| Grandaddy’s 2000 album The Sophtware Slump is so good that it rests with equal footing alongside its inspirations, as though the careers of Neil Young, Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips and every band in the hipster synth-pop revolution were all working together to come to this one defining moment of recorded noise.
Three years later, the pride of Modesto, California has a lot to live up to. At first, it seemed that Grandaddy would follow the disappointing path taken by so many others trying to follow up a masterpiece – tossing everything against the wall and walking out with a behemoth double-CD (and the threat of an experience more exhausting than exhilarating). Up until recently, that was Grandaddy’s plan.
For months, through posts on their self-maintained Web site (www.grandaddylandscape.com), the band reported an extensive series of home-based recording sessions and eventually unveiled the track listing for a two-CD set of all-new material to be sold at the cost of a single disc (on this point they were particularly adamant, the fan-friendly cuddle-bears that they are).
Scaled back to a modest 52 minutes, Sumday arrives with a typically misspelled title and a more subtle approach than expected. Where The Sophtware Slump embraced the "instant wow," Sumday takes its time, blossoming into a record that begs to be listened to from front to back, in its entirety. The album’s fuzzed-out opener "Now It’s On" marks the end of "the season of the old me," (but in a "can’t wait until tomorrow" kind of way), while both "Lost On Yer Merry Way" and "OK With My Decay" document a blissed-out oblivion – the abandonment of modern society for a pensive calm, wrapped up in ethereal candy-coated melodies.
Since the decision was made to release Sumday as a single disc, the Internet has been buzzing with rumours of backroom label manipulation – speculation that V2 forced a single album to be squeezed from a double-decker. Despite Sumday’s obvious high points, the babble of the average online punter might lead us to believe something’s been snipped away. But ask lead G-Daddy Jason Lytle where the rest of it went, and you’ll soon find out that the only reason something feels missing is that we expected twice as much.
"You have a wild imagination and evidently you’ve read many stories about spineless bands with no vision," Lytle declares. "I dictated the writing, sequencing, production and all other aspects of the final product."
So there was no outside pressure to scale it back and trim things down?
"The two-CD things only became one CD after I realized – and was quite relieved – that it actually flowed from song to song and two CDs was unnecessary. My only outside influence was the reliance on the band and their suggestions in terms of what they were comfortable with."
Ah, alright. Won’t be repeating that rumour online, then.
For those desperate for even more Grandaddy to pick through, Lytle forecasts that new material will pop up in shops frequently throughout the next decade.
"I can’t wait for this rock-and-roll circus to end, so I intend on releasing as much material in the next 10 years as humanly possible," he promises.
While it’s been three long years since the release of The Sophtware Slump, new (or at least sort-of-new) Grandaddy recordings have been released in the form of the brilliant The Windfall Varietal, a band-approved compilation of B-sides and rarities. Lytle puts it bluntly when he says that Windfall was his idea for the band to make some extra cash selling an exclusive tour-only CD.
"I didn’t give a fuck about the legal ramifications," he adds. "We were broke and had lots of outcast material." For Grandaddy completists, there was also Concrete Dunes, a somewhat less-authorized version of which Lytle says simply, "Fuck Concrete Dunes and the piece-of-shit guy responsible for releasing it without our knowing."
On a somewhat more secretive level, the group has recently started its own label imprint, Sweat of the Alps, and the first release is an album by a group called Arm of Roger – in actuality, Grandaddy in disguise. Titled The Ham and Its Lily, the recording is, in fact, a joke demo that was submitted to V2 on the tail of their 1997 debut Under The Western Freeway – even if V2’s not exactly the money-hungry demon enclave that paranoid chat-groupies suspect, don’t expect Lytle & Co. to give their bosses an easy time.
"(We) scared the shit out of the label – almost got dropped. Our A & R (artist and repertoire) person almost got fired. There were too many people being way too serious and weird about a friendly album, so we attempted to loosen things up," Lytle says.
Still, at least in Lytle’s mind, the joke was well worth it.
"When and if we get dropped, I could care less," he says. "This attitude gives me peace of mind."
Above all else, Sumday is Grandaddy’s most human collection to date – there’s no friendly robots à la Sophtware’s malfunctioning Jed. Instead, Lytle’s characters take to the hills, sobbing in the "Saddest Vacant Lot In All The World" or basking in "The Warming Sun."
Lytle outlines his new world view like this: "I like humans more than cash machines." It’s a beautiful thing.
By now, Grandaddy is a proven master of the concept album, so is there an overriding message to be taken from Sumday’s warm passages and meadows?
Lytle reflects and answers simply: "It’s going to be all right." |
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