Tell me how you found this album. Was it just like MTV or something? Yeah, so living in Bremerton, my lifeline was twofold. It was 120 minutes on MTV. And I would tape that because it was on at midnight on Sundays, midnight to 2 a.m. And then a radio station called KGRG, which was a college station at Green River Community College, which my friend Craig got at his house. for some reason because he was in a valley. I don't know why. And we would go in his house and we would

tape hours of KGRG and then make mixed tapes from that because it was the early 90s. And I have to believe that I probably saw the video for the concept on 120 minutes. That has to have been where I was made familiar with them. And, you know, I just, my heart just swelled. I was like, what is this band? This is, you know, and it might have been that or maybe it was star sign. I can't remember which was the first single that I saw. But it was something off of that. And I rushed out and bought the record. Also, at the time, I was reading AP before AP became like a swoopy dyed hair, like Screamo magazine. And Spin, when, you know, Spin was a magazine. And, you know, you're starting to kind of see these articles about this band from Scotland called Teenage Fan Club. So I had gone to the Beehive

CDs and tapes or whatever and picked up the CD. And, you know, I had listened, I've been listening to other music, kind of finding my own music along the way. But this just felt like this, this was familiar, familiar sounding in the sense that reminded me of the records that were on in my house when I was a kid that my dad was playing, but also like through the filter of louder, dirtier guitar music. So it felt like the kind of band that no one was going to make fun of me for liking as well, which at 14, 15 years old, you know, this becomes somewhat important. So it felt like it had enough of all these elements of these things that I liked, and it was all in one record. And it just really ran the gamut. I mean, you just go down the track

listing, and there's just so many wonderful songs on here. You just said something really important that I wrote down a bunch of times throughout my notes, which is that it felt familiar. Like, I think that's one of the greatest magic tricks of teenage fan club is that somehow their music sounds so immediately familiar, right? There's like some bands that, I call them growers, not showers, if you will, where you have to put on the album a couple of times, and there's, you know, part of what hooks you into a song is the repeated listen, right? Then you understand it or whatever.

But I feel like Teenage Fan Club, it's just because they're taking from these traditions that are sort of familiar and just sort of, making their version of it, immediately it hits you. That's my experience anyways. I agree. And I would add to that with the observation that, you know, I'm not going to name names probably because, you know, they might be mad at me and try to hurt me. But there are bands that have been active throughout the last 15, 20 years that clearly

heard like the Nuggets compilation and were like, let's sound like that. And then just, you know, got the equipment, got the recording stuff. Like, there are, you know, there is this trend in revivalist indie rock where, you know, people want to sound like the seeds. You're pushing too hard. And they sound exactly like the fucking seeds. Yeah. But with Teen H fan club, they don't sound exactly like Big Sar. They don't sound exactly like the birds.

They're borrowing from these bygone traditions of the style of songwriting and, harmony and arrangement, but it's 100% being filtered through a 1990-91 indie sensibility. And I think that's what makes this record in particular so special and I think so timeless, is that it's not trying to be 1972. It's trying to be 1991, but there are enough things that kind of tie it to the past while also placing it very much in its presence. 100%. I mean, I think the thing that I think of every time that illustrates this is just how the concept starts, right? The concept starts with that like, a bit of like feedback, right? It starts ugly and it starts sort of messy. And that's very 90s. That's very early 90s. It's very like in, in that sort of like Sonic Youth Grunge situation or whatever. Like if you were just going to do 70s, karaoke rock, you wouldn't have included that bit.

No, there would have been like, it would have started with like a 12-string guitar, like, like, iconically strumming the chords. And the thing that's so, you know, if we get really put the microscope on that, the beginning of the concept, it's like you have this swirl of feedback and that's telling the listener, it's fucking loud in the studio. This is not like a pro-tools effect they're using. Like they are in, they're clearly in a room with the amps on fucking 10. Yeah.

And as soon as that first, every. chord that Norman hits the top of that song, like the guitar is just almost about to burst into like a sea of feedback. It's just, he's just trying as hard as to not get the whole thing just just to dissolve into feedback. And that's what makes the top of that song so fucking great. And you're like, what's going to happen next? Like, oh, no, they're going to go to a C chord. And now we're just in a strummy. We're just strumming this jangle shit, you know, and it's fucking awesome. It's so good. It's so good. The cover of this out. album is just a bag of money. Raymond McGinley designed the sleeve with his girlfriend. He did use

Microsoft clip art that was free to use. And Geffen hated it. This is just going to start a long tradition of Geffen hating their album covers. And he said, I don't think the other guys in the band liked it either. And we ended up getting sued by Gene Simmons, who claimed to have trademarked bags of money. This is actually true. Oh, I'm aware of this. Yeah, it's fucking incredible. So he said, so I'm trying to produce the cheapest sleeve possible as some kind of comment on the music business. And we end up getting sued by Gene Simmons.

I said to our lawyer, can we just tell him to fuck off? He said no. So we gave him $500 in a credit. I heard another story that he came up to them backstage at Saturday Night Live and was like, you stole my thing. And they were like, okay. That would, that would, I can't imagine Gene Simmons showing up somewhere that he wasn't the star, though. I know. So that story seems like it might be bullshit.

But I will say that this is a terrible album cover. I think... It definitely doesn't tell you what the record is going to be, that's for sure. No, this is the kind of thing that you do when you're feeling insecure about taking the leap to a major label and you're trying to kind of make some gesture to let all of your friends know that you know that this is kind of bullshit, you know? Totally. That's what this is. And, you know, because I know it because I've done it myself, you know.

There's also a secret message etched on the first pressing of the vinyl that says, nothing's final till it's vinyl, which I enjoyed because, and they said it was because they were talking to all these labels. And Alan McGee called them and said, look, we can still do this deal, even though you're talking to other people, because nothing's final till it's vinyl. That's fucking great. One thing I emerged from this story being is, obsessed with Alan McGee. I truly think he might be one of the coolest, most interesting people

that's ever walked to the earth, and he's so funny. And I owe him a great deal because he brought so many good bands into my world and life. Shout out Alan McGee, if you're listening. I'm going to read you just a couple of quotes across the years where they're talking about the inspirations and stuff. So Jerry's told sounds in 1990, I think a lot of bands in the last 10 years or so have been more preoccupied with the image of being in a band rather than being big music fans. It's kind of refreshing to meet someone whose whole life is music. Some people lose their place. It's music you're dealing with, not fashion or image. Music lives on. It's not bound by time. So I feel this is kind of what we were talking about, right? This is what they

care about. When we say they don't care, they care about that. This is probably a me thing and not like an objective reality thing. I think they're such brilliant songwriters and they write these like classic beautiful pop melodies with there's gorgeous harmonies and stuff and the dirtiness of the production and the you know griminess that we're talking about is what strikes the perfect balance for me when they shed that I don't like it as much it's like when like a candy is too sweet or something do you know what I mean I do I don't dislike it's still really good and I love Grand Prix. The songs Northern London. I'm not, you know, I have a heart and ears, but. I will actually say Grand Prix is my favorite Teenage Fan Club record. Wow.

Yeah. I mean, Banwagon-esque is the, that is the entry point for me. And because of that, it's kind of like saying, like, oh, my favorite Beatles record is Sergeant Pepper. Okay. It's like saying that, right? So it's like, it's clear that, like, bandwagonesque is the most important record of their discography. It is, like, their defining album in pop culture. It was the biggest record they ever had. But I think that from a songwriting perspective, from a sonic perspective, Grand Prix is my favorite record of theirs. But to get back to your original kind of point, I do think there is a tipping point in Teenage Fan Club where things tip a little too lush. And as the records get a little bit more lush, the songs are still

brilliant. But... Oh, we're going to talk about howdy, babe. And I will say it to your face, I don't like that album. You don't like Howdy. Man, I... Okay. Well, we're going to get to Howdy.

Okay. Let's just say it's the last one on Earth all put on. Okay, fair enough. Okay. But I understand, I think that is a fair criticism, because I do think that what makes Banweganis so unique and special in the landscape of music at that point. and also in TeenH Fanclubs discography,

is that it is this perfect melding of the songwriting and the kind of sonic palette that is so perfect for its time and also very much, as we spoke about earlier, kind of, it's a breakaway point from the influences of the record. Whereas later in Teenage Fanclubs' career, they start to lean into the lushness

of some of the influences that made the band sound like what it did from the beginning, which is not a bad thing, but it made the records a little less unique in the landscape and also in terms of their discography. I'm going to read you this, and then I have a question for you. This sort of ties into that.

Okay, so Norman said, Norm, if we will, Normies. He said, when we actually get down to recording, there's sort of this collective set of references from the great albums of the past that we use to help pinpoint what we're after. You might describe what you want by saying to the engineer, I want this bit to sound like the guitar off exile on Main Street, or I want the vocals to be like the Beach Boys' Holland album.

It's no more than admitting you like the sound of something someone else has done and saying you like to do something new with it. There's a whole series of reference points, sounds from the last 30 years of music, that help you get what you're after, and let everyone else involved know exactly what you expected to sound like. It saves time. And Raymond said,

it's not like you're trying to emulate the classic bands like the Beatles or the Stones, more that you like the way they recorded and the actual elements of their sound, the overall feel. It may be something really unimportant, like the particular Tom sound, a band got on one track. I'm basically reading these because, like, I think one thing that happens to a teenage fan club is that the criticism that they do get and the writing off they do get is this, right, that they're too referential or whatever. And I kind of don't agree with that. I think they just talked about it more than other people, right? And that leads me to my question of you, a professional musician who makes albums.

I mean, is this also how you make albums? Oh, absolutely. Right. Yeah. I mean, this is how everybody does it. This is how people make records. It's not, you know, if you are a fan of music and you grew up enamored with rock and roll records, you know, the things that influence you, the things that make you want to make music,

you know, there is not a day that goes by in the studio and has gone by in the studio that I've been in this band or any other project I've ever been involved with that there hasn't been a reference to something that already existed as at least an aesthetic starting point. You know, it's not like you go, I want to write, let's write a song that sounds like I'm only sleeping by the Beatles, like, okay, well, that's going to sound like, you're going to end up with a song that sounds exactly like I'm only sleeping by the Beatles. But if you're like, you know, I really like the feel the drums in that song because they're really laid back and they almost feel like they're not.

not playing the same song for some of it, but it still really clicks in. And Jason and Jason, I'd be like, I totally get that. I'll go for, I'll lay back and try to find something similar to that. You know, you're pulling on the history of recorded music to make something that you hope will be in some way new with the 12 notes on the Western scale. The goal is always to kind of be inspired by things that made you want to make music in the first place, but also, you know, take the elements of it, then you can not so much improve on, certainly it's not that, but that you can kind of form and shape and make into something that will resemble, you know, something authentic to yourself.

Totally. I mean, that's well put. I just, yeah, I just feel like, I mean, with rock music in particular, I can't speak too much to other genres because I don't, I'm not as versed. But it's almost like the language that you're writing in. is the language of influence, right? It's not the 12 notes on the scale or whatever. Like that time has come and gone.

Now it's like you have this rich palette of colors to paint with. And it's like you said, the history of recorded music. So anyways, all that just defend the honor of teenage fan club. I think a lot of what happens to them in their career is that they're very honest in some ways. And that bites them in the ass because like we said, journalists will take whatever you tell them. and then just go make that your story. So this happens a bunch with Teenage Fame Club. Well, just quick funny thing, Satan.

If you play that song backwards, it says, God bless my cotton socks. I am wearing a blue shirt. You're kidding, right? No. All right. Learning something new today. Big thing that we don't get anymore.

Play the song backwards secret message. People don't do that anymore. Ben Gibbard, next album. You got to play the song backwards, put a secret message. Yeah, I think maybe we can kind of do some, you know, I think maybe we can get on some, satanic shit. Bring it back, Bibb.

You know, bring it, bring the fear of Satan back into people's hearts. You know, that's what I say. That's what I'm saying. So for me, there's a two-song stretch here that is just extreme big star cosplay, which is December and what you do to me. What do you think? Absolutely. But one of the things that's so wonderful about this

record is it's not only the emergence of Jerry Love as a songwriter, but it's also the emergence of Jerry Love as a bass player. And it's like, you know, when you put on December, you have this like figure that is like the hook of the song. Like, that's the riff in the song.

And if you go further than the record, you know, something like Alcohol a day, you know, there's this like ascending bassline. That song, like, that song fucked me up as a kid when I first heard it. And part of it is also that bass line works like that. Like the guitars are descending and the bass is going, it's going up and then down. It's really sing.

It's like he's playing bass like a lead instrument, but he's doing it in a way that there's all these signature moments in it that are very musical and very, they're singable in a way that bass tended to not be. And it really wasn't in Big Star either. So, you know, while December and what you do to me are certainly like, they're leaning into the big star pretty hard, you know, it's the grit in the guitars. And I would argue just the bass playing, the figures that are very riff-like, they delineate, they, of course not.

No, but they delineate it a little bit. it from, you know, the bass player is there to just kind of follow the changes and kind of stay out of the way. I mean, like, Jerry's playing the bass like an instrument that needs to kind of sit forward a bit more. Okay, I love that. As me, a moron who doesn't understand music, I feel enlightened to know because I'm just like, oh, it sounds like a big star.

Well, if you think it does, then it does, right? I mean, it doesn't, yeah, I mean, I'm not going to tell you, I'm not going to, like, try to, like, music head you out of it. feeling that way. No, I think you've just elevated a bit where you're like, no, it sounds like a big star, but here's how it's like they made it their own or here's how Jerry Love made it his own, which I do find very interesting. And now I can take that information, go back and listen and be like, oh, I see what Ben Gemberd was saying.

Star sign, babe. What a banger. My notes just say, it's so fucking good, like so good. I love it so much. I'm melancholy. I'm joyful. I'm nostalgic. I'm sleepy.

I'm in love. It's all happening. What a good fucking song. I can't overstate. It's one of the songs that, you know, there's this thing that great pop songs do to me where they just seem to like grab me by the heart and just like lift me like six inches off the ground. Like I don't feel like I'm on, I feel like I'm kind of floating when I'm listening to them.

You know, StarSign was one of those songs for me at the time, and it still is, where, you know, first hearing it, you're just like, yeah, this has all the energy that one would want as a young boy, a teenage boy. It has the energy and kind of immediacy that you want from music. But it's just such a wonderful melody. And I don't really think that anybody in Teenage Fan Club gets enough credit as lyricists. And, you know, they don't seem to be talked about in the same conversation when it comes to people who are known for their lyrics. And, you know, I mean, the first line in star sign, hey, there's a horse shoe on my door, big deal. It's a great opening line.

What a great line. This is every one of my ex-boyfriend's being like, please stop talking about astrology. It's not real. And that is, you know what? That is something a fucking Virgo would say, which is what Jerry Love is. He is a Virgo. Classic. The biggest hallmark of Virgo is they don't believe in astrology. So I'm just saying, go ahead and prove my point. Jerry Love. Raymond McGilley's in Aquarius. For those of you at home who were wondering. Keeping score. Who are keeping score. Do you're keeping score. Let's play Star Sign because I think it would be a shame and a pity for everyone, not to, as you describe, makes you feel like you're floating.

I would say it makes you feel like I'm on drugs, but I'm a more disgusting person than you are. That was Star Sign. You said off Mike that you love that it just, just a full minute or so of just, we'll get there eventually, but the song is coming. Yeah, and it's also, it's just such a, it's like a, it's a, it's a psych out of an opening. because you just have this like shoe gazingy feedback delayish delayed kind of thing and like oh this feels kind of nice and then hey down no no no no and then we're like this uptempo like burner you know yeah also just famously they did not make good music videos the best one and we'll get into it later is the one for fallen and if you haven't watched it recently absolute just injection of joy into your

heart. It is the best video. It's just Day La Sol and Teenage Fan Club and they're all just hanging out in a classroom and teenage fan club are just like, have like little woolly hats on and like Day La Sol looks so cool and it's snowing for summer. It is so fun.

I was unaware to this very second that there was a video for Fallen. It's going to bring your heart so much joy. I can't even explain. Anyways, their videos are bad. They talk about it at some point. They basically are like, we didn't know. We didn't prophesize YouTube is basically what they're saying.

Like, we thought you just like make a video. It comes on. It goes. Who cares? Not that it's like forever the rest of your life. This is who you are. Yeah. I have a theory that if they had led with alcohol a day,

we would be living in a different teenage fan club universe right now. I just think it's a little bit of a grittier song than the concept. And given what the appetite was for in 1991, it just might have had more mileage. title alone honestly yeah I mean the title is incredible when I first heard this record I was struck with how unbelievably similar

the concept and alcohol day are as structurally like they are virtually the same tempo they use they're in the same key they are using virtually the same chord set but that's okay because they seem like

two sides of the same coin musically. I'm sure this is not intentional. One of the things that works so well and where they're placed in the record is you start with a concept and you're kind of sucked into this kind of jangly world that is, you know, there's an element of melancholy to it and that I didn't want to hurt you chorus. And you move to the record and there's, you know, things like what you do to me, this wonderful love song and you have December and Star-Syme with these kind of like musings about consciousness and, you know, whatever else in those songs. And then you get to Alcohol Day, which is, in my opinion, the most emotionally bare and honest song on the record. It is so,

it is so heartbreaking. And I remember listening to it for the first time as a kid and just being so, you know, imagine little emo Ben Gibbard, right? And he's just in his bedroom listening to the song. And, you know, I don't know if, I don't know if it necessarily kind of brought me to tears the first time I've heard it, but I just was overcome with the sense of just melancholy and just felt so in the song. It's like this sentiment of like, there are things I want to do, but I don't know if they'll be with you. This, you know, this, you know, the feeling of uncertainty in any kind of relationship or whatever of like, you know, there's things I want to say, but I don't know if they'll be to you, you know. And just these, these opening lines that are just such, I mean,

these are the kind of lines that you usually bury deeper in a song because you want to build up to them. And Norman just starts off with them. We are starting off with the most brutal thing you can, just raw dog in emotion, like right from the very beginning. Not even a little bit. And yeah, and I just, and just the way the song doesn't have a chorus is also very interesting to me. and that there is no chorus in the song. It just is a verse after a verse after a verse. And like, you know, you'll get to the end of the passage and be like, you know, it's like, people say I'm going crazy.

There are things. We're right back into it. Like we're back into like the first line again. Yeah, it's almost like it's all chorus or something. Well, it seems like kind of a spiritual relative to like losing my religion, where there is no chorus in losing my religion. It's just a series of verses, and it's like a, it's a long kind of meditation. And alcoholity is similar to that. And then you get to the, after like three minutes of this verse kind of looping and looping and

looping, you get to this little instrumental section that feels like it's taking you somewhere a little bit more upbeat, you know, like it's maybe going to change the mood a bit. And you just drop into this just like absolutely devastating and lyric. It's so all of a sudden, just like esoteric and like, big and heady. Yeah. And it ends with this like, you know, kind of not even a chorus, but just this kind of recitation of like, all I know is all I know. What I've done, I leave behind and I don't want my soul to find me. It's brutal, you know. Just. Yeah. Again, I stand by. I think this song would have just might have connected more. I mean, here's a, here's a crazy fact.

The concept was a music video that was like doing really well at MTV, right? According to Alan McGee, every week like sales were increasing. The rotation of the video was really good. People were requesting. It was awesome. So their A&R at Geffen was Gary Gersh. And Alan McGee was like, I was in the room. Gary Gersh had this like thing that he would do where he would call MTV when a video

was doing really well, he would take it off and put a different video. on to try to like build or capitalize a momentum. I'm not really sure. And he, so he decided to do that with the concept, even though it was like going, like it was building and building and building. So he comes back with what you do to me. And MTV was like, we don't want it. And that was it. It was dead, dead in the water. Like he like basically effectively, if we believe Alan McGee, and I'm only reporting on what Alan McGee said, this is not, please don't sue me, Gary Gersh. I don't have any money. That, you know, again, could have gone a different way, right?

Like if the concept had been let to build to its full fruition, we might have gotten a number one record of Teenage Fame Club. It might have been a different story. But Gary Gersh took a gamble, according to Alan McGee, and it did not pay off. Interesting. I would love to have lived in a world where Alcoholiday was a single and a big single. I had a bad word, though. It did.

You can do things about that. those. But I also think we can talk about this record and the kudo woulda shouldas of what song should have been released when or if Gary Gersh allegedly would have done this instead of that. Things could have been different. But I really think of like, just think of what it was like in the musical landscape in a post-Nirvana world where everything got really dark and really aggressive really quickly. And thankfully, a lot of that aggression and darkness was coming from a very, like, you know, enlightened and intelligent intellectual place, more so certainly than what was happening before that. But, like, I just don't see a world in which this record of this band

slots into that and is as successful, even half as successful as any of those bands. And I say that as, like, the biggest fan of this band. No, an absolute compliment. I mean, again, I stand by my original theory. Gary Gersh, Mary Gersh, this band did not have the, like, couple of things that it would have needed to break through. They're not hot enough, and they're not edgy enough. Like, there's just missing elements. And also, people forget, like, 1991, never mind isn't really huge until 1992, because it takes the Christmas season that really bolstered.

1991, you still see fucking Axel Rose every day on MTV. Every day. Yeah, but yeah, because we're, yeah, it's like we're, this, 1999 is a transitional year. Yeah, there's still hair metal on. In the spring of 91, use your illusion one and two come out. and are the biggest fucking records in the world. And you have this kind of cultural tension between what the world is passing by

and what the music world is starting to embrace. And that's a really interesting time in terms of cultural shifts as we've known them in a 20th century multimedia-type world, where it's like in March of 1991, all of this music, was underground and like things that like collegiate art people liked and like weirdos. And then in the fall of 1991, I'm literally sitting next to like cheerleaders who are talking in my biology class who are talking about how great Nirvana is. Right? And I can't, there hasn't been another moment since where the landscape has just shifted and corrected so

quickly. I mean, I don't think we'll ever see anything like that happen ever again because of the way we consume media and the amount of media and the fact that there are no gatekeepers on music. There's no, you know, we're not beholden to major labels choosing what they're going to promote or not to get them into the same goodies of the world. And, you know, I think in the grand scheme of things, that's a, it's a much better place to live because of that. But, but, you know, it's, it's just really, it's, it's really interesting to think of bandwagoness coming out in the midst of this massive cultural shift where people are moving away from like hair metal is in the court like within a year of this record coming out hair metal is dead it does not exist or it's been pushed so far underground that it practically

doesn't exist honestly who really suffered for that of my opinion is guns and roses because like I will fly the flag for guns and roses they're actually an incredible band that band was rooted in punk in many ways and was a very complex and interesting band and like they were of a different ilk of a sort of very fast forgotten time and it just sort of like that's it they never recovered yeah i mean i saw guns and roses not that long ago and they're fucking great like there's they are undeniable they were undeniably the greatest thing to come out of that scene honestly the question that we should be asking isn't why didn't teenage fan club make it big it's a how did they even get here?

Like, how were they even on Geffen and on Saturday Life? That's, I think that's the reframing, really. Given what we're talking about when you have, when you're up against Nirvana, don't forget red hot chili peppers. I'll say it once, I'll say it again. The opinion of people who are not from California about red hot chili peppers does not matter. Anyways, all I have to say, regardless of whether or not you liked it, Ben Gibbard, it was a huge thing on MTV and whatever.

And then you have that REM video for losing my... religion, slaps you in the face piece of cinema, Scorsese. And then what do you have? The concept. Three pale Scottish bloke's playing some guitar on a stage and a girl in a jean jacket walking in a record shop. There's no contest. They can't compete.

Oh, no contest. Yeah, and I think that I will agree with you. And I also will clarify, I think that teenage fan club, you know, speaking of about them now in 20, 22, they were as popular as they could have been. And that the thing that I never saw for them, even as we've, as we have determined number one fan, I've never would have seen them becoming one of those bands that people still are rabid fans of. That they, that they're one these bands that regardless of age or culture or when which record you got into them on or what song you heard first or the people who love them love them in a way that is reserved for a very small

handful of bands. Totally. And I think that at the end of their story, I think that's what they'll be remembered for the most is not that, oh, they were the band that almost made it. It's like, no, they fucking made it, man. Like if you can be, if you can be making records for 30, almost 35 years and people still care and people are like that they have woven these songs into their life to such an extent that, you know, people are still patronizing them and buying their records all these years later. I mean, that's, that's the dream, man. That's like, that's what everybody dreams of. Yeah, and you didn't have to kill yourself because it was so miserable and you were too famous. Also good. Yeah, living is fun. Living is amazing. Living is pretty amazing.

I think obviously just by nature of us being American were a little biased in this telling of the tale of teenage fan club through the lens of like the American experience of it and the American receipt of the albums. But I do want to spend a little time just talking about how there was sort of like in the UK a little different, right? They were pretty big in the UK, especially off bandwagon-esque, like they were being covered by every music magazine, every week pretty much. Like they were one of the, like, major players. I'm exaggerating, but you know what I'm saying. And I do think it's kind of interesting going along their career, how that kind of shifts and ebbs and flows, like where they're like welcomed with open arms for an album in their home territories. but shunned by America or vice versa. I just want to say that so because sometimes people from the UK yell at me

for not understanding things about the UK. And I'm simply an American girl. What can I do? The UK is a small country geographically, and they produced just an unbelievable amount of culture for the size of their country. And I'm not even sure if I'm saying that in a complimentary fashion. you look at the UK and you have to be impressed with the amount of great music that's come out of this small country over the course of the last 50 years or whatever, right?

So I guess the Brits could be forgiven for having a chip on their shoulder about Americans not knowing how things work over there all the time, but also it's like, we fucking live here. Right. I do think it like it just got me really thinking, though, that like temperamentally rock music. is more sacred in the UK than in America. I think that's, I think we can pretty safely say that. I mean, this is a country that since the 60s, you know, has absolutely revered and respected rock music to the point of having multiple weekly music magazines. Like, it never hit that point here.

You know, of course, like, we had our big heyday of rock music. But, you know, I think it's interesting. I bring that up just to say it's like, we talked about this a little bit. bit about teenage fan club having no edge and this and that. And maybe, like, we could even say, like, they weren't considered cool. And I asked my Scottish friend, I said, were they cool? You know, and he was like, no. Like, even that, he's like, but that didn't really matter, you know?

And I think it does matter a lot more in America. Yeah, I mean, but they weren't like cornballs, you know? No, no. Like, they weren't, like, doing Coke with models, like, at after hours. places in London, right? Right. But they were making great music that people really loved. It was, you know, they weren't, they weren't a joke.

They weren't primal scream. Yeah, exactly. They weren't, they weren't like a joke. They weren't like, you know. They just weren't like particularly cool. Of course. Which is just a credit to, I think, the way the UK treats music. The music is so good and that that wasn't, that didn't stop them from being important

or famous, whereas it, I think it probably hindered it a bit in America. That's all I'm saying. The enemy review of it. said, laziness is tedious. A lack of direction is unforgivable, but studied lethargy, while perhaps teenage fan club have something there. She says she likes the group because we pull in the slack, if you will, you know. It's a, it's a ultimately positive review where they're basically just talking about how it's like so laid back and, you know, they don't say Slack Rock, but they're basically saying, like, this is a great slack pop.

There was one funny line from it where they said, the Fannies have as much chance of becoming sex gods as Tom Jones has of signing to sympathy for the record industry, but they do manage to twang away at the heartstrings. Yeah, in the UK, they were called the Fannies, and I do feel the need to remind our American listeners that in the UK Fannie means vagina. It does indeed.

It does indeed, which... So they were called the vaginas, basically. Over here in the USA, this is a village voice review. However, it was written by one Simon Reynolds, famously British. So it's a confusing conflation of things. He does out himself. He says, as a Brit who spends a lot of time in the U.S., I could hardly fail to notice the scathing skepticism of American hipsters

when it comes to my country's rock exports. According to the fanzine-led Anglophobic consensus, British bands are either videogenic art school clothes horses or conceptually overdetermined stillborn music press offspring. Joe Carducci's rock and the pop narcotic is the mind comp of this nativist sensibility. I did end up going and buying that book because that sounded cool, not because the mind comp is cool, but just, you know, in the heavy-handed description of him, but I haven't read it yet. I don't know. I wasn't cognizant enough in 1991 or two to know what the consensus. towards British rock music was that I was like nine years old, but it's not a particularly positive review. It's interesting. Basically what he's saying is that teenage fan club began as a

totally Americanophile proposition, which I guess isn't untrue, like in the sense that they were inspired primarily by American bands, be it Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. or the Birds and big star. But I think this is like a bit of a dig. You can never tell. Sometimes British writers, they're just so irony-pilled. I can't even tell what the sentiment is. I was like, do you like this? Do you not like this? There's positive words. But then the way you're putting them together is confusing to me. It got reviewed by Entertainment Weekly, got a B. Overall, great reviews. That's pretty much the most of the reviews I can find. Here's the most important thing that happened, though, at the end of 1991, top of 1992, Spin Magazine, who in 1991 and

1992 was formidable, very powerful in America, would you not say? I would say so, certainly in my sphere of influence. Yeah, I mean, we didn't have a lot, right? We had Rolling Stone spin. I guess this is Sprint starts to have a lot of them, but spin was like the big one. Yeah, I mean, at this point, Rolling Stone was putting more actors on the cover. They were more mainstream, right, where spin was kind of cooler. Yeah, Rolling Stone had long since become a lifestyle magazine.

Yeah, totally. And Spin was dedicated entirely to music. Yeah, and it was just like, it was just cool. So Spin names Banwagon-esque, the album of the year of 1991. Now, as we've discussed, this is crazy considering the albums that came out in 1991. You mentioned REMs out of time. Let's not forget. There was My Bloody Valentine, Loveless,

Pearl Jam's 10, and Nirvana. Nevermind. And Spin said, actually, Teenage Fan Club Bandwagon-esque. It's a little crazy, no? Yeah, it seemed then, and it seems now, like, exactly the kind of thing that some snobby rock writers would do.

want to say Nirvana. We're not going to do it. You can't make us. We're not doing it. Yeah. Although, you know, I have, I still have like in a box somewhere downstairs in the basement, like, of spin magazines from like 91 through 93 when I had a subscription. I still have them. And I have, and I have that, I still have that spin with Nirvana on the cover. With the purple hair. Right. Where it says Teen H Fan Club album of the year. They didn't even put them on the cover. They said album of the year, but actually we're still going to put them on the cover, Nirvana. You guys can't be on the cover. Yeah, exactly. I mean, at the end of the day, they did need to sell magazines, you know. It's the kind of thing that it's just a part of the culture of music journalism.

And I don't, I'm not necessarily, I'm not saying that in like a derisive way. I just mean like, what seems to be part of the job of a music journalist is to turn people on to things. Sure. That they're not getting at the time on MTV or on. on the radio or whatever. And, you know, for them to kind of go out of their way to champion this relatively obscure Scottish band and give them album of the year can be seen in one way as maybe like a little bit of a fuck you to Nirvana and REM and some of the kind of bigger bands at the time.

But, you know, I think culturally bandwagonesque does not mean as much in the annals of music history as never mind, certainly. out of time as well. I mean, I'm biased, of course, but I think it's a better record than those records. They weren't wrong. They weren't wrong that it was better than those records as far as just, it was an incredibly unique thing to come out into the world at that point. There was nothing else really like it. Nobody was doing that kind of music. Do you think it's better than loveless? Yeah, but that's because I'm, my Bloody Valentine's one of those bands that in my musical travels, I've spent a lot of time with those records just because they're always on.

But I don't own any of them. And, you know, I don't have this just effusive love for my bloody Valentine that a lot of people do. I hear you. Well, around this spin situation, I did become a little mentally ill. I don't know why. And really needed to do some investigative journalism around it. And it's possible that I've uncovered a conspiracy. I'm just kidding.

That's not true. But it was very funny that. So number one, this is not me uncovering it. This is just known fact that the music editor at Spin at the time was one Stephen Daly. Stephen Daly is a Scottish man who was in the band Orange Juice. I'm just saying. I'm just putting this forward as exhibit A. Then I was like, I need to talk to some people who were there at the time.

So I get in touch with Craig Marks. He was like, I got to spend in September of 1991. And I don't remember a Stephen Daley, which is interesting because he absolutely was there because I did look at the mass tests. And then I got the phone number of one Chuck Eddy, also a very amazing and fun and famous spin writer. And he was basically like, okay, yeah, but I don't know why you're asking me. I never really cared about Teenage Fan Club. I was like, okay, so you weren't one of the people voting in Teenage Van Club. and Charles Aaron didn't remember.

So all I'm saying is I didn't get to the bottom of anything here, but it is interesting how there were no answers. It just maybe, perhaps, they're purposely obfuscating the truth. Well, I think also what happens... The country of Scotland paid off. I also think we forget, I think in general in life these days, we forget that we have given certain institutions kind of a status where we might not call. question how they've come to the conclusions that they've come to or why they've given us

the rules they've given us or whatever it might be. And I think for a long time, and, you know, we certainly saw it in like the dawn and, and, uh, rise of pitchfork where people didn't question the numbers or the reviews. They just assumed like, well, this is being, this is being delivered from on high. Right. These people are, they know and I don't know. Yeah. When they, when they're doing their year end list, this is like, this is, this is being, this is being, um, delivered from on high. Right. This is. is like an exercise in like purity and altruism. And in actuality, it's like, you know, like I, I know enough people who've worked there over the years enough to know that like, that's not really how that shit goes, right?

I mean, it's usually like, no, fuck that guy. I don't like him. We'll make him like, that guy's record goes, is 58th, you know, and this guy's, you know, like, it's, it's not, it's chaos. It's not real. Like, we're all only human beings. We're only human beings. We have our biases.

Exactly. You bring up an interesting thing that we should mention. across the board, and everyone has says this, teenage fan club were the nicest people on the planet. Like, every label person, every journalist, it just marvels at how nice of people they were. Like, they were, like, charming and nice and everyone liked them. Yeah, and, you know, so I'm sure that played a part in it, too, but I think, like, you know, it's, I'm sure this, this, the fact that this, that, this, that, Van Wagon-esque was named, the record of the year was probably not done by some kind of like, like, you know, 12 Angry Men's style, you know, like, you know, like we're locking this door

and we're not coming out until we have a consensus on what the number one record. It was probably just some editor being like, hey, we're putting Nirvana on the cover and I don't want to give them a record of the year because everybody's going to fucking do that. Can we just have it be teenage fancrums? Yeah, that sounds fine. That's probably how that went, right? Or like two or three people got together. We're like, you know what?

I mean, I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of good records that came out this year, but I just like this teenage Fan Club record, and like, nobody's really writing about it. So do we want to do that one? It's like, yeah, let's do that one. It's probably how it went. It probably wasn't an exercise in like, you know, we've got to figure this out and we're not

leaving this room until we've gone through every record from 1991 and come out with like a winner, you know. I really loved how the members of Teenage Fan Club have talked about this and reflected back on it, because in true teenage fan club fashion, they were kind of like, all right, you know, like, there's this, like, great, noisy article from 2016 where, like, they interview Norman and look back on all the albums.

So he says about it, we were mildly surprised until we found out the reviews editor at the time Stephen Daly had been the drummer in Orange Juice, that's how I learned it as well. Our favorite band from Glasgow. When we found out he was editor, we thought maybe he had influenced that decision. No, but here's the thing. The critics liked that record in the U.S., and I think Geffen expected it to sell massively because we had known the Nirvana guys pretty well. We toured with them on the European Nevermind tour,

which was an incredible experience. To be able to witness that phenomenon, you know, but we knew them before they were smaller. We got on with them and we played some shows together. So I remember at the time, it was our album, Nevermind, and My Bloody Valentine's Lovelace. I guess they had to pick something, didn't they?

And maybe picking something that was a little more exotic appealed to the writers. Everyone likes something exotic. And the way that the British bands are enamored by the USA, back then, the USA was enamored by the British. Maybe that would also explain Spin having it as album of the year. I think it annoys a lot of people that Nevermind didn't get it. But that's just the way it goes, doesn't it?

Why not us? I just love that. Why not us? True. Why not you? I think one of the reasons that they're such a great band and why they are so universally adored by heads and stuff like that is because Norman has a level of self-awareness that a lot of people don't have.

And it feels like knowing Norman, you know, not super duper well, but well enough to kind of get a read on his general vibe. I felt, I don't dispute the fact that they probably felt that way at the time. Oh, totally. Yeah. They were kind of like, oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, what are they? They probably said someone to do Nirvana. So we got it.

They probably weren't bragging to their friends being like, you know, album of the year, US. So we're going places. Yeah, I don't think so. It does seem like a very also, again, like we've talked about sort of temperamentally Scottish reaction. Just be like, that's cool. Sounds fine, mate. I don't know. Whatever. So this happens in January, and then in February, they play Saturday Night Live. The week after Nirvana, I have to presume that Geffen negotiated some sort of, I'll give you

Nirvana if you take Teenage Fan Club, and Saturday was like, okay. Was there not a cancellation? I thought there might have been, like, that Teenage Fan Club was a backup. Maybe. I don't have a source for that, so if anybody listening does. Yeah, bang our line. I think I remember in the documentary Alan McGee maybe saying it was a twofer and it would make sense only because it was back to back weeks

you know, but I have no idea. They did the episode where Jason Priestley hosted and apparently Mike Myers told them that he had the album and he liked it. I, when we played Saturday Night Live in 2006 and one of the things I was trying to get from somebody at

the show was a, this is in a pre- YouTube world of course. If there was any archive of that performance because I wanted to get like a tape of it. Yeah. And I guess I didn't have enough clout and never materialized.

They were like, sorry, Ben Gibbard. Yeah, they're like, let's see how your guys' performances first and then we'll decide if we want to go further with this relationship. Pretty cool that you played Saturday Live, that must say. Yeah, it was great. Scarlett Johansson was the host.

It was pretty wild, a life experience, for sure. The Teenage Fan Club, S&L performances are on Vimeo, for those of you looking now today in this modern name. They do the concept into Satan, and then they also do what you do to me into pet rock. They squeezed four songs into a two-song area. They also had no idea really what Saturday Live was, which actually does kind of make sense, right? Like the cultural currency that Saturday Live holds now, but even like back in the 90s,

is very uniquely American, right? Like, what do they know what this is? And also, in the UK, they have like 200 versions of this where like a band can go on and play on TV, right? We don't, we didn't really have that. I mean, we had like late night shows or whatever, but they have like 50 shows on different BBC channels where they're like, we have a band come. It's at two in the afternoon. Come along and play for the youth or whatever.

Okay. I'm very excited now because we're going to talk about my favorite album. 13. This is crazy to me. I don't think until I started doing this research that I knew that other people don't like 13. Ben Gibbard, this is absolute. I feel that you. have been brainwashed by the circumstantial context around 13 that has little to nothing to do with

the actual album. We'll talk about it. Okay, 13. 13 comes out October 4th, 1993. It was produced by Teenage Fan Club and Andy McPherson. Now, here's the thing about 13. It was much harder for the band to make than bandwagon-esque, right? They talk about it a bunch, like Norman says it was difficult to make. We went into the studio and we had 40 fragments of songs. Too much information, you know. We have three songwriters in the group, which makes it easier to write albums because you get the best of each person's new songs and you're showing the load. But we had too much here. We spent months making it and it took a long time to get it over the line. We were relatively happy with it, but then we'd become a bit disillusioned. It wasn't as well received as bandwagon-esque, but that's the way it goes. Now, here's the thing.

I think it wasn't as well received as bandwagon-esque because they went around and told every fucking journalist that asked that this album sucked and it was hard to make. And then what do journalists do? They turn around and write, this album sucks. Well, I'm sure you're aware of the trope of the difficult third record. Actually, I'm not. That's like sophomore slump that into difficult third record. Well, this is, let me explain, let me kind of lay it out. This is how it goes. Right. Okay. So this is how the trope goes. You have your entire life to write your first record. Right. And the second record, is songs that are left off the first record.

Sure. And then the five songs that you've written in the past six months, right? And then comes the difficult third album, because when you're making the difficult third album, you're out of material. There's no, you have no songs. You are literally starting from scratch, and now the hard work of, like,

writing an entire album in six months or a year, or whatever it might be, versus, oh yeah, these songs, the first record is all these songs that we had for our entire lives and we make the record. So it's odd that this is the third teenage fan club record, because the first record, a Catholic education feels more like Norman had some songs and they just got together and fucked around and, like, made a record. It doesn't arrive with, like, the pomp and circumstance of most first records. And then bandwagon-esque, in my opinion, I think a lot of people's opinions exist almost like the first record because it comes out and it comes out of nowhere for a lot of people. And it's the first record that a lot of people are hearing. But 13 is the third T.H. Fancliffe record. And, you know, from my perspective, I think that there are some phenomenal fucking songs on this record. But my issues with this record are threefold. One, I really dislike the production of this record. Oh, I love the production.

I find that the guitar, I think, it feels like they were going for like big American style guitars. But there's just like a like a low mid-rangey kind of teethy thing with it. And the drums, the drums feel kind of kind of flat. The mix is goofy. It's not a very well-mixed record. I would love to hear like a, I would love to hear a remix of this record of any teenage fan club record that desperately needs a remix. I would say it would be this record. And then for me, I think this record.

is too long. I think that, you know, there are 13 songs on this record, hence the name 13, I have to assume. But this is a 48-minute record, and that's not crazy long, but hindsight 20-20, blah, blah, blah, I'm king, I get to go back in time. I got a time machine, I go back, and I want to make this record better. I would cut like three songs off this record and have this be a shorter record. And I think, for me, at least, I think it would have been a more satisfying listen, if a different production and or better mix and shortening this record by at least 10 minutes. Okay. Ben Gibbard has weighed in on 13.

Okay, I hear you. I hear what you're saying. I'm welcoming your thoughts and feelings. I like this kind of production historically, but just because I like things that sound kind of fucked up. And especially with teenage fan clubs, we've talked about this, like, And this is perhaps another thing to bring up with my therapist. But when it's too beautiful and the sentiment is so vulnerable and open, I got a look. But then here we have like the beautiful song structures, the vulnerable sentiment,

and then we've just fucked it up a bit. You know what I mean? Just put the airplane with the medicine. It is a little long. I think I'm looking at as more like it has my most favorite teenage fan club songs on here, but also just has like a string of favorite teenage fan clubs on here. Yes. Yeah.

There are great songs on here. To me, it has more of my favorite songs than Van Wagonessk. There's more songs I like, like, love, love, love on here. I mean, just tears are cool, babe. Yeah, that was one of the songs I put on the playlist. It's such. That's the number one. You know, it's great.

And it's just like, it's such. You know, I think, I think in the, in ranking, ranking the three songwriters in Teenage Fan Club is like ranking the three songwriters in the Beatles. Like, if you're coming in third, you're still a fucking great songwriter, right? Better than most people in the world. Right, exactly. So take that with a grain of salt with what I'm about to say. I think that Raymond is the third best songwriter in this band. But he has these moments that are just absolutely fucking transcendent and tears are cool is one of them where it's just like that that chorus of like when I when I see you cry I think

tears are cool like what a what a beautiful little peek into my psyche I think that's the most romantic lyrics I've ever heard in my entire life every time also just the weird the snaking of the lyrics how they don't they like some of them come back around but in no sort of like pattern actually is really fucking cool to me like It catches you a bit off guard, right? Because it's not just like, we've talked about with other Teenage Bank Club songs. It's not like the chorus comes back and it has the same words. And then this comes like, it's just like there's like, whatever, 20 lyrics.

And some of them are used five times. And some are used like, don't take my word for it. Let's play it. This is, tears are cool. That was tears are cool. I don't say my prayers, but I pray for you. Goodbye. Goodbye.

fuck me all the way up in it. That's what I wrote in my notes. Just Raymond, bitch, you absolutely slayed. You ate this fucking song forever. I listened to it so many times in preparation for this episode that I was like, I'm going to need to be committed. It's such a great song. And it's, you know, I find that, you know, certain records there are more of one songwriter

than the other, but I feel that Raymond's songs tend to be kind of tucked into the records. They very rarely open up a record with the experience. exception of Grand Prix, which we'll get to. But it's like, you know, there's often, you're not getting a Raymond song to like five or six songs in. They're usually like in the middle of the record, as is this one. This is like, this is late in the record. It's like song nine of 13, right? Back half, yeah. I think one of the things that makes their record so compelling is that having three songwriters, two of which who are kind of dominating the space, allows for Raymond to kind of slip in there with a song like this. It's like right when you're, right, when

you're starting to think about what you're going to listen to next or whatever, this song comes on. You're just like, holy shit, this is like one of the best love songs I've ever heard. It's just, and also I just, again, to make a case for the production, if that song, let's say it's like just produced straight up like a big star song, like just a beautiful 70s. Like, I wouldn't like it. You know? Like, I would probably recognize that it's good and it would be sweet. but the way it's presented, it's just such a perfect balance for me of like this naked sentiment, but it's difficult, right?

Like, naked sentiment is difficult. It's difficult to experience. It's difficult to feel it. And to have that reflected in the production for me makes a lot of sense. That's certainly a good case for the production. I think for me, I can never divorce this record from being 16 or whatever. and going to the record store to buy this the day it came out. Like I was waiting for this record.

And the anticipation, you know, having bandwagon has to be this kind of watershed moment in my life as a musician and a music fan. I've grown to like this record a lot more than I did when I first heard it. But I think at the time, it was a classic situation of something not being what you wanted. And because it's not what you want, you kind of speak derisively of it. And rather than listen to a record for what it is and learn to appreciate it for what it is and not what you wanted it to be. Yeah. So that was kind of, that was a difficult thing for me to get over. You and the music journalists.

I suppose so. But I think as we spoke about bandwagon, and that's what I loved about the production of that record is how it just felt really kind of gritty and grimy and kind of little sloppy in places. Yeah. And, you know, this, this record is an absolute bridge between that sound. and what would come next with Grand Prix. And in the discography, for me, it's become more of a bridge record than a highlight record. Like, there are songs in here that I love, that I always put on mixes and still listen to to this day. But it's, I kind of go on, I go to either side of this record for the full record experience myself.

But you love this record, and that's great. I put it on more than any of the other ones. I just, but I guess maybe also because I find, I do find what you're saying so interesting and this happens so much. with bands where it's like maybe one of the worst things that can happen to you and you might have experienced this is like if you make a truly great album and no matter what you make next, it's going to be unfairly interpreted and judged because there's the context is is now in the shadow of the other album. If it was heard on its own, if 13 came before bandwagonesque, I think that people would have experienced it completely differently, right?

Yeah, and this thing that you're speaking of that we're also kind of applying to bandwagonesque, this is one of the best, quote unquote, problems you can have as a band. Because what, you know, the translation of that is you made something that resonated with people so deeply and that they've integrated into their lives to such an extent that they want that same hit again. But the reality is you can't make that record again as much as the listeners can be the age they were when it was made. You can't recreate the circumstances. Exactly. And, you know, I think there might have been a time in my career where I might have kind of jumped up and down, like figuratively speaking and like complained about why people don't get it, man, this new record's awesome or whatever.

And maybe in some cases it was, maybe in other cases it wasn't. but over the course of my career and certainly at this point in my life, I just feel lucky that I've made anything that has resonated with fucking anybody. And I'm sure that teenage fan club feels the same way. So, you know, when people want you to play the old songs or like play the hits or, why don't you make a record like dot, dot, dot, dot, right. You know, although that comes off a little aggressive, it's coming from a place of love.

It's coming from a place of like, I care. much about this. And I think in some ways also, it's also kind of translating to, I wish I could get back to that place in my life. I wish I could be that open-hearted. I wish I could be that age again. I wish I could hear this again for the first time. It's both kind of a beautiful sentiment and also a little bit tragic as it pertains to the passage of time and everything else. And just aging. Yeah. Luckily for me, who is permanently 14 years. years old. I don't have to experience that because I'm still there all the time. But I'm sorry about you guys. I guess the last thing I'll say about the sound of this album before I give some fun facts is like,

I guess what resonates for me in this album that starts to slowly wither away out of teenage fan club music is tension. There's actually quite a bit of tension in this record. And I just as a listener, again, Ventilio probably, really respond well to attention. And you have to imagine that like, I mean, they said it was difficult to make

as much as their Scottish, who cares vibes or whatever, like, it must have been a massive amount of pressure from, you know, being this, getting this album of the year in America, you're on a major label. They had some

trouble with the major label, like, they fought over the cover art of this album. Apparently, Gaffin had hired, like, you know, some firm to make the cover art. And it was, like, a girl in a white t-shirt running and crying with mascara down her face. And the t-shirt said 13.

And they were like, that's not really, that's not really who we are. We don't really want that. And they were basically like, well, if you don't use this image, we won't promote your record. And they were like, all right. And then they were like,

What if we put this ball? What about a ball? And that's what they did. They did a nice. It was a Jeff Coons thing, I think. I also think people hated Norman 3. And that was a single. I think that really torpedoed the view of this album.

I love Norman 3. I think it's very fucking bold and, I don't know, just like fucked up and weird to say I love you 48 times. song. It just, it's, it's fucking weird. It's cool. That's, that's not one of my favorite songs I'm like that I have to say. I wrote, sorry, I love this song, which apparently I know that other people don't like it. But I love the cabbage. Yeah, the cabbage is amazing. There's so many great, like, acidic lines in that song, just of like, kind of like a, what's the one where it's like, you know, are we together, I guess we're not? Do you still want me? That's what I thought. Yeah,

asked you for nothing. That's what I got. I asked you for nothing. That's what I got. I asked you for nothing. That's what I got. It's like fucking brilliant. Like really like bitter, man. Like bitter and and filtered through this like kind of just wall of guitars. And I mean, I love that song. Hang on is one of my favorite teenage fan club songs. You know, radio feels a little bit like a like a star sign kind of like I wouldn't say retread, but it's like let's see if we can capture the magic of star sign. And I think maybe if star sign it never existed, I'd feel differently about radio. I don't, I, I, it's, it's not, it's not a song that I dislike it anyway, but I know from

personal experience trying to kind of recreate even the feel of a song that you've put out that has resonated or been popular in some way, that in attempting to do so, I'm not saying that Teenage Fan Club was trying to do this, but it undermines the, the magic of a, of a particular creative moment. Right. That you can, you really, it's virtually impossible to, to recapture. They're both Jerry songs, right? So that's no, that's no coinky dink.

I like it. Song to the Cynic. I love that fucking song. Another thing about this album, I think it's like, for me, peak lyrics. Like, the lyrics on this album are just so poetic and deep. And they do this, like, magical thing where they just are really honest, like, bare bones lyrics that still, kind of they're not like

assaulting you with like they're not shocking they're just you have to like a little bit pay more attention to be like wait what did you just did you just say this and I love song for the Senate because it almost feels like a very like teenage fan club mission statement right

like no you won't leave your mark on me I'm protected by an honesty yeah just like not a sentiment that was voiced a lot at that time Yeah, and I think this is, just roll with me here. You know how in U2 songs when you're like, this is a love song and then you're like, no, it's about God? That's like every U2 song, right?

Right. But here, I feel like what teenage fan club, at least on 13, there's a lot of songs where you're like, this is a love song. No, it's about our relationship to our art and the world, right? Like, I think a song to the Cynic and 120 minutes, obviously with the fucking title. that one works on multiple levels but like the the lyrics of 120 minutes like I don't want to be alone

I don't want to be well known like there's so much sort of like woven in about about fame about I don't want to be defamed I don't want to be acclaimed like just this album to me very much feels like a reactionary album of like

what do we do now with this like weird life that we've entered you know where we're like not just three lads in Scotland playing some shows, like we're on a tour with Nirvana and national television of America and people are pressuring us to change. Yeah, and I think with that song, you just referenced, you know, with it, like, I don't want to be, you know, alone, don't want to be well known. But the chorus of that song kind of culminates and I just want to

see your face again. Yeah. To me, to me, that song, it's like a feeling that I think a lot of musicians, touring musicians, people in bands have probably had before where you're like, yeah, we're out here busting our ass and I don't really, I'm not even sure what it is I want out of this. Totally. You know, in our band, we had this moment, you know, where we had to really ask ourselves, what are we doing this for? What are our goals?

I think so much of being in a band, it starts out as like you and your friends just fucking around. But, you know, it starts, you're like, yeah, okay, let's play a show in Glasgow. Okay, cool. oh no, these guys in London, are we're going to, you know, this, Alan McGee wants to put a record, okay, cool, do that. Oh, now we're making this. Oh, shit, now we're going to the States. Oh, we're making another record. Oh, we're on a major label. They're on SNL. We're touring all over the place. Right. And your life just gets away from you very quickly. And I've lived that myself, where one moment you're just playing a show in your friend's house and then the next moment you're

in some, you know, corner of the world drunk by yourself going like, what am I doing out here? what are my goals? Why am I doing this? What purpose is this serving as I'm losing my grip on the reality of the person I was before, what my life looks like at home, and usually who I'm, who I'm with at home who cannot be out here with me? And that song, at least to me, feels very much written about that feeling of, yeah, I don't want most of this. I don't know why I'm doing this. All I want to see is your face again. Like, that's all I want to, that's all I want to do, you know. Yeah.

I totally agree. And I, you know, it just struck me because it's like this even like a broader sentiment of like sometimes the more success you get. And for some people, that's fame, right? It is the more lonely it becomes, you know? Like if there's not that self-awareness that you're talking about, if you don't stop to like interrogate your, uh, what's fulfilling about it, right? And it's, and it's just sort of like careening out of your hands and then you get far away from what it was that brought you that satisfaction and fulfillment and joy from the thing

in the first place. And that's like such a melancholy in that, and you can hear that in that song. Yeah, and I think there's also a distant, I mean, I, you know, I can't say with any certainty if the guys in Teenage Fan Club felt this way. But, you know, there's also something that seems to happen where I think, I think, think that in a lot of ways you want to literally go home again, but you also want to go back to your hometown and just kind of do the things that you used to do and without bother or without people. And, you know, I don't think that Teen H Fan Club was super famous anywhere in the world,

maybe not even Glasgow. But I'm speaking more about, you know, the Kurt Cobain's and any Vettors of the world who, you know, lost the ability to just be, like, you know, Ed took to wearing like a Yoda mask around Capitol Hill when he was running errands because he was so fucking famous that like he couldn't go anywhere or do anything. And, you know, that level of fame when you're on like Time Magazine and shit, it seems like it's just an untenable way to live your life. And I imagine in a small way, that was a feeling that I had going back out into the world in Seattle after the band got popular. You know, I've heard this kind of quip about like you spend your 20s thinking everybody's talking about you, your 30s realizing, wondering why

nobody's talking about you in your 40s realizing that nobody was ever talking about you. So I think, you know, if you put yourself in the mindset of like, you know, these guys who are in their mid, late 20s probably at this point, or where I was at a similar time, where you're just, you know, you're just very insecure about where, how you stand with in the place and with the people that, you know, you've been away from for so long because you've been out touring the world and doing whatever else. And I have to think that there are certainly some of those kind of insecurities is that play with this particular song? Yeah, 100%.

It's just, there's a lot going on here, I think psychologically and, like, sort of thematically that I find, I just find really interesting. And that's another thing that connects me to, to albums. So anyways, this album, because of a multitude of things that we mentioned, it got kind of bad reviews. Like, Robert Criscow just gave it on. happy face. The spin review is quite like spin. You turned on you, you created a, you, you, you, you lionized these people just a mere two years ago and then you turn around and basically,

okay, here's what they said. In case you were afraid teenage fan clubs bandwagonesque took twinkling stasis and toe-tapping impersonality as far as they could possibly go, you just said last year that it was the best off of you. Not to worry. The fan club's third album, 13, is another giant leap forward, neutra-sweetened post-partridge family neopop revisionism. The vocals have been raised to fresh heights of faceless monotony. Norman Blake's and Raymond McGilley's guitars have gotten still more antiseptic.

Every cunningly strummed cord is hermetically sealed for the listener's protection. Plus, you get recycled tunes that are a blast of hot house air with words to match. So many postage due greeting cards from that misty bog where the Bay City Rollers went to their eternal reward. I felt literally insane reading this. I was like, I'm sorry, did we hear the same album? Did you have a different version? Was it mislabeled? Like, what are you talking about?

Everything that this man said is incorrect to me. You know, as somebody who this record is not high on my list of teenage fanckel records, I still would say that that's completely insane. And I think that maybe the person who reviewed this record... Howard Hampton, we'll name you. Also, was so enamored with bandwagon-esque or maybe a Catholic education that they saw this record as some great affront or, you know, they took offense to it or something like that. But I also think it's important to kind of acknowledge that the guy who reviewed this record probably got paid a couple, 100 bucks. to do this.

And we don't know where he was in his life at the time that he wrote this. We don't know what was going on with him. He might have been in a shit mood when he was writing this review and didn't spend enough time with a record. It's not as if when a review comes out about any record,

that's literally just one person's opinion of the record. But in these cases, when they are published in places like Spin or Rolling Stone or whatever else, they get elevated to this level. where they are kind of frozen in time as at least one reputable publication's definitive take on

the record. And you don't have to look any further than like the Rolling Stone reviews of like the Led Zeppelin records in the 70s to realize how fucking stupid some people are when they're reviewing records. How like how absolutely wrong they are, you know, there's something else going on with this guy, this review that whatever, I don't know, it just feels very personal in a way that seems like a little over the top. So what you're saying is I shouldn't retroactively. I shouldn't gather my fellow fanny lovers and much like the swifties do come for this man and publish his home address for a review in 1993 that nobody came up. Yeah, because that's like that's that's that's like the childish shit that I find that kind of behavior to be just like unbelievably brutal and

It is literally cyberbullying. It's crazy. And it's cyberbullying like somebody's saying something that's not, more times than not, it's not even something mean about Taylor Swift. It's just something that's not saying that she's a genius, you know. That's enough to set these wackadoo fans off. The Army. They're going to come for you now, Bingaboo.

If they haven't already, I don't know. I'm not really online. So across the board, it gets pretty mid to bad reviews. But there is, there's a really funny interview with them in an ME in the wake of this album. And I just want to read it because it's actually very funny because Norman gets a little messy here, a little gassy, a little messy. And it really made me laugh. Norman said, but what does really fuck me off is when people try and finger us for writing songs. You know, that teenage fan club sound like an old rock band crap.

I mean, Jesus, we're a pop group. We write songs. That's what's being in a pop group is about, right? What the fuck do people expect? I don't know, he says, shaking his head sadly. Songs are out of fashion nowadays and it breaks my heart. No, it does. See bands like, what's that American group called?

Temple thingy? And the guy goes, Stone Temple Pilots. And he goes, uh-huh, Stone Pylopilots. Oh, boy, they're terrible. What on earth is going on there? It really is rather poor, isn't it, Raymond? Raymond shakes his head sadly. I mean that guy

He goes, I mean that guy couldn't write a song If his life depended on it And he wants to be in a pop group You shouldn't be allowed to form a group If you don't at least have an idea Of what a song is supposed to sound like And he says at the end You can tell he feels like a bit bad

For going off on these other fans He's like oh I don't know It's just not us We're the opposite of that macho, tuneless rubbish We're the opposite of muscles and crap tattoos Music, sweaty music We're not sweaty, not on purpose anyway We write honest tunes, man, songs.

He's not wrong. He's not wrong. But it's funny, right? You can tell that, like, this is just back to, A, it was hilarious, but also back to, like, they're getting a little annoyed, you know? Like, this, the grind plus the people being like, you just copy Big Star or whatever over and over and over again is like, it's probably starting to, like, weigh on their nerves, you know. Douglas Stewart from BMX Bandit said, what people don't understand about the fan club is that they're

probably doing the most difficult, subversive stuff in the country at the moment. They are. They are because they write really open, honest songs with brilliant tunes. It's bizarre because when I was growing up, noise was considered really dangerous. But of course it isn't. Saying I love you is dangerous because you leave yourself wide open to ridicule and writing simple songs is so much harder than writing avant-garde rubbish. And I think he's totally right. And that's kind of what I was saying about the, like, I'm going to say I love you 42 times in Norman 3.

It is. It's almost like more punk to like be so open and honest than it is to like hide behind tuneless garbage, if you will, in the parliance of Norman. I will say this. When large swaths of people are all doing something that they view as iconoclastic or you know, unique, it immediately becomes not unique by just by definition.

A perfect example of this is tattoos, right? There was a time when, you know, having a tattoo, like we used to call a neck tattoo in the 90s, like an everlasting job stopper. Oh, yeah. We were like, you were like, you were. Now every creative director had a fucking startup that makes coffee beans has one. Yeah. Well, when the, I mean, honestly, when when jocks have full sleeves, like I'm watching the World

Cup right now. And everybody on the pitch has full sleeve tattoos. So I would argue as somebody with no tattoos, that I've gone from being not punk for not having tattoos, arguably to being the most punk person because I don't have them. They're cool. I'm not saying they're not cool. I'm not saying I'm better for not having them. I'm just saying that like along with like, along with kind of making aggressive, loud, detached music, I would agree with Norman. it's much easier to employ a cool detachment than it is to say something earnest.

It's way more difficult to be earnest. You're exposing yourself so much more by being earnest and saying something heartfelt than you are, you know, just having lyrics that don't really mean anything but sound cool, in my opinion. I mean, I have a vested stake in this, as you might imagine. So, you know, take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. But I think it's true. I think it's way, you're way more. exposed being open-hearted and earnest than you are being cool and detached.

100%. Ben Gibbard. In 1993, Brendan O'Hare does leave the band. It's unclear why. In a very Scottish way, they don't tell us. Cloaked in mystery. I do remember watching 120 minutes when Teenage Fan Club was on promoting this record,

when Lewis Largent was hosting the show. And Teenage Fan Club was on 120. minutes, and it was just the three of them. And they mentioned that Brendan O'Hare was at the Betty Ford clinic at the time. Do you think they were joking, though? It didn't seem like they were joking, because I think the next question that Lewis Largen asked was, it's not so much a question as much as an observation that he literally just said, you know, Scottish people drink a lot, don't they? And you could see them kind of bristle a bit. And I think that, maybe he in, you know, I think maybe in that moment, Lewis was attempting to kind of lighten the mood

a bit. Right. Right. But I think it was a miscalculation, which I don't fault him all these years later for. You know, it's like this is a moment in time, like a very, and just they're filming this thing. He's filmed five segments that day. Who fucking knows, right? But you could see, you can see, I remember watching this, not live, but, you know, the next day on 120 minutes. And, and you could kind of see this kind of bristling with like Jerry and Norman and Raymond kind of like, well, yeah, but you know, he's kind of, if I'm recalling this correctly, you know, they alluded to like, yeah, I know you're kind of doing a bit, but this is like a serious thing. This isn't. Yeah. I mean, we've sort of like painted these boys as like good, good lads who don't party,

but that's not true. And I'm, I'm speculating and you can ask Normie and Ray and Jared. but creation records, Bibb, that was a fucking full-time rave over there. Like, everyone was doing drugs. It's fine. Like, whatever. Everyone was partying. And I presume they were partying to. And maybe Brendan O'Hare just parted a bit too much.

It happens. Yeah, there's always the one guy in the band, me, who's unable to kind of curtail the partying and, you know, has to take other measures. You know? I have to say, man, if you're a Scottish person not to stop drinking, That's like levels, though. Like, you really had to have, like, gone super hard in the paint. Yeah, I also, I think that my experience with drinkers, not even so much in Scotland, but in the UK, is that they go from zero to blotto in no time.

And it's very difficult to determine what the reasoning for that is, even if it might be even something genetic. I don't know. But I have, I have, I have, my theory is that bars used to close earlier. They used to close it like 10. Yeah, you got to get it. because they had to be at the factory the next morning. So, like, we can't have these dudes. These guys can just sober up before they come to work tomorrow at the, you know, at the, at the coal factory or whatever.

So let's, we close pubs at 10. But, yeah, I remember, you know, I remember tour. I mean, I've said this to these guys, so it's not like, you know, talking shit. But, like, we toured with this band, The Cribs that became really good friends of ours in, like, 2004. Great band. And, you know, we would, they would go on stage and they'd be stone sober and we'd come off stage and I'd never seen drunker people. my life. He's blackout.

And we played a maximum of 90 minutes, you know. So it was, at the time, I was impressed with just how quickly they could. And honestly, almost every British band we had ever toured with could go from coherent to just impossibly wasted within such a short period of time. And for whatever reason they can keep it together. I mean, we won't, we won't rail on on this topic. But it's just like the funniest stories. It's like when Avondando tried to go on tour with Oasis.

because he loved them and, like, nobody can hang with Oasis, but... No, you can't do that. You can't hang without. He got too fucked up. So, he's replaced by Paul Quinn, who played in the Soup Dragons, the Soupies, if you will. Then in 1993, September, an important thing for both our lives, Ben Giverr, the Judgment Night film comes out.

God damn right, it did. Accompanied by the best soundtrack of all time. Why don't they do this anymore? Well, I know why. I'm not, that's a rhetorical question. But, like, whoever was like, you know, what we're going to do for this? soundtrack, babe. We need to pair. Hard rockers. How Teenage Fan Club got rubbed into this, absolutely unclear. Perhaps the people did not do their research, because every other band is like

Helmet and Dinosaur Jr. and like, anthrax. I will tell you though, I was in high school when this came out, and when I heard that Teenage Fan Club was doing a song with De La Sol, who were like one of my favorite groups of all time. also at the time. I must have just busted in my pants. Like, I must have had to, like, go home and change my fucking pants, because this was, like, I could not handle it. I couldn't handle this piece of information.

There were a number of moments in my, when I was in high school, where people gave me information that I could not fucking handle. Like, the other one, that, you know, hey, Dave Grohl starting a band with half of Sunday Day real estate. What are you talking about? It didn't go well, but... It did not. But this went incredibly well.

And, like, this song, when I first heard it, I was like, this could not be a more perfect distillation of both of these groups. Of all the songs on this compilation, the soundtrack, it's the best one. It's the number one best one, yeah. But nothing comes close to falling. Falling is just... You know what? Let's play it. We can.

It's my show. That was Fallen by Teenage Fan Club and De La Sol. God damn gorgeous fucking beautiful song. Just do yourself a favor. Go watch the music video. It's a delightful, delightful several minutes. You'll just, teenage fan club, ruddy Scottish lads in their woolly hats. And then fucking De Laus Hole being so cool.

It is very clear in that video that having not known it existed until 24 hours ago, which is wild. And then watching it, it's very clear that De La Sewell are incredible performers. Yes. And they have this charisma on camera probably do in large part because they are rappers. Like they're not playing instruments. Like they are on stage with microphones. Like they have a lot of practice being in front of a camera, being from an audience with just a microphone and just like rapping. Right.

There's no, they're not wearing guitars. They're not another activity that they're doing also in tandem. And that teenage fan club, they don't have that juice. You know, like they, they're just in the video kind of sitting in the background, letting, you know, wisely letting De La Sol kind of, like take the reins on this thing. But, you know, there are very few moments in the video that even make it look like Teenage Fan Club is having a good time. It's really, you're being very kind, but as we've established before, Teenage Fan Club,

not a particularly charismatic band in general. I mean, Teenage Fan Club are just absolutely neutral. Like, they're just, they don't, they're just there. They're just there with their little wolly hats and they look so cute. It's a very cute video you should watch. So, Grand Prix comes out May 29, 1995. I wanted to ask you, since you said earlier, this is your favorite Teenage Fan Club album,

when you sat yourself down Ben Gibbard and said, I'm going to recreate faithfully an entire Teenage Fan Club album from start to finish, why didn't you do this one if it's your favorite? Well, because I think as we spoke about earlier, I'm always quick to delineate between what I think is the best and what is my favorite. They're not always the same thing. Okay. Yeah.

And Ban Weganesque is my favorite record by Teenage Fan Club because of the context in which I heard it and how it changed my life. Right. So it's my favorite. But I think from start to finish, I think that Grand Prix is their best record. I mean, there are brilliant songs across the entire catalog, but this record, to me, feels like the first kind of dipping one's toe into, like, a more mature sound, which often is a derisive thing to say, like, oh, you know, like the mature sound or like, oh, they're, they've really grown up on this one.

That people don't, you know, don't tend to kind of view that favorably. But it's not also as if teenage fan, but even from a. Catholic education or bandwagonesque. It's not as if they were like a punk band with a lot of angst, you know? Sure. Like this, I mean, the sound of this record, which is a lot crisper, you know, the production of this record, the guitar sound fucking incredible on it. Yeah. It just has such a width and like, the arrangements have just this width to them. And it's like such a sonically pleasing album to me in a way that bandwagonesque is sonically pleasing. because it sounds kind of dirty and fucked up.

But this is like, this is what Teenage Fan Club sounds like when they've taken the time to really dial the amps and the mics in. This is the platonic ideal of Teenage Fan Club is this album. Yes, yes. And I think, and it's paired with some of the greatest songs that they've ever written. I mean, this, this, the, I believe the only album that starts with a Raymond song. And, you know, as opposed to, you know, you think about the beginning of the concept. and it's, you know, this distortion,

and you can kind of hear the sound of the amps in the room, and then it kind of the feedback squealing, and they're barely getting the guitars to not feedback before the drums come in. And with this, the first chords come in, and it's just like the most, like, sonically pleasing, like, beetle-esque kind of just, like, wide guitars that are so, like, they have this, like,

just really pleasing high, mid-range kind of sound to them. and you're like, okay, what's happening now? And then there's just this chorus of vocals that come in with like, I always knew the way. And we're in this thing. And it's like the lyrics are just words, kind of. They're not, there's nothing really pointed in the lyrics for this first tune. But it just sets a mood for the rest of the record.

It's like, we're having fun on this one. You know, we're going to have some fun. And maybe because of my feelings that we spoke about 13 in the sound of that record, It almost feels as if they too Listen back to 13 We're like, I think we can make it sound better than that Let's really focus on it on this next record They did change producers

So I presume you're right That they wanted something different They went with this guy David Bianca Who at the time Had mostly just mixed and engineered stuff But he had worked with primal scream And one Thomas Petty Amongst others

Let's hear about you How do you feel about that? I feel great I mean, we just got a little private death cap concert, which was very nice. Then I quite enjoyed it, but we'll also play the real version. That was about you. It's very interesting because you said when you were talking about it, that it has this Beatles-esque guitars, right?

I thought it was funny because Norman says about this song, for me, that's one of our songs that should have been a single, but it wasn't. There's a perception of us as Power Pop. To me, that one shows a Stone's influence, exile on Main Street. I would say, actually, you're right. And perhaps it is hard to describe your own music, but what is one fucking truth? The Rolling Stones fuck. You know what I mean?

That music, that music is questionable. Great music. Does it fuck? Unclear. Teenage fan club, this music does not fuck, babe. It's great. And this song, it doesn't not fuck. So I don't know if it's a Rolling Stones ask song, but it's so good.

And I do agree it should have been a single. Well, I think the fact that the inspiration is. for the song was, you know, like an exile era stone song, and that the song sounds like this. Like, is a perfect example of the confluence of influence and the inherent kind of sound of a band that has become a signature sound for them. Right. Where Teenage Fan Club could try all day to sound like the Rolling Stones, and they would still sound like Teenage Fan Club.

There's nothing about the song that until you said that, I never have said the word Rolling Stones and Teen H. Fankold in the same sentence. But that's, that is incredible, right? And like, maybe it's not a skill per se. Like, it might even be a limitation that produces something amazing, right? Because unfortunately, there are some people who, like, you said it much earlier in the podcast, like, said about to mimic something and just do it. And they can do it actually really well. But then all it is is is a mimicry, you know? When you have such a strong. strong musical voice like Teenage Fan Club, you couldn't even mimic it probably if you tried, you know, because it's always going to come out the other end sounding like it went through the prism of Teenage Van Club. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's cool.

It's funny what you were saying about the sound of this record and them getting the production. Mojo said Grand Prix really sounds like a teenage fan club record rather than a big star or a bad finger or a junior Nirvana or whatever else has been leveled at their records in the past. They found the perfect blend of the knowing and the heartfelt. It's an album less hung up with the notion that volume equals power too. The guitars are lighter, the mood sunnier.

I kind of read this to me and what I hear too is that like, we talked about this on the sunny day real estate episode where it's like sometimes some albums, and I'd love to hear your experience of it, especially earlier albums, are a result of chance, right? Like you just got that studio and you got that producer. or you only had two weeks or this is the amp you had or whatever. And Sunday Real estate is a great example, right? Because a lot of people, I love the production of Diary.

I fucking love it. I think that album wouldn't be the same without that kind of fucked up messy, shitty production. But you hear then as you go along, that's not how they wanted to make it. You know, like you get to like the third album and you're like, oh, they wanted to make the stuff that sound like this, you know?

And this is kind of that version, I think, for Teenage Fan Club. Do you have a version of that for Death Cab? Or I guess there's only one post or something. Yeah. You got it the way you wanted it. You know, I mean, for us it's a little more complicated than that because Chris Walla, when he was in the band, was producing the records. But we were also, you know, we made the first two records and EPs and stuff like that.

We never in like an actual studio. It was always like in a house or a basement or something like that. And, you know, the sounds of those early records were kind of incidental. And I think one of the things that attracts people to those early records is the modesty of how they sound. I don't know if I have a really crisp answer for this. Obviously, I don't. But I do feel like, at least with our band, it was like really wasn't until transatlanticism where we found ourselves in a place where we were developing a sound that was less built-discipline.

fan fiction and like low and you know bedhead fan fiction and started to become something that became signature to what who we were right and that took four albums for us right that is interesting yeah i mean i think it it presents differently obviously with every artist and band maybe some people like sound exactly the way they want to from album one it's just circumstantial but all that to say this is this is where teenage fan club was like this all it's It's also, they talked about, as you said, the production was probably reactionary to 13. I think it wasn't just the production, right? They say that how they said it was difficult to make 13 because they didn't come really prepared.

You know, they had a bunch of fragments of songs, et cetera, et cetera. They were coming right off of a tour. They stayed home, they said, which they never did again because they didn't like it. It became too meandering. They went home every night, came back, whatever. So they came to this album with all the songs pre-written, like fully just ready to go. which I think you can kind of, you can tell, right? Like, it's a very cohesive album.

It's a really confident record. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, again, back to the difficult third record. I mean, back to 13. Like, yeah, of course they didn't have a bunch of complete songs and everything. Of course, they had a bunch of ideas because they'd been touring their asses off for the last year and a half and they had, they were on their third record. And this feels like, for me, kind of marks the rebirth of Teenage Fan Club. This is, like, Teenage Fan Club 2.0.

Right. And when we kind of juxtapose the production on this record with 13, you know, something like Sparky's Dream is such a huge sounding song. Like the guitars sound massive. But they're not as distorted and like, I think with 13, the guitars, you can tell they're going for big guitar sound. But the way in which they're trying to accomplish that are through relatively like tried and true methods, which is like more distortion. turn the amp up. And there's something a little disingenuous in the sound of that record, to me, with looking at the first couple of records and everything that would come afterwards.

But with this record, it feels as if they have probably with a new producer and probably with just a better understanding of how they want the guitars to sound, maybe the engineer who worked on the record. They're accomplishing this massive sound, but it's not being achieved by turning the volume up or, like, adding more distortion. It's just the crispness and the tones and how these tones are all layered that produce this really wide, big guitar sound that they would utilize for the next couple records. I would think that I wouldn't like this record if I had just heard all these descriptions. You know, like, okay, it's more cleanly produced and it's more beautiful and, you know, all the, but I love it.

I love Grand Prix. and I feel it's time for me to posit one of my theories. One, it's because this record still does have a bunch of tension, and that is the result of one Norman Blake during the making of this album, meeting his soon-to-be wife while he was already in a relish with someone else. So the just absolute, gorgeous, you know, despair of that wrenching morality and desire and it's all, you know, it's in this album. You can hear it, right? And there's some songs about it. My theory being that accumulated from different things that I read in interviews,

because there's three songwriters and because they're doing it in the studio altogether, it seems like when one of them is sort of like bringing a theme or a thing to the table, it's just picked up by the rest of them. It's impossible not to, right? Like, you're writing an album together, even if you're writing your own songs. And so this experience of Normans colors the whole album, even though he didn't write all the songs. Yeah, I think that's a good observation.

I also think, too, that the lyrical palette for this band has never been super wide. And I say that with no value judgment attached to it. It's like, you know, they're not writing political songs. They're not, like, commenting on, like, the world. They're not, it's like, you know, these songs, their songs are, you know, a lot of these songs are, they fall into a series of categories. They're, they're love songs, their breakup songs. They're songs about, like, the, you know, the existential kind of angst of existing on this planet. Right.

And that's kind of about it. They're a pop group, babe. They're a pop group and they write pop songs. I mean, look, I made a career out of it myself. Like, you don't need much more than that. But I think that might be true, but I think it's always. also possible that given the lyrical palette of this band, you know, unless like Norman had gone off and joined Earth first or something like that in the time in which this record was being made and wanted

to write a bunch of songs about like The Spotted Owl, I think that anything that they were going to be writing about about what they were going on in their lives based on what a cursory knowledge of their lives as just like nice Scottish boys, that this was going to be the lyrical palette they were going to pull from, and they would be pulled into kind of similar zones from record to record based on what they were all going through. You don't feel that when you've been in more despair, you've written more despairing songs. You were extremely happy when you wrote transatlanticism. I was not, well, I wasn't, I wasn't sad. Oh.

I wasn't, I mean, that, I think that there, you know, I think it, I think as a songwriter, no matter. what you're going through in your life or how happy you might be, how content you might be, or how depressed you might be. When you get in a room by yourself with an instrument and you're trying to write a piece of music, most people's tendencies are going to go, at least my tendencies are to go to those like areas of your brain or your heart where you're just kind of unsure about something or you want to kind of just utilize a particular moment and make it something bigger than it is for the sake of the dramatic effect of writing a song. And it's not to say that art.

Like, I mean, all songs are kind of a version of lying, right? I mean, he's not exactly someone who people are going out of their way to reference these days. But, you know, there's a scene at the end of Annie Hall where he's written the play about his relationship with Annie Hall. And he kind of creates this new ending where he's leaving her and not the other way around. And he looks at the camera and he says, like, well, what do you want? You know, what do you want from me? Like, you know, we do things in art because we can't do them in life, you know. What do you want?

It was my first play. You know, you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it's real difficult in life. It's a good line. And I think that that line, that kind of sentiment has really, you know, colored a lot of my work. And I'm sure a lot of songwriters work in the sense that you're kind of trying to pull from your life and see the songs in your mind's eyes as if, you know, you're watching a movie. but at the same time you have the authority to kind of change details, you know,

change the places, change the names, kind of create a new story. Sometimes it's not exactly the way the shit went in the first place. It's just how you want to present it. Okay, gorgeous. I'm so glad I'm going to walk away from this podcast. Just absolutely disillusioned and now I don't even know

up from down and I don't know any of these death cab albums. They're all lies. And that's, I was I'm prepared for this to experience, but you know what? Well, off, off air, we can go through each song, and I can tell you how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, how much, if that song is a very, that is like a very true song. Thank God. So that one's a real one.

That's a real one. Let me keep it. Well, mellow doubt, Ben Gibbard, I would think is also a very real song. and I don't want to know if it's not Norman. Keep it to yourself, babe, okay? It's so, so beautiful this song. I mean, he did say I wrote this song for my wife before she was my wife, before she was my girlfriend,

because she was the housekeeper at the studio where they were making the thing. I mean, this fucking song, it's the drumbeat. I don't know, there's just something about this song. It's so sad, but it's also, like, like has like some hope baked into it. Yeah, I love how dry the song is. Yeah. You know, I mean, and having the song come third after, you know,

two absolute bangers with just massive, massive guitar sounds and like, and walls of vocals, you just have what sounds like just Norman's vocal and what sounds like Jerry singing a harmony. one guitar is on panned hard right the other thing kind of comes in hard left it's like a very the economy of the song has always been really interesting to me and it just allows this very kind of melancholic sentiment to really have like a perfect kind of you know it's a perfect environment for this sentiment where it's like i'm telling you something rather intimate and we're doing that without any anything getting between my voice and your ears there's no

reverb, there's no delay, there's no, nothing's washed out and spacey. It's just like very, very immediate song. Yeah, I love it, I love it. Speaking of lyrical palette and straying from that, there's one really interesting song on here that does completely stray from, I think, their thematic concerns, which is tears. And that song, that song is about Alan McGee, and it's about Alan McGee's sort of, I mean, he basically had a breakdown from getting too fucked off for too many years. Like he fully just like collapsed and was hospitalized one day and then just like disappeared for a while. And like, you know, they say like he was ill, but I think he was just like, you know, Betty Ford clinicing. Too much cocaine and alcohol.

Too much speed. Too much. All of it. Yeah. It's fucking Vicodin and everything. He says it. He's not. But this song is sort of written like to him. Like it's like addressing him, which I think is kind of interesting because they don't usually do that kind of song. But, you know, it also goes to show what an important figure he was, you know, like in, not, you know, a bit in their story, because he was, like, kind of a Malcolm McLaren, like, figure for all the bands that were on creation. But just, like, in general, like, what an outsized figure he was. And it ties into this question, I want to ask you, because what happens later in 1995 is that what's the story? Morning Glory comes out. So obviously, creationist signed Oasis, put out their first album, which,

was good, but didn't, you know, blow up or anything. And we all know what happens with fucking What's the Story of Morning Glory. And then it's Brit Pop, right? Like, almost right away, like, you know, even prior a bit to What's the Story of Morning Glory? And Grand Prix gets a bit swept up in that, right? Like, do you think that Grand Prix is Brit Pop? No, it's not at all.

No, it's not. I mean, in the sense that, I mean, you think of the bands that were... Scott Pop. if you will. The big rip-pop bands and all the also-rans and you get down to like men's wear and shit like that. It's like, you know, it's like one of the commonalities with all these bands is like an attitude and a fashion sense. And the presentation of the rock band is like a larger than life. A bunch of neophytes who just are out there partying and doing blow and like and broadcasting all of that.

And getting into fights and the NMAs writing about it. you know, the gossip columns are going insane with like who's dating who. Yeah. And like, and everybody looks incredible and everybody's like gacked out of their fucking minds. It was music and a lifestyle and a fashion sense and all these things rolled up into one. And teenage fan club is just not a part of that. Like geographically, they're not a part of it. Aesthetically, they're not a part of it. Like, I don't know about their, you know, drug and alcohol intake at this point in their career. But, you know, I don't seem to recall ever reading like anything about Teenage

fan club in like a scene gossip report like a London based you know Norman Blake was seen at the Columbia Hotel with the exactly no it's just you know it's like these guys were just too busy like collecting records and buying guitars

you know it is funny because they were literally actually part of the scene in the sense that they were actually there hanging out at the very least at the creation offices with primal scream with Oasis like they were literally We're all friends, right? But yeah, this album is musically and aesthetically, they're not Brit Pop at all.

They were just because they were on creation and because Oasis was on creation, and this album came out in the same year, people were like, oh, Brit Pop. Yeah, and I think that, I mean, I wouldn't know this would have to be something that we'd have to, like, find out from somebody who was there. But we've been friends with other bands over the years that you knew at a certain point at the evening, it was time to go. and then they were going to go off and do, and all this other crazy shit was going to happen to them.

I mean, there was a period in the aughts where we were rolled kind of deep with the Trail of Dead dudes, and we'd see them at festivals and shows. They'd come out to our shows in Austin. We'd go see them in Seattle. I always knew there was a moment in the evening where I was going to have to back out of whatever was happening next, because it was very clear that they, like, went way harder than we did, right? And, you know, great dudes, great bands, but you just knew, okay, now is this time. It's my bedtime.

time. Like, it's my time. And I have the feeling that Teenage Fan Club might have had a similar relationship to a lot of the bands on creation. We're like, they were there for a while, but then like, okay, they were probably getting up at 9 a.m. rather than going to bed at 9 a.m. No, yeah, Oasis is going to be up until Tuesday. Like, that's it. You're not, yeah. No, I hear you and I agree. It is kind of interesting a little bit later on, I think it's the next album, that they happen to record it in the same studio as Oasis. And, Liam Gallagher loved them. He called them the second best band after Oasis.

He's a big fan. This is your favorite album. So do you want to play one more song off of it? I would love to. We should play a little bit of Sparky. It's about Sparky's Dream because it's one of Jerry's best singles. And it just sounds so good. It's such a jam.

Okay. Amazing. That was Sparky's Dream. Gorgeous song. There's also just performing going places to be. Low-key and incredible. incredible country song, in my opinion. It's a great record.

Top to bottom. It's giving country. Top to bottom. Okay. This is the album that, from what I could tell, the UK really loved, right? All of a sudden, we're back. 13 never happened. Let's never speak of it again.

But this album is great. America, no. Oh, interesting. Here we go. Entertainment Weekly by Chuck Eddy, who I did text, and he did tell me some of that into Teenage Fame Club. And it's true because he says, these Scottish Laddies, Prissy Harmonies on Grand Prix have moments of sweetness and their guitars chime out now and then. But like most

practitioners of pure pop, teenage fan club leaves out any sounds that might conceivably get anyone excited. C-plus. Yeah, that, uh, I don't, I, I disagree, my dude. In fairness, it's 1995. So what's happening in music is very much like, you know, PJ Harvey to bring you my love has come out. to bring you... Smashing pumpkins melancholy and the infinite sadness.

Sonic Youth's washing machine came out that same year. We're still pretty in like heavy alt-rock territory in America and in the UK we're entering a whole different phase which is Britpop.

So it kind of does make sense that America was a bit like no thanks on this whereas the UK was like, yes, we love this. When I first met Chris Walla in 1995, I was aware, wearing a teenage fan club shirt.

And the fact that he commented on that was one of the ways we ended up playing music together. But this wasn't like a band where like a lot of people that I knew were super into them. I didn't know anybody else who was like a big teenage fan club fan at this time. I was like the only one I knew who cared about this band. And they were kind of like a man without a country. I mean, having lived through this period

and knowing what was popular at this point, you know, this record didn't stand a chance in the States. They didn't understand a chance. I didn't even listen to it. I loved Teenage Fan Club with those two albums, Banwagon Esk and 13, like in more or less real time, again, because I was an absolute loser with no friends who just used my allowance money to buy albums and because I was so obsessed with Nirvana and they were attached to Nirvana.

But by 95, I wasn't even checking for, like, a new teenage fan club album. Like, I didn't hear Grand Prix until much later, like, maybe college. Yeah, I mean, it definitely seems as if, the States, the dream of alternative rock had started to kind of wither or turn into like a nightmare at this point. I think what's interesting about this time, this mid-90s period, it's my belief that the late 90s were the worst time for rock music in the public consciousness. You mean when something about airplanes came out. Exactly. When the day that record came out, the worst thing than it could have happened.

in music. Do you mean because of like new metal and like that sort of shift? Yes, because I, in my theory on all of this is that, you know, in the early 90s, you know, you have Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Sound Garden, you know, smashing pumpkins, raging against the machine, all these bands are putting their first record out in those first three or four years of the decade. Right. And then I think there were a lot of people whose musical kind of knowledge was only as

deep as those records. Yeah. Right? You know, not going to name any names. We know who we're talking about. Nickelback. You know, somebody heard raging against a machine.

Bush. And was like, that's all I need to know. Somebody hears, never mind. It's like, okay, great, I've got my marching orders here. Let's move forward. And it seems like a lot of the bands that got very popular in the 90s that they're, at least listening to the music

that they were making, it was very clear that they were either, A, intentionally trying to capitalize on a trend of things that had happened earlier, and or their musical knowledge really only extended to, like, 1991. That was at the earliest, right? This is a total, like, sorry, jump off from this, but I'm actually deeply curious now, because I'm like, you know how Velvet Underground? Like, the whole thing about Velvet Underground is, like, whatever, 22 people heard Velvet

Underground, they all started fucking bands that are amazing. Now, why did that happen with Nirvana? but the results were bad. Like, I am, but I'm genuinely curious, right? Is there something about, like, what Nirvana rock that just, was it an ending point? We have to kind of recognize that the Velvet Underground was so not popular when those records came out, and there were so few of them pressed. If you had heard those records when they were out or immediately afterwards, then you were the kind of person who had to go pretty

far underground and we're pretty left of center and pretty, you're weird. You're fucking weird if you like these records in like the Lake Sexy's. Not just weird, right? But passion, like deeply passionate to find the thing and to research and know more. I think because Nirvana was so popular, they were, they were. Yeah, the job. And like, and like, and, you know, I think what's, I think when less sophisticated people hear. raging against the machine. Let's just take it away from Nirvana. And the reason for that music existing just goes right over their head. They're not picking up on anything other than the aggression in that record. And with Nirvana, same thing. They're not picking up on the nuance at

all. They're just hearing the volume and they're hearing the screaming and like the visceral pain in those records. Clearly, the music that was influenced by that, that was shitty, was by people who who didn't have even a tenth of the introspection that Kurt had, and certainly, you know, less than a tenth of the talent. So you end up with this music that's, like, aggressive. It might be catchy in its own way, but that lacks any of the substantive elements that made Nirvana more than just like a butt rock band. Right, totally.

Okay. So they do well in the UK. They don't do so well in America. Two more years go by. they put out another album. 1997, modest mouse, lonesome crowded West has come out. Yolotango has put,

I can hear the heart eating as one of. Built to spill. Perfect from now on has come out. Indy rock has arrived, okay? This is what I'm saying. Grandaddy. Don't forget granddaddy. Death cab for kitty.

You can play these songs with chords. Highly influential tape. EP? No, no, no, no, no. Not nothing, not that, yeah. Elliot Smith, either or. So, songs from Northern Britain, July 29, 1997, it is kind of crazy this run of records, because songs from Northern Britain is so good. It's ridiculously good. It's ridiculous. I'm actually, I have the Wikipedia on it open, just to kind of make sure for the track listing. And I see that Pitford gave it a 4.9 in 1997. And then,

they gave it an 8.3, four years ago. So it's like, good job, guys. Way to go. That's our favorite game here on Pitchfork Revisionist History, where they think we don't have Wayback Machine, but we do have Wayback Machine. It's a dangerous thing for a woman. I'm a victim of the Wayback Machine myself here. You can never get rid of the past. You can never quarantine the past, as one Stephen Malchmus said about the Wayback Machine specifically. But again, you kind of get it, right? It's 97, and this is a pretty and beautiful album in the same. I think it's like part and parcel with Grand Prix. What do you think?

Yeah, these are definitely, this is like the rubber soul and revolver of Teenage Fan Clubs catalog. These records are sonically very similar. You could easily almost take one of these songs off of songs from Northern Birth and just like, just slide it in.

If you didn't know either record, you could create two different records from these and then play them for your friends. Be like, well, I love this record. Yeah. And I don't mean that as an indictment on the band of, not growing as much as like Grand Prix, that feels like the, why it's, I think it's the best record,

is it feels like everything is coalescing for this band in a way that they are finally landing in a sound that is entirely theirs, and they sound confident, and the production is phenomenal, and the songs just sound incredible. I mean, like, start, I mean, there are so many great first songs on Teenage Fan Club Records, but again, start again is such a fucking great opener. It just jumps out of the speakers. And it's just this wall of vocals and guitars. And it just feels like, it feels as if this is like another home run of a record that is for a band that's completely coming into their own and really kind of establishing a sense of their own identity. Yeah.

I mean, I totally agree. The only difference that I sort of experienced and when I was like sitting back with both of them is that like I do think Grand Prix is more like immediately accessible. and songs from Northern Britain is maybe a little more sprawling in some ways. Yes. Yeah. I think if there's a knock on songs from Northern Britain is that it is pretty front-loaded. It is like when you look at the songs on this record, the first side of this record is like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And the backside of the record, like, it meanders a bit. There's still some great songs on side two. But it is just like home run of a side one. What song do you want to hear off? I mean, there's so many good ones. I love so many of them.

Which one would you want to hear? I think we should hear, I don't want control of you. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. That was, I don't want control of you, a Norman song. Ben Gibbard, why didn't you choose this song? I think it's such a sweet sentiment. There are lyrics in this song that I don't think I would be assure of myself enough to sing. Like, you know, in the bridge, this, like, tired situations that mean nothing to me.

You've been an inspirational figure to me, you know? Yeah. It is so entirely hard on sleeve and it's so earnest that it would almost be as if you would have to be dead inside to not hear this song. Have you no heart. And just the harmonies are so beautiful. What I find so interesting about a lot of songs in this record is like the way the harmonies are so strong that they almost double as like a second lead vocal. and they're mixed really loud. So, like, you know, the melody of I Don't Want Control of You is, or I should say the harmony that is sung with the lead vocal is a strong enough melody that could almost be the melody for the song.

It's a weird distinction that I'm not sure might not translate for a lot of people. But whenever I'm listening to this record and driving around and singing to myself, I'll oscillate between singing the main melody and the main melody and the harmony as if it's the melody and sometimes get confused as to which one is the melody because they both, they're mixed so evenly and they're, and they're so strong, you know. To no one's surprise maybe that's my favorite song on here. I just, I think I'm a Raymond McGinley stand. Once again, I'm a contrarian. He is, he writes all my favorite songs, it seems. Raymond is usually not as represented on the records. At least, you know, as we've established with the exception of Grand Prix,

there's not a record that at least in these first handful of records that starts out with a Raymond song, they tend to be kind of buried a bit. And yeah, like, your love is the place where I come from is track 11 of 12. Like, this thing is like buried in the record. The disrespect to my man, Ray. Yeah, and it's just such, it's such a romantic sentiment. But like a kind of a fucked up one, again, probably why I like it. But like so interesting.

Like when I'm on my own, I'm lost in space, my freedom's a delusion. What a fucking brilliant and interesting set of lyrics. I think about it all the time. Like it really got stuck in my mind. Raymond McKinley, man, your mind. Your mind. Well, this album was just like Grand Prix, absolutely below. love it. Like this got them right back to the top in the UK. The UK was like,

fuck yes, we love this. Gorgeous, perfect, wonderful album. I'm not quoting anyone, simply paraphrasing. But, you know, NME loved it. America did not love it. Or at the very least, I don't think this was on MTV. There was, I don't think it was on the radio. None of that was happening with this. And also Entertainment Weekly gave it a C-minus, as we said, pitchfork in 1997 of 4.9. I'm just going to read a bit of this, because, because A, it actually is kind of funny how mean pitchfork used to be, like just unbridled cruelty. But also just like, it's not something that this kind of music was just not welcome in the Indy Rocklandscape of America. They said, if British people had dentists, L.O.L. This is probably the music they'd hear as they sat in wood-paneled waiting rooms reading highlights.

Apparently Northern Britain is the UK's regional equivalent of Iowa. Otherwise known as places where tractors can be seen commuting to one-story malls where the entire discographies of all the great 70s hippie bands can be found with laughable ease at the local coconuts, where every year there is at least one major state gathering with a two-word name like Corn Fest or soybean fest or Tobacco Fest. Hell, I imagine myself walking across the muddy field of a state fair looking for an airbrush booth as I reviewed this album. Wasn't teenage fan club at one point a fuzz-happy Brit grunge band? Oh well, chalk it up to the mediocre old guys gone country rock syndrome. Hey, don't get me wrong.

I've been to state fairs. I've been on a hayride. This album has its moments of jangly sun-drenched harvest pop pleasure, but I think I'll stick to my city life. Imagine being so wrong. I think it's worth mentioning. I have a good friend who was a writer at Pitchfork in these early days, right? And I think it's important to get the visual that this was like literally five like 16 to 18 year old nerds.

Unkem to dorks. Yeah. This is like this is like a handful of in cells who are obsessed with like pavement. Right. Yeah. And like probably like the Jesus lizard. 100%. So it's like, you know, you know, pitchfork has kind of, it grew into and then kind of slowly out of.

of this like very large sphere of influence. Sure. Firmative. But I think it's, I think, I think, in relation to this particular review, you have to kind of, I don't know this dude who wrote the review, but I have to assume that if what I've been told about the early years of pitchfork for my friend Matt, that this was like just a bunch of nerds who like liked, liked American indie rock a certain way in anything that was like adjacent from that or off kilter from that was seen as like, that sucks. Totally. The way that kids are like, I like this and that sucks. And that sucks. Even more from what you're saying. It's like, pitchfork in 1997 was a fucking blog. Like, nobody imagined that, you know, in 2022, we'd be sitting here reading it aloud in the context of like, canon of music journalism. It was just some dudes blogging saying whatever the fuck they were thinking. I had a blog too. Thank fucking God. It's not accessible to anyone. You know, like, because you just say shit.

you're like, like you said, 18 years old and whatever. So you're forgiven, but for that. And the, if British people had dentist line as an opening line, strong, honestly strong. I mean, very strong. Yeah. We're going to snark right out the gate. We're like indicting an entire continent. That's what we're doing.

However Rolling Stone, who was a reputable source of music journalism, also didn't like it and gave it two stars. I mean, were they, though? It was 1997 at this point. I mean, it was the closest we had. Well, who else was there? I dug around a bit in the New York Times archive, and I couldn't find that much. They basically just all, I won't read the whole thing because I'm boring, but the last line is the most damning of all.

Overall, songs is soothing to the point of narcolepsy. What's next? The Eagles? Harsh. Yeah, brutal. Creation at this point is, like, extremely powerful, right? And has so much cachet because you broke Oasis. Like, that's it.

Like, that's fucking, they become the biggest band in the world. So they, I'm presuming through various ways of this, they put teenage fan club on tour with Radiohead. Kind of a big deal. This is the OK computer tour. So. It's wild. Absolutely wild. Yeah.

It's not a small thing. And that you would think, given how big Radiohead is in the landscape of American, indie American music, with OK Computer, this would have boosted teenage fan clubs, appeal profile, credibility. It did not do anything of the sort for whatever reason. Nobody cared. Yeah, I mean, these records mean so much to me, but I'm also able to see them through the lens of what was popular at the time. Right. There was just, as we stated earlier, there was just no, there was no world in which this record was going to be a big hit. Okay, we have corn.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're talking like... Incubis. Lincoln Park. I mean, this is, like, this is what Americans are listening. This is what's on the American alt-rock radio at the time. Yeah. I mean, this is what's popular?

And, you know, so, I mean, in what world is this music going to reach a larger audience? It's not going to happen. But it's just, it's funnily enough, not only did it not reach a larger audience. It also didn't resonate with the people who liked built to spill on modest mouths. It simply just didn't really land. Except for me, I think. Except for one man in Seattle who went on to achieve great things. Actually, it was already apparently achieving great things in 1997.

You're right there. Okay. So what happens after songs from Northern Britain is howdy. Ben Gibber, do you like Howdy? I really like Howdy. Yeah. Tell me why. I'm more curious as to why you don't like Howdy, which I'm sure we'll get to.

But I think that Grand Prix songs from Northern Britain and Howdy are kind of like a trilogy. Okay. You know, the Sonic Pallet is fairly similar throughout these records. They all kind of land in a similar place for me. I mean, there are some of my favorite songs. you know, my first reach for a teenage fan club song would be like accidental life or cul-de-sac or dumb, dumb, dumb. I just think there are wonderful songs on this record. And it's not in my top three teenage fan club records or anything like that, but I do really love this record. And

this is in some ways the last teenage fan club record that I truly loved, that I listened to start to finish over and over and over again. That's not to say that I don't appreciate the records after this record, but this is like the last of their records that I wore out that I was able to appreciate from start to finish. So maybe because of that, that might be why I have such an affinity for it. I think you're an unreliable narrator. That's very, I'm 100%. I'm 100%. Well, we've already established that you're a liar in the Death Cab songs. Absolutely. Yeah. No, okay, well, what I'm more mean by that it was a joke but like you know you you were coming to this album in real time with an immense amount of goodwill towards teenage fan club and getting kind of what you want i i didn't i i basically

heard it for the first time when we when i was prepping for this show so really wow okay i never really listened to it it's too saccharine for me it's too sunshiny it's too it's not bad right like i very much recognize that like these are really well-written songs and like maybe like isolated a song or two I can take and enjoy, but like there's the onslaught of sugar and sort of brightness. And it's just a little one note for me. I will give you that. It is definitely, it definitely lacks teeth.

Yeah. But there are songs on this record that I like for that exact reason. Like cul-de-sac is a perfect example. It's just this like very smooth Jerry Lange. love song that just has this like really kind of, it's just like a summer breeze of a song. And yeah, it has no edge. There's no edge to it at all. But for whatever reason, that didn't jump out to me at the time as being something that I didn't like about the record.

I was, for whatever reason, I felt like I was, I was in a place to accept kind of the lushness and lack of edge in this record. Okay. But I completely understand that if you had not spent any time with it or didn't have a relation to it in the time it came out as a fan, that when somebody who's listening to the show who might not know a lot about Teenage Fan Club starts digging into these records, without the luxury of being a fan in real time where you are like awaiting the release of the new record with baited breath and you get it certainly at a time when you had to buy the record. You have to go out and buy it and bring it home and put it in a CD player, turntable, whatever. more times than that you're coming to that listening experience wanting to like something because you've had this relationship with the band up to this point. You're with every record they put out, you're running out and you're buying it and you're finding something to like and or love about it.

But if when somebody becomes a fan of an artist or a band posthumously or late in the career where you're like, oh shit, I never listened to, fill in the blank, and now I'm going back and going through all the records, you're going to just be more brutal about that stuff. because at the time, this is 2000. I've been waiting for a new Teen H Fan Club record for three years. It's finally out. I've bought every record from bandwagoness on the day it came out. I've run out and bought it and listened to it.

And I have a vested interest in finding something to like about this record and something to love in it. Versus, okay, now I've got all these albums and I just got to make my way through them. And I'm just going to be a lot more discerning about what I like and don't like. Because it's a whatever. There's all these records at the same time. I'm just going to listen to one until I like it. and discard the ones that I don't because I've got a mountain of material to go through. Yeah.

And I think that if you had never heard Teenage Fan Club and you heard Van Wagoness or 13 or Grand Prix, even songs from Northern Britain, you would be like, yes. I don't know that you would be like, yes, if you heard Howie. I just don't know. Yeah, I think that's more likely than not. Out of all the records to this point, this might be the one where you'd go. like, oh, I don't know. I don't know if this was the only Teenage Fan Club record that you had heard, you'd probably be like, eh, they're okay, you know. Because this record isn't,

it's not, it's, it is a, I think it's a good record. I don't think it's a great record. You know, but by this point in my fandom of Teenage Fan Club, I don't need every record to be the best record they've ever made. You just want more. I just need the record to have like three or four songs that I love on it. Right. Because at this point, you're kind of compiling this, like greatest hits mixed CD at the time or now like a playlist of the stuff that you love the most. And, you know, you don't, seven records in, you don't need this record to be the greatest thing you've ever heard. And they don't need it to be, honestly. Exactly. You just need to be a continuation of like what you love about the band.

And there's something in there to kind of get into. Well, why don't we hear one song off of it begrudgingly? Which song would you like to hear? Since I have no, I have no dog in this race. Let's hear a cul-de-sac because it's smoother than a baby's butt. Okay. That was cul-de-sac. A couple things happen around this album.

One is that creation records folds. Sony had bought a stake in it, and in Alan McGee's absence, Sony had sort of slowly taken more and more control of creation, and it just wasn't really fun to work there anymore, according to the people that were trying to run the show. and Alamiki came back and he was just like, I don't think we should do this anymore. It's not fun.

The whole thing for them was like being fun and giving artists complete creative control and they couldn't really do that anymore. So there's a funny thing where Norman says like, oh, we like let, you know, Sony listen to it. We're just like, you know, hoping they wouldn't like it, but they liked it. So they put it out.

Also, Paul Quinn plays on this record, but right after it's finished, he leaves. So Francis McDonald, the very first, drummer who had left, if you'll remember, to go to uni after Catholic education, comes back. And has played with the band till this day. Yes, and still plays this band. And then they also add a new person, Finlay McDonald, from the BXMex Mandits. I am absolutely unclear if this person is related to Francis McDonald's or if just 30% of the population of Scotland's last name is McDonald.

I don't know. It was very hard to find that information, but they have a keyboard player now. Just the only review I want to mention and I won't read it is that, like, oddly, Nick Hornby reviewed this. Nick Hornby was a very big teenage fan club fan. You know he wrote him. High Fidelity. Thank you. High Fidelity.

It's one of my favorite movies. I never remember the name. He wrote High Fidelity. He loved this album. Just absolutely, to the point where I think in his review, he's basically like, if you don't like this, there's like something wrong with you, you're a dark and twisted soul. And you know what? Guilty as fucking charged Nick Hornby, okay? Moving along.

It's 2002. We're going to put out an album called Words of Wisdom and Hope with Jad Fair on alternative tentacles. Jad Fair being the singer of half Japanese. I don't know, this might surprise you, Ben Gibbard, but I love this album. You love this album? Yeah, to me. I love it too. It's like Lulu.

It's so fun. It's like alt indie outsider rock Lulu. And famously, for people who listen to this podcast, as you all know, I also love Lulu, which is not a popular opinion. Remember Lulu, the Metallica album that they made with Lou Reed? I actually love Lulu as well. Hell yeah, Ben Gibberd. It seems like a mistake on Metallica's part, but it seems like an incredibly well-calculated thing on Lou Reed's part to have this record that like makes no fucking sense.

And I think that, you know, knowing that Norman and Jad have been friends for so long, like this record to me is like such a beautifully innocent, wonderful thing. Totally. And, you know, love's taken over. is like a song I'll throw in DJ sets when I do DJ because I just think it's it's a fucking banger. Like it just, you have this like weirdo just like like hollering over top of it about how much he loves love. And, you know, the like the beats are kind of awesome in it. You know, it's like it's a great, it's a fucking great song. Let's hear it. Let's hear Love's Taken Over. That was Love's taken over. Yeah, I fucking love this. I think besides the fact of this is just like, for me,

a purely enjoyable album to listen to. It really underscores, again, the thing that we've talked about from the beginning about Teenage Fan Club is that they make music to make music because they love making music. Not that that's not true of every band, I just think it's true to differing degrees, obviously, right?

And it just seems to me that, like, the pure fulfillment and joy in just making music has not waned for them this many albums on. And they're just like, yeah, wouldn't it be fun if like we just made the music of an album with our like pal who's this like weirdo poet spoken word you know musician like freak and he just like puts words over it and they're like yeah that would be fun let's just go do it yeah exactly exactly and and this seems like a perfect thing to do after uh howdy right it's like absolutely like oh they could have just kept going in that direction until they're just making the world's sweetest most sunshiny song that absolutely smothered there's you in your sleep, or they could have, you know, perhaps taking a little turn and

done something a little different. Yeah, exactly. Which they did, they did do. I love it. I think if you don't like Jad Faire's voice, it's probably challenging, but I do. I mean, he's an acquired taste, but I would understand why people don't like him, but I find him thoroughly charming. Yeah, I love it.

Okay. So then in 2005, they put out man-made. At this point, they don't have a label, so they self-funded this. album, again, to the point of we just want to make music. They make it with John McIntyre from Tordas. Interesting opinion on my part. I like this album better than

Howdy. This is actually an album I quite like a lot. This record to me is the result of two great tastes that don't necessarily go together. It's like pizza and chocolate ice cream. On their own

they're delicious. But like if you put a scoop of chocolate ice cream, on a slice of pepperoni pizza, it just doesn't, it doesn't hit the same way as the things do individually. I'm a huge John McIntyre fan, huge Tortoise fan. I was a big stand of everything happening in that scene in the 90s and in the, in the aughts. And while I think that it's all in my mind is a top 10 teenage fan club song for me. And I also think that only with you is maybe Raymond's best song he's ever written. Oh, I think that. You. You say this in the face of tears are cool?

You look tears are cool in its eyes. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. And I think, so I want to give a compliment to, I mean, I've given compliments to John McIntyre. I'm a huge fan of his. I think that the production on Only You is wonderful and entirely appropriate for that song.

And I think to an extent also his production on it, it's all in my mind is great. But at their core, T-Nge fan club is like a job. jangle pop band. They're like a strumming guitar's band. They're a power pop band. And I just, I, this record did not resonate very well with me at the time because I just think that this combination of John McIntyre and Teenage Fan Club did not elevate, it didn't elevate the record for me. It, it just, it more made me wish that this record had been made with, with another producer. I don't necessarily think that this was the best pairing. for a teenage fan club record.

That's okay. Ben Gaberbord, you don't have to like it. But you like this record more than howdy. Yeah, I find it more interesting. My most common tagline here when we get to this part of any band's discography is that, like, please, to take no offense to us. But that almost universally the back half

of any artist discography is less good than the front half, but it's more interesting. it tends to get more interesting. I wouldn't disagree with that. Yeah. And I like that, right? Like, I think if it doesn't get more interesting, then, and it's just bad, which also happens, that's when you've really failed, right?

But, like, and you said it earlier, like, there's something magical. It's something I wanted to ask you around this record. There's something about rock music and youth, to your analogy of the tastes that go together. Like, that is just, it's, they're made for each other, right? There's a power in music, rock, guitar, rock music that's made by young people that is just unparalleled, right? And you can't recapture that feeling or that magic usually ever again. You make different kinds of music and you probably make more mature and interesting music.

But the visceralness of the music of youth, I don't. And I can't explain it, right? I always just say, like, what's the amazing grace line? I once was lost and now I'm found. It's just more, it's just music is better when you were lost. Once you're found, that's great, right? For you. But art that comes out of being found and stuff just tends to be less resonant.

And I don't know why. And maybe you don't even agree with me. Maybe you're like, you're absolutely wrong and here's 22 examples of why you're wrong. but it's not so much that I think that you're wrong. Full disclosure, I'm 25 years into my career, so I'm, you know, maybe a little defensiveness. But, and I acknowledge my defensiveness on this. So take that with a grand of all as well. There's something about musicians and bands that is entirely unique amongst, like, creative ventures. There aren't a lot of other mediums in which you say that an artist's best work is the first stuff they did.

Yeah. You know, it's not the same, it's never that way with filmmaker. It's not that way with novelists. Usually, it's not that way with painters. But I think one of the reasons that is kind of coming around to a point that we discussed earlier is that when you are of the age that Oasis, let's say, is like your favorite band. And you're there seeing them, going to see them live and you're with the records. And, you know, they are, you know, everybody in the world is all agreeing that this band is like the best band in the world in this moment or certainly one of the biggest bands in the world in this moment. it's understandable that someone would have that opinion about music in general that people make

their best stuff is the early stuff because that's the stuff that you first latch on to. We were talking earlier about songs for Northern Britain. If you had never heard this band before, and this is the first thing you heard, you'd be like, this band's fucking incredible. But we have the hindsight of these records that came out before that were so seminal and so influential and of the time and of the culture that it gives those records a weight and a significance that later material just simply can't have. And, you know, again, I will acknowledge that I'm saying this as much because we just released our 10th fucking record, right?

You're like, what are you saying, Yossi, about my new album? But I think, but I think it's like, but it's the kind of thing where it's like, you know, I think when you're a band that's been around as long as at this point teenage fan club has or as long as we have or whatever, the blessing and the curse is that your back catalog is your worst enemy. Right. Yeah. And everything that you do is held up against that. the time in which that music came out, the age, the fan base was, everything else.

But I understand why you have that, I understand that, I understand that, that perspective. And I think, I think in a lot of cases it is true. But I think that it is true as much because of the context in which those records, and as the years go on those records, they kind of, it's like they snowball. They take on more and more significance. They become more a marker of a time in your life. they become more of a marker in the culture at that time. You know, it's like one minute, never mind, it's just a record that came out on DGC

and people are like, oh, I kind of like it, it's pretty good. And then the next year they're fucking Nirvana with a capital N. And it's never mind with the capital N. It's very strange because I do just feel like it is sort of unique to guitar rock music. Like, right? Like, it's not the same with pop. I think a lot of artists make, like, later pop works that are like really good. And I'm not saying that people don't make good music.

in their career. But it's the way that it connects is just a little bit. And I think you're right. I think it might have to do with just context. I would be really interested to see if it has nothing to do with youth and maybe has to do with newness.

And maybe there's like a 40 year old woman named Yossi Salek who's finally going to figure out how to play the guitar and put out a first album. And maybe because it's just the first one, it'll have the same. visceral quality because it's naive or something?

I don't know. This is a working theory. I can't tell you. The final point I can add to this, too, is like, what's been interesting about my career is that there have been many entry points into our band for people. And, you know, there are people who, like, we have the facts is their favorite record and everything we did after that sucked. There are people who, like, transatlanticism is the best.

I mean, everything else that sucks. And through all of the, like, trepididivism. and visceral distaste for a new album the day it came out because it wasn't like the old record. Like, I have this unique position of being the constant through all of that. So, you know, I remember people taking a shit on transatlanticism. And then, and then 10 years later, 10 years later, like, re-reviewing it or re-contextualizing it. Or I remember when plans came out and people like, God, this record fucking sucks. And then, like, five years later, you.

and be like, why can't you make a record like plans again? You know, so it's, it's people are fickle. Like, you know, it's like people have very strong feelings because they care, you know. The opinions on a record can change from year to year. The material is always kind of being recontextualized and being listened to by new people. And like, it's just, it's just really, it's an odd thing to be a part of, honestly. Yeah. As a fan, as a music fan, first and foremost.

I think we'll never, we'll never figure this out. But I'm not going to stop trying. Did we hear a song off manmade? Did we do that already? We did. No, but we should hear it's all in my mind, I think. That was, it's all in my mind. I did enjoy that I learned from this record that Teenage Fan Club was friends with Jeff Tweedy because they played shows with Uncle Tupelo back in the day,

and they borrowed a guitar from him to make this record in Chicago. Teenage Fan Club is friends with everybody. I mean, Norman's, you know, and that's not a surprising piece of information. It's like Norman's, well, those people, you meet him, and he's just so engaging and so warm and you want to be closer to him even though he he's an elusive motherfucker. I'm also the worst because I also prefer the older Wilco albums, which nobody says. You're talking like 90s, Wilco? Like a.m. Yeah. Yeah, that you are, yeah, that is a unique perspective that not a lot of

people have. That's right. That's why no one should even listen to anything. I say, I don't even know why they let me have this podcast. So we're getting in the home stretch now. in 2010 they put out an album called Shadows. They're on Merge now as of Manmade. Great home, I think, for them. Tell me a little bit about Shadows. In keeping with what I just went on my offensive theory towards every musician over the age of 25, I had trouble connecting with the last two albums, the little sleepy times for me.

Yeah, I think the last two... Or three albums, I guess, Shadows. Yeah, I will say the Shadows... shadows and here, the last two. And endless arcade, there's three. Right, but the two records that Jerry is still on. Right, okay. Pre-Jerry's departure.

Yeah, pre-Jerry before J-Lift. You know, I think the thing that's interesting kind of doubling back on man-made is that, while I'm not super into the production on that record, to your point, it is interesting and it's very unique for the band, right? Yeah. And we are now, it's been 10 years since Howdy. And with man-made in the middle of those two records, which is kind of an outlier sonically and everything they've done, it's almost as if that with that record in between Howdy and Shadows,

you don't really get a sense of like how the trajectory of smoothness, like of the easy, breezy feeling that Teenage Fan Club. started to employ around, definitely around shadows. Like certainly at Howdy, as we talked about. Sure. But now in shadows, like, we're kind of in, like, the easy listening period of teenage fan club. Babe, we're middle-aged.

We are married. Yeah, exactly. This is, you know, we're in the angst-free era of teenage fan club. And as with every teenage fan club record, there are songs on this record. I adore. I mean, Baby Lee is one of Norman's best songs ever, I think. It's a good song. That was one that stuck out for me on the album.

It's just a great pop song. But I do think that we're getting this in territory now where the tempos are kind of slowing down. You know, the guitars are getting quieter. The arrangements are getting lusher. There's more strings involved. You know, these records are starting to fall a little bit into the comfortable middle-age period. And because I have such a vested interest in this band that I love them so much, you know, there are things on this record that I love, but it's not necessarily a record that I would reach for.

Right. Okay. Let me ask you a hard question. I think we've sort of established it, but I just wonder. Why do you think they keep making albums at this point? Well, because this is their life's work. Right. I mean, I remember at some point in the OTS,

a friend of mine talking about R.E.M. And saying something along the lines of like, God, why these guys still making records, whatever? And it upset me, not because I was a huge fan of late era RIM records, but that like, you know, maybe because I was, I was in a band myself, making music is what these guys do. Totally. This is what they do.

This is literally their life's work, you know. And as with all of us, we are not the same people we were when we were 25. We get older. You know, our priorities shift as artists, you know, the things we want to say and how we want to say it change. And I think when I heard, my friend was saying this specifically about REM, for REM to continue to make records at that point and records that he, he did not like or connect to, I think that is a reflection of one's own feeling about themselves growing older as much as the band. Totally. And to not be able to relate to something that you once used to love means that you're changing to. Great.

And losing connection with something that once meant so the world to you, you know. But here's the thing. Like, this is my favorite band. I don't have to think that everything they do is the greatest thing they've ever done. I'm allowed as a fan to be critical of the stuff that they've done that I don't like or I like less. Of course. This record is enjoyable. And there are songs on here that I really love.

Not many, but there are songs in here that I really love. And for me, a new teenage fan club record means that, they're going to be out playing shows. They're going to be playing songs in their entire catalog. As long as they don't commit the cardinal sin of going out playing the new record in three old songs and walking off stage, then we're good, you know. Which they say they won't do. They said that's similar to what you said.

They were like, oh, we don't care if you like the old stuff about it. That's great. Yeah, it really doesn't matter. And I think that there are moments on these records, maybe leaving one of them that, you know, I hear a song like that. And I'm like, God, God, damn, Norman can write a fucking song. God, the harmony sounds so good. The guitar playing is so good.

And it reminds, and I think at this point, this deep into a band's catalog, what you want from a new record, I might have said a version of this earlier, is for a new record to remind you why you love the band. Yeah. And reconnect you to the music that means so much to you. I know that. And that's great. Just to be clear, and the band's playing tagline on this always is the same, which I think

artists should keep making music until they die because I think that's their right and that like to your point that's their life's work like why would you stop you know like unless you just don't want to do it anymore but if you want to you should continue and and I would hope that they wouldn't stop just because they don't think they're going to connect in the same way as being but I guess it's interesting to me because the way you answered the question was from a fan's perspective I'm interested in why an artist keeps making music right like I know it's your life's work right you don't have to put it out, right? I mean, and this isn't a challenge. I think they, I'm just curious what the thinking is, right? Like, I know part of it's probably practical. You kind of meant, you hinted at it right now with Teenage Fan Club, but you want a tour. You should probably put out an album, right? That sort of goes hand in hand. For, you know, I can only speak for myself, but I think, and my band, but I certainly think this is probably the case for Teenage Fan Club as well, is that there are a few things more creatively, and spiritually satisfying, then finishing a song in this little room that I'm in that I'm really

proud of. Yeah. And that I can't wait to share with people, if not just my bandmates initially, but, you know, my bandmates, and then maybe we record it, maybe it's on a record, blah, blah, blah. And the the jigsaw puzzle of making an album is still something that is, it is never ceased to be fascinating and challenging and fulfilling. And over the, the years as the album has become less of a thing, you know, some bands, you just, yeah, you start, you start hearing people like, we're just going to do singles now, we're just going to do EPs now, it's like, well, that's fucking easy. Releasing a single is easy. You just like write a song, and if it's halfway decent, you just put it out and like, oh, well, that didn't connect, we'll make

another one. Right. But making an album is like, you are creating a statement, and it is something that only comes around every couple years, if not more. And, you know, it is the culmination of years of work. I mean, we just put a record out a couple months ago. And our last record was four years ago. I mean, obviously there was a pandemic and then all that too. But at the same time, it's like, you know, four years of writing. Like, you know, I think that, you know, dozens and dozens of songs that got thrown out so that we could have this collection of tunes that hopefully people like, right? And that challenge becomes more and more difficult as the years go on.

It's like painting yourself into a corner. Like, you're in this room and you've got, you can paint anything you want. Eventually, like, oh, shit, I got this little patch left. Well, I got to make it as good as I can. I got to do the best I can with it. And to me, it's the challenge of making a record and hopefully making a good or great record. But also, it is the marker of time.

It is the fiscal year. It's the marker of time for bands. It's like you make a record. You make an album. And the feeling of satisfaction when you get that, I'll never forget, in the first copy of something about airplanes and holding it, a CD, you know, even just a fucking CD, and holding it.

and you're like, we fucking made this thing. Like, this is ours. Like, I used to buy these things at the store. I still do, and we made one of our own that you can go to a store and you can buy it. You know, that kind of, that sense of wonder has just never left me. I still feel the same one when I hold a new thing that after all the years of working on it, after writing the songs and arranging them and recording them and mixing them and everything, and the artwork and the liner notes and everything, it's all there.

And like, you're holding it and you're proud of it. Like, that's the feeling that I think. think so much of us are still chasing and why we still do it all these years later. I mean, that's just a perfect answer. It's a perfect answer. And I think it's a nice way to wrap up the episode, to be honest. Me too, I'll be making podcasts well into my 80s and just really seeing that in the world as a download on an app. Really satisfying, fulfilling.

Before we wrap the opposite, let's hear from the enduring teenage fan club fans, much like yourself, on why they love and continue to love this band. I absolutely love Teenage Fan Club. I think the thing I love the most about Teenage Fan Club is that for me personally, they were a gateway band that didn't lose their charm after providing me with that gateway. I think the first thing I love about them is just, The gorgeous harmonies they employ, all the three different songwriters all having unique points of view and unique lyrical content with them all singing together. And it just all merges to create such a gorgeous sound.

I tried to listen to Bandwagonesque a few years ago, but I feel like it was kind of before the time I was ready to appreciate a record that sounded like that. But since then, I've gotten into bands like Big Star and other bands from the 90s that sound. like that like the lemon heads the obvious big touchdown for them is big star and even after they introduced me to big star a band that would become a massive favorite of mine they never lost that appeal for me the record stounded just as good as they did the first time i heard them it's a running joke where like if you're in a band on the road and you're in charge of the ox cable if you put on teenage fan club somebody in the back seat is going to perk up and say hey who is this this is awesome and the answer is always it's teenage

Their songs are so simple that like any beginner guitarist could truly pick up a guitar and play a teenage fan club song. But they're such great songwriters and musicians that you just don't really get that feeling anywhere else. They wrote these really simple songs, but they accomplished things that a lot of their peers, you know, didn't accomplish and probably couldn't accomplish. One thing specifically with Teenage Fan Club is they're such great lyricists. Absolute king songwriters. All of the melodies and chord changes are just perfect. It is like a balm for my brain. I could listen to it every day.

And I kind of do. The first song that really did it for me was called Sparky's Dream off of Grand Prix. It just immediately made me stop and be like, what is this? Like, because I heard it like when I was like out somewhere and I asked the person working what it was. And they said that it was a teenage fan club. And I was like, damn, this band is sick. Like I immediately was like on. Teenage fan club is like the best example of what power pop is.

Like power pop's kind of hard to describe. But if anybody ever asks, I just say, yeah, like the teenage fan club, you know. I feel like they're great songwriters. And I also feel like their tones are just. dialed. I just feel like they really put a lot of care into their records, which is kind of a rare thing to come by. There's that quote from Noel Gallagher where he says, you know, Teenage Fan Club is the second best band of the world, Oasis of the First. One of the best bands we've ever gotten to experience as a human race. I think they're just incredible. And every band that rips off

Teenage Fan Club is good, too. And I think everybody should listen to Teenage Fan Club. club. You know, the people who love that band, they really, really love that band, you know, myself included, they really are as good as we say they are. And if I had to sum them up with one sentence, I would just say recommended for fans of music. It's nice to know that we're in good company with the teenage fan club, the Fannie's fans, if you will. Yeah, I think that one of the reasons they have such a rabid fan base is because we all like the same things about this band. Totally. Yeah. Well, Ben Gibbard, we've reached the end of our teenage fan club. Fan club. It's been a pleasure to talk a teenage fan club with you.

This has been a blast. I love getting the opportunity to proselytize about this band. Yeah, we laughed, we cried, we fought. We really, it's, we've been all over the map. We've lived two lifetimes in the course of the taping of this podcast. We've come out the other end learning something about ourselves. so. It was, you know what? It was about the friends we made along the way. Ben Gibbard, can you choose one last song from the last three Teenage Fan Club albums to bring us home to close out the episode? Yes, let's take a listen to the darkest part of the night from the record here. Okay, amazing. Come back next week for a new episode of Bandsplain, and this is the darkest part of the

night by Teenage Fan Club. If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandsplaine, only on Spotify. Our guest today was Ben Gibbard. You can follow Deb Cab for Cutie on Twitter at DCFC. Huge, huge thanks to the teenage fan club megafans you heard on this episode. Eric Smeil, Sahan Jaiusuria, and Marcus Nukio. This episode was produced by Nico Stratis and edited by Adrian Bridges, with help from Casey Simonson and Justin Sales. Executive producers for Bansplaine are Gina Delvac and me, Yossi Salick.

Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethanyi Costantino and Jennifer Clavin and graciously recorded by Carlos de la Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to Robert Adler, Leah Edwards, David McDonough, Dana Meyerson, Jessica Hopper, Drew Pierce, and Dirty Grie Grews Martini's. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandsplaine, only on Spotify. Bedgibird, when I get married to one of the reply guys of my podcast, since that seems to be my fate, will you come sing a song at my wedding? Only if it's a reply guy.