**the making of cursive’s domestica - featuring tim kasher**

Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.

Cursive formed in Omaha, Nebraska in 1995 by Tim Kasher, Matt Maginn, Stephen Pedersen and Clint Schnase (Snozey). Kasher, Maginn and Pedersen had played together in the band Slowdown Virginia prior to forming Cursive. They released their debut 7 inch in 1996 on Lumberjack Records, which later became Saddle Creek. In 1997, they released their first full-length album, Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes. Another album, The Storms of Early Summer, followed in 1998, but the band broke up before it was released. Kasher had gotten married and moved to Portland, Oregon. When his marriage ended, he returned to Omaha and decided to reform Cursive. Ted Stevens took over for Pedersen as they began working on their third album. Domestica was eventually released in the year 2000.

In this episode, Tim Kasher reflects on how the album came together. This is the making of Domestica.

Tim Kasher: Hey, this is Tim Kasher from Cursive, and we're talking about our album, Domestica. We technically don't call it a divorce record because it is ultimately fictionalized and the couple doesn't get a divorce. Like, nobody gets a divorce on the record (laughs). And Saddle Creek created a bio that basically was exposing, you know, like, “Tim recently got a divorce,” and like, “Check out this, listen to this record!” (laughs). And yeah it was a conceptualized record and it was about a failing relationship. So it's really kind of parsing words to say like, “Well, it's not a divorce record, it's a record about a failing relationship” (laughs). It's like, “Okay, well whatever you want to call it, Tim.” I do think that was an important part though, I think that us coming out in front of it and saying like, “This is a divorce record.” I think it did kind of inform and shape the record quite a bit. And probably in a way that Saddle Creek was probably wise to do so. Because it maybe, perhaps it did help people to recognize like, “Oh, I understand this content a little bit better.” Perhaps, I don't know, I feel like I'm an outsider about this a little bit. I think we should be interviewing fans of the record and see what they think. And let them tell us if it's a divorce record or not. I have a hunch that they think it is.

Yeah, so what happened with Cursive, we did two records, Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes, and then we did a second record called The Storms of Early Summer, and so we stopped the band before Storms of Early Summer even came out. I'd gotten married kind of on a lark, and we moved out to Portland, Oregon just to kind of try to find some excitement, some adventure in our lives. I found that adventure by becoming an assistant manager at a Walden Books (laughs). It didn't last very long. So I recall, you know, living in an efficiency up in Portland when I think somebody sent the Storms of Early Summer CD to me. Portland didn't last very long and then we kind of, my wife at the time and I, we kind of like slowly made our way across, back across country. Made it back to Omaha and that relationship kind of ran its course, unfortunately, still good friends. So I think that getting married and moving to Portland and stuff was kind of, I guess, supposed to be the next chapter in my life, and that fizzled out. So I kind of went back to Matt and Clint, Matt McGinn and Clint Schnase, and it's like, “I could probably start doing Cursive again, I don't really know what I'm doing.” Stephen Pedersen, though, had already gone off to college at that point. He was our guitarist on the first two albums. So we picked up Ted Stevens. Ted was already a songwriter, he was and is. So it wasn't really the guitarist that we wanted, only because I didn't want to step on those toes.

He was doing Lullaby for the Working Class and that is one of my favorite bands. So we actually asked a couple other guitarists before we asked Ted, and when we asked Ted, it was really with this big disclaimer, like, “Look, this feels inappropriate. You're not a second guitarist, you're a first guitarist (laughs) songwriter and you should be doing your own records, your own albums, your own bands. But if this is just something that seems appealing to you…” He previously had played with Clint Schnase, our drummer. That was his drummer for like his high school band. So there was like all of these, you know, and it's Omaha, it’s small and the scene was small, but those connections were kind of already there. So Ted was kind of like, “Yeah, sure.” And that is such an important part, I guess, maybe that long story was to say that's an important, Ted was a really important element as to Domestica being made. And he's been with playing with us ever since and I think that that is kind of a seminal part of what Cursive sounds like. It's just kind of all that kind of like odd, more odd and queer guitar work that he puts on top of everything. He has a lot of input aesthetically too, both to the songwriting and to just kind of like the entire, really everything about what the band does. So we brought Ted in and then did the album. Domestica is the fastest record we ever put together. And we were still asking ourselves the questions of like, “Why did we have to put it together so fast?” And I feel like the best answer is that we were still young, and that doesn't even matter, young doesn't matter. But we were still mostly working on a local level, but with like a foot in this national scene. You know, we'd had our first album come out on, was like on a New York label, then on an LA label. So it kind of had, you know, a little bit of, it kind of helped for touring and stuff, like a little bit. But, you know, I think our impression was like, “Holy shit, we quit the band and we took off too much time and we really got to get something else out quick.” I think that was our attitude. Ever since then, I mean, we've, I don't know, I do a lot of projects, so really Cursive only puts out, I'm going to guess that Storms of Early Summer came out in ‘98 and Domestica came out in 2000. So, we really didn't lose any time at all, but I think our impression at that time was like, “We better get this out quick before people forget who we are or something.” Like as if anybody really knew who we are to begin with (laughs). But it’s a nine song album because that was as much as we could cobble together.

Probably why I wrote it fairly quickly is because it was, I had just gone through a lot of pretty specific and intense experiences that I just probably needed to get off my chest. I think there's probably a certain amount of protection or shielding of the actual, the more raw story from trying to color it in with elements that were closer to storytelling about this fictionalized couple, who is really, you know, sure, probably more accurately Kim and I. But I guess just the protection that I've always done as a songwriter, as just a writer in general, to protect oneself, you kind of have to keep everything fictionalized. So now I can look back and be like, “Okay, well, yeah, upon being asked the question of like, what was the writing process like?” It's like, “Sure, I had recently gotten divorced.” And so a lot of the storyline was just me kind of like getting out a lot of what Kim and I had just gone through. But both Kim and I both know if we were to sit and listen to the record that a lot of it is, you know, we know what's accurate and we know what's not accurate, you know. And so I think I even made a point of not having them get a divorce because I probably was recognizing that it was getting too close to my own story and I needed to, I needed to shield it. I needed to shield Kim, you know, I think it's like, as with most fictional writing, it's so unfair, because for most fiction, it's not actually accurately fiction. And it can be so unfair to the person who doesn't have a voice, who doesn't have a say in the matter, you know?

“The Casualty”

“Casualty,” yeah, I think that it was a pretty convincing, like punch for an opening track. Opening the album with “The night has fallen down the staircase” is probably a good, you know, it's like placing ourselves into the action, I suppose. That song felt like kind of a front runner for us as we were working on the record. And sometimes that's the type of thing that could get you that top spot, that first track. I think a lot of songwriters and album creators think this way, I think that the first song is not necessarily like your biggest banger. It's something like unique. It's an entrance, right? An opening. An opening track, that's what they call it. You need a proper opening and sometimes like your hottest song might not necessarily be that. But also you kind of want to, I don't know, there's this tendency to top load albums. I think that any, where are all my album creators out there? Like I think that there's a tendency you want to top load shit because it's like you want to put all those songs that you think are more convincing toward the top because, you know, you're afraid people are going to turn it off, probably, and are people going to get through the album or not. You're trying to like, you're trying to create something compelling, but I also,the way I've always crafted albums is you got to also save the other songs that can be used as anchors or as cabooses.

I will say that this song, sorry for calling myself and calling us out, but I respect the song, I'm a fan of it, but I do think that it's, as a track, it's one that gets a little more derivative, that it will sound a little bit more like our influences. I don't need to specifically say Fugazi, but I do end up specifically saying Fugazi when we put out the Burst and Bloom EP and kind of, you know, we do a song called “Sink to the Beat,” where we kind of name check some of the influences that we were wearing on our sleeve. And one of them was Fugazi and I think I just felt compelled to call myself out because I've felt like songs like “The Casualty” are a little less purely from our songwriting sensibility and shows a little too much influence on them. Hey, that's okay. I think this happens all the time. I think all of our, these great artists and our favorite songwriters have these moments where you kind of, they kind of are like, “Oh yeah, well I really love Chrissy Hynde and this is my Chrissy Hynde moment,” or something like, “I just couldn't help,” you know? And so I think I've been hard on Domestica over the years for that reason. But mostly just because I'm just trying to, I know it sounds like hippie or cheesy, but like trying to be true to myself, true to my own songwriting. And so when I look back and kind of find things that I think are, have like shades of clear influence, then I can find it a little disappointing sometimes. But all that to say, “Hey, look, I'm a fan of the song. I don't think it's like…” And again, it's like, “Yeah, I grew up, you know, listening to like indie hard rock in the nineties. So, guess what?” (laughs) You know, you just like, I think that with Domestica we wanted to fit in a little bit in by Ugly Organ, I think we kind of got back to like just being like our weirder selves. But that's again, that’s saying things that sound like I dislike or care for Domestica less and I think that's kind of unfair. I'm not pitching this record at all to you or to anybody (laughs). I'm simply, merely speaking my mind. We've been doing this Domestica like rollout with a new reissue and playing it live front to back and it's been really awesome. It's been a really cool experience. And I'm just being sincere about that. It's nice to have something written 24 odd years ago or so that people still appreciate so much and that I can like also, you know, there's not a song on the record that I have to be like, “Uh well and also this one,” or, you know, or I have to feel kind of cringy or embarrassed about.

You know, we lived in an apartment and there's still, you know, like, there's still being a hole in the plastering of our wall (laughs). Like that was what ended up being like a fairly clear and obvious piece of symbolism for me as I was like reflecting back on the relationship that her and I had had. Nothing like so terribly violent, but there's like kind of a violent act in that just in the idea of a phone being thrown and a hole in the wall, you know, in the plaster as a result. But I don't know, I think that's probably getting a little too close to talking about things that are like, like make it seem like I'm starting to point fingers or waggle fingers or something like that. I'm really not. Kim and I are totally, we were young and just like going through, you know, like a tough time, trying to figure ourselves out and figure each other out and trying to figure out how to make our relationship work and just also drinking way too much.

“The Martyr”

You know, a song like “The Martyr,” you can't really retire. Not citing a complaint here (laughs), filing a complaint. I really don't mind playing that song. But it's a different song for me, and it's a song that, I’m patting myself on the back a little bit and say that it's an interesting composition. It's amongst the better compositions. I think that we've come up with a, so I'm proud of that. It has a good movement to it. I think that what I like about “The Martyr” is it's what I do with so much music is, it's verse and chorus, but you kind of, you try to futz with the song enough, or at least is what I like to do. A lot of compositions, you try to futz with it enough so that it becomes a little bit more vague about what verse and chorus is. And just try to make it feel more like pieces, like parts. But yeah, so the composition for “Martyr” is cool and that we were able to come up with that dissonant guitar piece so early on in the songwriting of it and so we could use it to kind of frame how the song was working. That's also pretty rare for us as for songwriting. I think a lot of times that those kind of like guitar ideas will present themselves much further along, maybe after the composition's already been finished. But I do kind of recall coming up with that, kind of falling upon that guitar idea and being like, “Oh, cool,” you know, “this really works.” And so we're able to incorporate it as part of the song. And that's great. That's not something that happens very often for us.

The top of the song is, kind of suggests this kind of gross, like, birth of this new monster man who's a newly divorced drunk, and yeah, so to compare that to Rosemary's Baby wasn't so hard for me to compare it to being the devil incarnate being born, you know, in the aftermath of this relationship. Yeah, major spoiler alert, but I think everyone's probably seen Rosemary's Baby at this point. Actually, I'm surprised at how many people haven't seen that movie still. But yeah, at the end of Rosemary's Baby, she has a baby and it's the devil. It's the devil born on Earth. And the cabal of satanists chant, “The Year One,” which is, I think I've kind of read of some people consider to be also being the year one as in the year one as in this is now, whatever you want to call it, you can't call it A.D. 1, the birth of Jesus, but whatever the Latin we want to use for the first year of the birth of the devil. But yeah, they kind of, he yells out, “The Year One,” because it's the first year of, first year of Satan.

I have a real fixation, for better or worse with religious imagery, or I should say Christian imagery, and that's just from an upbringing, and that's just 12 years of Catholic school. Catholic and Jesuit, I guess I should say more specifically. So really, you know, I was totally indoctrinated so so much of that imagery is just with me now forever (laughs). But I like to go back to, I mean, it's, the oldest stories in the world, the Bible, you know, and I go back to them time and time again, even today. I just can't stop, but I also, my fixations also has, you know, it's also rooted in a certain, I think a clear, like bitterness that I developed from those 12 years of kind of being having that at times feeling like it's being forced down your throat, you know.

Yeah, and as far as like the lyrics of “The Martyr,” I appreciate anybody who recognizes my attempt at being even handed with the storytelling of a relationship. It's really a shitty thing for a songwriter to be able to come out and you know, just kind of like lay out all of their dirty laundry and only have one voice and not really represent the other side, the other 50% of the relationship. Even grosser if it's a male, you know, I think that sometimes I'm certainly more forgiving for albums written by women where if a guy is like a piece of shit, and they want to talk about it, it’s like, “Yeah, let's fucking talk about it. Let's air that,” you know. But I'm not as interested in hearing men talk bad, to bad mouth women, it’s like not really very compelling to me. “The Martyr” is like kind of like, more or less from the word go, it's like kind of offering the female's perspective on it and giving this female, giving the woman an opportunity to take down the man and his bullshit.

A singer or somebody on stage who's using the sorrow for a goldmine, so to speak. Yeah, I think it's quite clearly, my impression of how somebody who would be an ex of mine specifically would, perceive of songs such as these. It's always complicated, right? For any writer to kind of take from their own experience. And then I think this is again, so much of like the struggle of what Domestica is about and like the overall unwillingness to kind of like clearly claim that it's just my own life. It's just like, it is and it isn't. And “The Martyr” is actually a good example. I mean, I don't know how Kim ever really felt about this album, but I went ahead and inserted her opinion into, you know, I kind of created that opinion for her. But in deference to her and much to my own folly, I suppose. You know, just kind of creating a, what I imagine would be not an unfair reaction that somebody might have to hearing an album that they might perceive as bullshit, you know.

“Shallow Means, Deep Ends”

The electronic drums that we use at the top of “Shallow Means, Deep Ends” is very much a product of another big influence of mine at the time, and a big influence of mine in general, Portishead. Although I've never been hard on myself for having Portishead influences the way I've been hard on myself about having Superchunk or Fugazi influences. I think the reason why is because Portishead is just such a, what a great band to take influence from, especially if you're kind of playing some kind of post-hardcore music. It's borrowing from a different genre, and that seems much wiser than borrowing from one's own genre. That's dangerous, I think. So yeah I just was, I had become infatuated with Portishead in the late nineties. And so it was kind of short lived, but for any real historians of what I do, which is like, maybe there's two of them out there, the drum sequences on both Domestica and also on the first Good Life record, which is called Novena on a Nocturn, which I want to say came out and also came out in 2000, or maybe it came out in 2001. To me, as the songwriter, they're really companion albums. They're both albums that are post that divorce and kind of touch on that relationship just with different sensibilities, with different attitudes. But they both also share this kind of very remedial electronic drum work that I was working on so hard. It was so difficult. It's so much easier to work on electronic drums with technology these days. Back then I was using like this little Alesis, I wish I could remember the name of it for any tech geeks out there. But anyways, it's just this little drum machine. And I'd spend hours and hours on and I ended up coming up with just a few remedial drum beats and one of them ended up on “Shallow Means.”

We placed this song third on the album because we had the impression that it was gonna be a much better received song. Turned out that “Casualty” and “Martyr” really are kind of two of the, I guess, best received songs on the album. Or maybe I might go with “The Martyr” and maybe “Radiator Hums,” I'm not really sure. It's nice that this album has a lot of different favorites, but I feel like “Shallow Means, Deep Ends” is not one of those (laughs). But it's a cool song. It's been nice playing it again. It's something that hasn't really, it wasn't really quite evergreen for us. We haven't taken it with us over the last two decades. So we've been playing it again for this Domestica tour and it's been great. It's one of my favorite songs to play on the set, probably for the most part because I haven't been playing it for the last 20 years. But it's a cool song.

There's not a ton of lyrics in this song and so it's a little bit more clear cut, I think, of drowning, you know. Drowning in a relationship. As far as the Eastern feel to “Shallow Means, Deep Ends,” I think that it might just come down to, well for one, not knowing music theory, which is, can be, advantageous, I think, in times, because you find yourself, you know, rooting around in different scales that you don't even understand what they are. And sometimes they end up being kind of Eastern. I also have an affinity, unintentionally, I think, for half steps. And I think that you find a lot of that in Eastern music as well. But yeah, I think sometimes I just, I end up in a different scale than I'm probably supposed to being in. Happened just recently on some of the new stuff that we were, that Cursive was working on. So I guess it keeps happening.

"Making Friends and Acquaintances”

You know, as far as any kind of loose concept that kind of works through it, I mean, we're on song four now, and I think that “Making Friends and Acquaintances,” as I said earlier, you know, “Casualty” was kind of weird. The album starts by being thrown into the action of maybe like a certain specific drunken evening or a drunken fight, you know. And by song four I think it's kind of, one could see it as laying out what's going on out in the world, you know that the album's not just one evening. Nor would I say it spans an entire relationship, I think it probably only spans this suffering tail end of this relationship, you know. So yeah “Making Friends and Acquaintances” I think it just explores that idea of like, “What is this couple like relative to their society, to their community? And what may they or may not they be getting into when they're out in the world on their own?”

Yeah for “Making Friends and Acquaintances,” this is one of the songs that Cursive didn't actually even, this was a song that we had to poach from… In between Cursive kind of breaking up and getting back together again, I was cobbling together a different band called Braces. And that was my wife at the time, Kim Hyman. It was Kim and I, she was playing bass, I was playing guitar, and Clint Schnase, Cursive's drummer, played drums with us. But we never played out, we were really just working on the songs and then we went and recorded them. And I think the idea was Kim and I were going to continue, actually I know the idea, the plan was, is that when we moved out to Portland, we tried out different drummers, including a gentleman from Kind of Like Spitting, played with him at one point, out in Portland. But, you know, then Kim and I divorced, disbanded, and the band disbanded. And so as we were trying to round out Domestica, I had these five songs from Braces, and we ended up putting them out on this Domestica reissue. It's a seven inch that we did that kind of goes along with the Domestica reissue. We did not include the recording of “Making Friends,” just because it's already, I mean it is interesting to hear the first version of it, but it's a little less compelling to us other than these four other songs that very well could have been also on Domestica. And I think they're interesting songs and I think at least at least a couple of them would have been cool on Domestica, but I'm not one to poach songs and put them from one band and put them to another or, you know, like I don't, that's something I've avoided for the most part for my entire career. So even then, it felt uncomfortable for me to go to Cursive, the band and kind of be like, “Well, I do have these other songs here and they maybe would have been Cursive songs had we kept going. And maybe we can, if we need to round out this album, maybe we can just kind of take one of these.” Interestingly, we took “Making Friends and Acquaintances,” which is a, much quieter, almost folky song in a way, probably the most folky song, I guess the folk song on the record, actually. I mean, if you want to call it folk, it seems like that's maybe a bit of a stretch, but, it follows more of a classic chord structure. So why we chose that one instead of some of the heavier stuff on Braces, I think I just really like this song a lot. I guess I just thought it was the song that stood out of those five songs. Cursive, the rest of the band, they were open to it. And Cursive did a nice job with it. I mean, it was already one quarter us anyways, Clint and I, but bringing, having, you know, Matt and Ted on it definitely brought the song to life.

“A Red So Deep”

It's a cool bit of history, just thinking about, because the Mogises have gone so far in their, with their productions and with their career. But at that time, they were buddies of ours that were just really talented and the music community was recognizing like, “Wow, the Mogises, like really know their shit.” So they had a house in Lincoln, Nebraska that they built out a real basic, you'd be surprised at how basic looking this studio was. It really wasn't even a studio. I mean, we really just kind of played in their basement. And they had a kind of like a back room. Like, kind of like a smaller, like, mud room, like, laundry room, type of room. Where they had a board and they had a tape machine. Actually, maybe they didn't have a tape machine yet. That might have been pre-tape machine. So it was pretty tight in there. And I'm now remembering we recorded this to ADAT. But yeah, everything was, it was really quite nice, I suppose. It didn't look nice, but their outboard gear I think was pretty decent already at that point. But also, you could say it was incredibly rudimentary to where they ended up years later. They were still kind of like building what they were doing. AJ really recorded that album. AJ's the older Mogis and Mike was more of an assistant at that time. But Mike was learning, with a voracious appetite. So I think by Ugly Organ already we were, we did Ugly Organ with Mike. But we continued to do other albums with AJ as well. They both have a great sensibility and they both have like impeccable ears. I think Mike would even agree that AJ even more so. AJ, I think he's an audio genius, probably, is probably what people would say. That's what I'm saying right now, how about that.

Ted sings on the verses of the song and for a while there, I started thinking that this was a song Ted wrote and I think that Ted has since come back to me and said like, “No.” But he did write, he wrote the lyrics for the verses that he sings and I think that may be some of the confusion. I think of it as a Ted song for that reason. I will say that there's a familiarity in the type of songwriting I do in the bassline. “Red So Deep” is kind of based around a bassline. So I wrote the song as a bassline. It's something that Matt McGinn and I have a very good relationship about with Cursive. Specifically, sometimes the song is written just as a bassline, which means that Matt's part is already written for him. But he's always been really cool about it. He doesn't mind that at all. And then he's able to like, give it flourishes and I've never written an entire composition for him. I’ve just kind of been like, “Here this riff, sorry, I already have this riff written,” and then he just kind of takes it on. But this song is a riff. It's yeah, as a decent amount of Cursive songs are, it's like a riff, it's a riff-based song. In that riff, I guess that was a long-winded way of saying that riff looks familiar to the way I write. So , I mean, it probably is something I wrote. I'm still not convinced, but it looks familiar. It has my DNA, but I consider it a Ted song cause he sings the majority of it.

Well, having Ted sing a decent amount on this record was really something that I wish that we've done a better job of keeping that up because, back to, you know, I mentioned bringing Ted in to the band was a difficult decision to make because of him being a songwriter already and didn't want to kind of curtail any of his own songwriting, but we also opened the door to him just to be like, “And also write whatever you want to write,” you know, like “we can be co-writers of this band and we'll bring you in singing,” you know, just kind of like wanted to bring Ted in as who he is, which is a songwriter. So he sings a decent amount on Domestica, though he didn't, as I understand now, it's like he didn't really write anything for that. He started writing stuff for Ugly Organ and for Happy Hollow. But, we did a good job of sharing vocal duties a bit more on Domestica, and I think it's great. It's just something that we've been doing less of, and I think that's regrettable. I think that, you know, it should be, I don't know, Ted's just such an important part of the band and I think that his vocals and his vocal presence is part of that as well.

For the end of “Red So Deep,” I think that's a nice moment on the record when we get into like the small falsetto section. I guess that's a female's perspective at the end. Most of the song is about questionable infidelity and frustrations that arise as a result. So the song, a lot of the song kind of is, a fight in a sense. And so the ending's kind of like a denouement, I guess, I suppose, of the other side of relationships, like if you're still going to be in a continued relationship, you need to make up at some point. And I think that's kind of what that nicer moment of the end of the song is. And me singing falsetto, it sounds silly, but I think it's pretty lame to consider female songwriters a genre and I try to avoid that notion the way that so much of this like goofy music industry like, you know, like creates like a genre unto a gender, you know, but it just so happens that I love I love the female voice and I love female songwriters I tend to lean that way when I'm when I'm looking for music that I like. And that's all to say that I also wish that I had the capacity to be a woman who could sing with a beautiful female voice. I don't get to do that, but I think it's moments like this in the song, in “Red So Deep” where I want to at least emulate that without it coming off as goofy or mockery or something like that. Certainly not mockery, but just, you don't want to be an idiot in like a Kids in the Hall impersonation of a woman or something like that. But I know in my own mind, I know what I'm wanting to do. And that is, I wish that I could, I wish that I were a woman sometimes so I could do what women do in music. And nowadays I think that I probably would have had that part sung by a woman. But when we were working on Domestica, we were very much a four piece band and as I kind of said at the top of this conversation, we weren't really looking at the notion of overdubs and, you know, you record an album in nine days and you pretty much were, just everyone lays down their parts and you mix it and you're done.

Such a cool production trick at the end of “Red So Deep.” I want to say that I remember the specific rack outboard gear that they used for it, but it's not true, because I think the one I'm thinking of is something that Mike didn't get until, I don't remember if it was called like a Diffuser or something like that, but it was a pretty cool piece that he got when we started working on Happy Hollow, and we used it a lot then. But it's a similar, it was of a similar kind of deconstruction, that sound. It's like it was, we were doing it to the drums, and it's basically like really oversaturating it and then, man, as not an audio engineer, I'm not finding the right words about it, but by so grossly oversaturating it, it also kind of like deconstructs upon itself. If that's a good way to put it. I don't think it's a great way to put it, but there's people out there who understand what I'm trying to say. But that's cool as hell. And also, you know, they were doing that a handful of years before I think that became very popular. There's any, you know, like myriad of guitar pedals that want to create that same kind of sound. Not saying that they're, it's like the Mogis sound from Domestica, but you know, they were doing that earlier on and they created it, I’m sure it was all analog, the way they created it.

“The Lament of Pretty Baby”

AJ likes stuff far heavier than Cursive. AJ introduced me to Eyehategod back then. They grew up in North Platte and they grew up with a lot of metal. The way you do when you grew up in North Platte, Nebraska (laughs). Let's see, “The Lament of Pretty Baby,” I guess talking about metal, I mean, I certainly wouldn't call it a metal song, but it's definitely a different approach.

“The Lament of Pretty Baby” is kind of a heavier riff. Was it maybe the heaviest riff on the record? I think my impression is that it is. And, I should say too, similar to the Mogis Brothers, I also like metal. I didn't really grow up with metal at all. It's something, oddly I started embracing metal as an adult, which I think is the exact opposite way that we're supposed to do it. I think you're supposed to love it when you're a kid and then you grow out of it or something, but I'm still learning, I'm still like I'm on my lifelong journey of learning metal and hardcore. I think it's great, it just excites me. I tend to explain my relationship with metal and hardcore as similar to jazz in that I also love jazz, but I can't say I totally understand it. I love to listen to it and I love to count with it, and I love to hear the innovation of metal and jazz, but it's hard for me to really understand it the way like a true metalhead does. You know like a true metalhead who like can hear like all the subtleties between like the nuance between what makes something death metal and what makes this, what makes this death metal and what makes this grind, you know, like, I don't know, I can't figure that out. But, all to say, back to “Lament of Pretty Baby,” this is not hardly what I would call a metal riff, but it's like a heavier, uglier, or more aggressive riff that I've kind of flirted with over the last 30 years, as it's just another thing that I'm interested in. And I think a lot of these ideas don't tend to make it onto albums, but this one did, and I think that's cool.

Is it fair to say that this song just has a lot more attitude than some of the other songs? Ted didn't care for the song that much after the fact and didn't want to play it for a long time. And I wish I didn't bring that up because I feel like it'd be more fair for him to explain why. Cause now I'm gonna put, now I'm gonna speak for him and say that I have a hunch that he might feel that the riff is derivative in its own way of just kind of being like, “This isn't quite Cursive. This is maybe a little bit closer of like, Tim's, like, occasional dalliance into wanting to find more aggressive songwriting.” Cursive as a band is like the lightest hard rock band, I think, or something. You know, it's like, we're kind of not hard rock, but then sometimes we're very hard rock, but it's just kind of sprinkled throughout or something. It's confusing even to us, and it's made us, to our own demise. It's kind of left us a little bit genre-less at times, and so people don't know where to, who are we supposed to tour with? Sometimes we don't know. But we've gotten a chance to open for Mastodon, you know? But, you know, Mastodon fans would flip us off. But it was still cool to get to open for Mastodon, what a dream. I fucking love Mastodon.

Yeah, I kind of just kind of went off for a while just on the riff itself, which feels a little bit out of character. But the song itself, “The Lament of Pretty Baby,” it started as just a bad, a little bit of trauma that Matt and I have in our life. So Matt and I were essentially brothers. We grew up on the same block and were placed in front of each other when we were infants. And so we've just grown up literally side by side. And we also grew up with a gaggle of sisters. Both of us are the youngest. And he has three older sisters and I have four older sisters. So we've grown up under their wings and under their protection and under their guidance. And also, it made me scared of men, you know? I grew up scared of men because they would, because men would, like, make lewd suggestions toward my older sisters. They'd like, hit on my older sisters. And it scared me and it made me really hateful as well. And Matt endured that as well. Anyways, a traumatic experience that we went through is one of Matt's older sisters was approached on the street, like, walking home from school. It was kind of like lewd conduct, and was like, nearly could have been abducted. But it was, like, a sexual harassment and she came home and it was terrifying. And I think that it's, you know, I think that everything turned out, everything turned out fine, I mean, thankfully nothing too bad actually happened. But we were young boys and were kind of there at the wrong time and I think that we were kind of being ushered out of the room, you know. But it was scary and stayed with me. So the song started about just a reflection about that and then I kind of recognized what I was getting at, in context to my current situation at the time of, back to like the relationship that we were writing about. And so, yeah, it ended up being a song about kind of being pro, the strength of women. Like the strength that women kind of have to endure and have to uphold when dealing with piles of shit that are the other half, of males, you know.

It kind of goes back to the fight at the end, I suppose, you know, I think it can be kind of interchangeable at that point, like who's really speaking, but you know, like one trying to present themselves as strong. I think it's kind of like the heat of an argument, pretending that you're the strong one and recognizing you're not the strong one. But also I'm just so often on the attack on myself in my songwriting and thinking about the way the song kind of like wraps itself up. I step out of the song myself toward the end and kind of just call myself out for like martyring again, you know, I suppose. So just like you're hurting this other person, but yet you're still managing to find ways to show that you also hurt yourself or, you know, like turning it back onto myself, I suppose. I suppose that makes the song a little bit less cohesive and a little bit confusing, but kind of like open for interpretation for the listener. But if I were to parse it out myself, I would say, yeah, there's kind of a separation at the end there, where I'm back to kind of attacking myself. But attacking myself from the vantage point of the woman in the relationship.

“The Game of Who Needs Who the Worst"

“Game of Who Needs Who the Worst” is one of my favorites on the record. I think it's just the fact, the composition, I think it's an interesting composition. I appreciate that we let ourselves stretch out through the opening with kind of a trippy-ish instrumental section. This album doesn't have a lot of room for that, it seems like. It's a pretty tight album. We let ourselves go off at the end of “Red So Deep,” I think that's a nice moment as well. But so yeah, we're kind of having an instrumental moment at the beginning of “Game of Who Needs Who The Worst” is, I quite like that, and it really, it's just because we were kind of smitten by the section.

So I think what happened is that I had written my guitar part in 3/4 and Matt had accidentally written in 4 over it. But as young music learners, you know, 3s and 4s, they meet at 12. So we learned that we could create a loop that I could play in 3 and he could play in 4 and we would still end up meeting every 12th bar or whatever, meeting up again. That was a cool little revelation for us, fancy little music trick in any song. There's a lot of storytelling in this song that I like. I think it evokes a lot of imagery for me and the ambient music at the top, the instrumental ambient section at the top, ambient maybe is a stretch but ambient for this album anyway, I think it all kind of evokes imagery and I wonder what everyone else sees. The song's like very green for me, like it looks green, and it's set in a pretty nice cocktail party that's like really dimly lit, but it's also green. It's very dimly lit and green. I don't know, I hope that other people can relate to that. But I like that, I appreciate that about this song, is that it really helps evoke imagery for me.

It's a pretty ugly song. It's like the lyrical content, it's really the ugliest probably of the album, but that makes me appreciate it as well, I think it's great. I'm always supportive of any time that I'm willing to kind of go a little bit further out to really expose what I think is really trashy and gross about humanity and that includes in what we see in ourselves too. I think that that's kind of more of like a raw exposing of our actions and our reactions. It's an ugly song for me because it is from a male perspective and then it's like the male being really smug and being really ugly, which frankly, I can be. I'm a human being, you know (laughs), like I know what it's like, but I also see it in other people as well. So I find it to be an interesting, like it's like an interesting case study, I think is maybe the way I would see this song. I like that it paints kind of specific, maybe a little bit closer to specific scenarios of a certain evening. To me also, I know I don't need to be saying this, but it's also fictionalized.

Kim would have no connection to this song. I just don't have any like historical connection to it. But it's the feelings, you know, it's the feelings of what we were going through and how we were just how we can get so bitter towards, how we can be so bitter toward one another. I'll say respect to Kim or just to anyone I've dated or been with, strong motherfuckers (laughs). You know, like strong dominant women that are fucking cool. And so yeah, I guess I should say too that I guess that's kind of something about this record too is it's not really cookie cutter or black and white as far as like the aggressive moments equal male or, you know, it's kind of shared amongst gender I guess.

“The Radiator Hums”

“Radiator Hums” has been a controversial song for us on this record, similar to “Lament of Pretty Baby,” I suppose. I think that fans of this album just really fucking hate it when I attack this, I go on the attack on this song. And again, I said earlier, there's like, there's no songs on this album that I'm embarrassed of or anything like that. And I just, I'll say that as a disclaimer, as I'll now, like, kind of defame the song just a little bit, just moderately. We didn't play “Radiator Hums” for a while because we felt, again, that it came off as too derivative, not even of stuff that we listen to much. It just seemed too derivative of the moment. It just had a really big kind of power chorus to it. And that's just not really who we are. Maybe I should say, when we recognize that we're doing something that, as we're working on music, if we can recognize like, “Oh that's just as kind of like a typical big major-chord power chorus vibe, that's just kind of very like fist pumping hard rock. If we find ourselves dabbling in that will have a tendency to do something counter, like we'll go in a different direction with it. With “Radiator Hums, it just all kind of came together the way it did. And probably for good reason, because people really like this song a lot. And I totally respect that and I enjoy playing it too. What I really love about “Radiator,” though, is the verses. The verses for me make up for what I think is just kind of an average okay chorus or you know what? How about this? The chorus is probably really good. It's just not to my tastes, if that's fair, if people can be okay with that. It's not really, it's just not really my wheelhouse of musical interest as much. But the verses, I think, are some of my favorite moments on the album and so, I love this song for that reason. I love to play it acoustically because when I play it acoustically just on my own, I'm able to diffuse the choruses a little bit into something that I think is like, that makes more sense to me. And I also really get to play up the falsetto and the beauty of the verses. And the verses again is this female's perspective. And I just really, I'm just really into what she's saying. I almost feel like it's not me. I guess it is, I mean, I wrote it, but I guess I get into that song enough that I feel like that voice. I'm really patting myself on the back here, I apologize everyone (laughs), but I feel like that voice comes off as accurate enough I guess or as authentic enough that I enjoy performing it because I feel like I'm performing somebody else's piece and I just like what she says. She's like a real, she's very empowered at that point, and I think it's great.

A radiator plays a big role in Eraserhead and I suppose people can interpret it in different ways, but I think the radiator is, I don't know if I should say simply put, I don't think it's simple as far as the symbolism, but it's just this thing that continues to like rattle and hum in his apartment and in his like intense anxiety and depression, he just like stares at it and it consumes him. And it ends up just being kind of like symbolic or emblematic of his anxiety and his depression. I think. Something like that. So the film Eraserhead is astonishing to me. I'm just a huge fan of that movie. I understood it, which I think is, can sound hilarious to a lot of people because I think I understand that movie. I think I understand everything about that movie. That movie comes across to me like a very linear, like, Cameron Crowe story or something (laughs). I think it's just being, I saw it when I was a young adult. And just the fear of being caught in a relationship and accidentally impregnating somebody. And it's a male movie. It's a very male movie. It's about young men being terrified of responsibility, being terrified of adulthood. And that has been such a huge influence. And I think it just, it resonated with me so absolutely. I think I'm terrified of responsibility probably as just like a typical male, I think. The Graduate is also one of my favorite movies. And it's just kind of, like, this weird male fantasy of just, like, kind of getting to be, like, “ Can my life just be about nothing? Can I just do nothing in life? Can I just, like, float around? And can I like fall in love with a woman, but also like have sex with her mom?” And you know, just like a lot of, just like it's kind of an awful movie (laughs). And it's so narcissistic, you know, but I really I relate to all that because sadly also I mean, I'm glad that we can be talking about representing a female perspective on this record, but I also have to accept and admit that I'm also, I grew up male, or I am male, you know. As much as I wish I wasn't, I guess, you know. But it's just kind of like what I have to deal with. But I like to be honest about that and I like to take a shit on men and on me (laughs).

“The Night I Lost the Will to Fight”

“The Night I Lost the Will to Fight,” it was an unfinished song that never would make a record in these days. Which is wild, because I think it's a really neat song, and people really like the song, and it ended up being a really effective closer for this record. But I can't even speak to the composition that much, because when I hear it, I think I hear it so differently than people who know this record. I can't really speak to the composition because I don't quite understand the composition because it's unfinished to me, like it sounds like, it ends up being kind of unique for a Cursive song for that reason, which I appreciate. It's kind of experimental to me, it comes off as experimental and largely instrumental and I don't generally write instrumentally, I almost never do. So the lyrics on this song, “I Lost the Will to Fight,” are really less about a vocal lead and more of just like another instrument. They chant, they just, they repeat things, they repeat lines from other parts of the album. They just kind of have a repetitive mantra that they say. So to me, it's just like another instrument melody on the song, and I think that's interesting. To me, that's interesting for a Cursive song, and I think it's interesting for the record.

It brings something different than the other songs don't. But clearly we liked it enough that we thought it would be cool on the record. And I think it's probably just me being kind of persnickety of just feeling like, “Well I never quite got a chance to lay all my ideas out for that song before we rushed in to record the album in nine days.” But it did give me an opportunity, as it was, I think one of the last songs. I mean it was, it must have been one of the last songs we wrote, or one of the last songs we chose to be on the record. And it gave me the opportunity to put a bow on the record, to kind of like to tie a bow at the end of the whole thing. It afforded me the opportunity to bring it back to the top by citing, “The night has fallen down the staircase,” to kind of try to help bring a cohesion to the album. But also lyrically, it's important to note that this is why we've always contended that it's technically not a divorce record, is that the couple doesn't break up. And the couple, instead, it's the night that I lost the will to fight. Yet another night that ends in an argument and ends in defeat.

This, I feel, is from a male perspective. It's essentially feeling overall defeatist and just being like, “I can't fight anymore.” I'm just going to stop fighting and I'll accept my lot in this relationship. And I do think it's more common, I think it's actually far more common for men to do this than women. I suppose you could always come up with different examples and you can't really make the stereotype, but I feel like we can probably both or any of us can think of plenty of examples of men who just clam up. You know, like later in life and they just stop talking. It's kind of sad really, you know, they just stop fighting. It's kind of weird (laughs). But you know, for any examples that you can think of like that you can also think of like plenty of really sad scenarios of women who are kind of muzzled, you know, or kind of like kept under the thumb of their like male counterpart. So there's that too. They lose the will to fight because they're kind of not allowed to, I mean, I suppose you can see it both ways.

We were really fairly gobsmacked at the reaction that the album got. We just aren't used to that. Like most musicians, you're not used to, you know, you make something and you get really excited about it and you can daydream about its success, but you don't truly anticipate it, you know? Or I should say, certainly not if you're coming out of Omaha, Nebraska, it's just not really what one expects. So yeah, I remember quite vividly being out on tour. We're doing a co-headlining tour with Small Brown Bike, a band from Michigan who are still really close friends of ours to this day. And we're playing appropriately very small rooms but as the tour was going along, those rooms were like filling up and like selling out and ended up, some of them just being like packed with people waiting outside or like wanting to get in. And it blew our minds, we couldn't quite process it, you know. But that was a lot of fun though too, what was most fun about it was just being around the country eventually, even then and being in Europe and just people singing their songs and you know, like we're a local band so we understood being a part of a community in Omaha, but now you're kind of a part of a community in like Richmond, Virginia, I think I remember playing Richmond, Virginia on that tour and just being like, “Well, this is wild. I guess, now we're like, we're part of this community, at least for the night.” Domestica was the first time that it seemed like we were kind of part of a conversation and I never expected that. And I still feel really flattered about that. And I'm still flattered by people's appreciation for it so many years later, if maybe I should say more flattered by that, actually. It’s one thing to do something that kind of makes waves in the moment, but to have something that can kind of keep its stamina going, it's pretty wild and I'm really proud of that. I look back now at that success and I wish I would have understood it more and appreciated it more. Truly, I just didn't understand it. I can look back now and be like, “Holy shit, like you had, like there was, you were really a part of that conversation there for a while. That's a pretty big deal.” But I didn't know, I didn't understand it at the time, and frankly, I think that's better. You know, it's better that we didn't really understand it, because that way it couldn't really get to our heads, go to our heads. And it never did. I'm glad it didn't consume us at all. And back to saying, like, looking back at it, I wish it would have consumed me a little bit. I wish I would have, and going back to just like, I wish I could have appreciated it some more. But I just didn't really understand it. But I think that's cool. I think that's cool to kind of, like, to not have grown up in LA and had, like a dad who was in Steely Dan or something. I don't know. I'm probably calling somebody out. I don't mean to. I just threw out Steely Dan randomly (laughs). I'm sure they have children. You know, cause then your perspective would be so different. We had zero perspective. And I think that's great.

I don't recall Kim and I ever really having a conversation about it. I think it'd be an awkward conversation. I don't talk about my records with the people that I'm close to in my life, I never have. So I think with Kim and with Domestica, it's the same thing. It's just like, you know, I think it's just an awkward conversation. It's like everything's laid out and if something in it would have really truly pissed her off, I think she would have brought it up to me. I hope. But shortly after it came out, I mean, she was really supportive and seemed, you know, excited at times about the reaction that the record was getting and stuff. So she seemed nothing other than supportive about it and she's always been very supportive of what I'm doing in music. And I really appreciate that. We'd been really out of touch for years and for a good amount of years and I reached out to her about this reissue and about the fact that we were gonna finally put our Braces songs on to a 7 inch and she was just delighted. She just thought it was really cool and there wasn't much more to say than that. You know, she's kind of busy with her own life (laughs). So she's like not really, you know, I'm sure to her that just seems like a thousand years ago.

But other reactions, and I've told this story a few times, but it is funny and worth noting. My grandma was really pissed off about Domestica. She saw it, and it's not unfair the way she saw it. It's what we talked about earlier in this conversation that I also grappled with, which is, “Should I really be airing all of this, all of my personal life out into the world like this?” And my grandma says, “No.” She's like, “No you shouldn't be.” She saw it as kind of, you know, cause she's also very Catholic and so divorce, she was ashamed of my divorce, you know and just kind of really did not appreciate that I was running around letting everyone know that I got a divorce (laughs). That I was in a messy relationship that ended up in divorce, you know.

I can only assume that there were certain people that were coming out to the show specifically because they felt the need to talk to me about their relationship that they're currently going through. And I'd listen and I would try to offer advice that I could, but oftentimes too, I ended up kind of just saying what became like a running joke for me, which was, “Do you really think you should be asking me?” You know, like, “If anything, I think I just kind of exposed that I don't know how to do it.” But that's not necessarily true. You know, I'm not a licensed therapist (laughs). But in that, there's just a lot of beauty in that too. There's just a lot of camaraderie. And people, you know, resonated with something that I sang about and spoke about. And you can kind of find kinship in that when you're going through that.

Outro:
Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Cursive. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase Domestica. Instrumental music by Flooding. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"The Casualty”

“The Martyr”

“Shallow Means, Deep Ends”

“Making Friends and Acquaintances”

“A Red So Deep”

“The Lament of Pretty Baby”

“The Game of Who Needs Who the Worst”

“The Radiator Hums”

“The Night I Lost the Will to Fight”

Recorded and Mixed at Dead Space by Mike & A.J. Mogis

Mastered at Dead Space by A.J. Mogis and at Studio B by Doug Van Sloun

Produced by Mike Mogis

Vocals/Guitar: Tim Kasher

Bass/Vocals: Matt Maginn

Drums: Clint Schnase

Guitar/Vocals” Ted Stevens

Additional Instruments: Mike Mogis

Episode Credits:

Intro/Outro Music:

“Muzzle” by Flooding from Silhouette Machine

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam