**The Making of LeT Go by Nada Surf - featuring Matthew Caws**

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.

Nada Surf formed in New York City in 1992 by Matthew Caws and Daniel Lorca. The two of them had been friends in school and played together in a band previously. Nada Surf had had two different drummers by the time Ira Elliott joined in 1995. At a show in New York, Matthew Caws happened to meet Ric Ocasek and gave him a demo tape. Ocasek offered to record them if they were able to get a record deal. Luckily, Elektra Records signed them soon after and their debut album, High/Low was released in 1996. Their second album, The Proximity Effect, was released in Europe in 1998 before Elektra decided not to release it in the U.S. and dropped the band. With no record contract, Nada Surf began recording their third album. Let Go was eventually released in Europe in 2002 and the U.S. in 2003.

In this episode, for the 20th anniversary, Matthew Caws reflects on how the album came together. This is the making of Let Go.

Matthew Caws: Hey, this is Matthew from Nada Surf, and I'm talking to Dan Nordheim for this Life of the Record podcast. We're talking about Let Go, which is Nada Surf’s third album. That was absolutely a turning point in terms of how we were perceived. You know, the fact that our record, our first album, was produced by Ric Ocasek and our first single was kind of funny, and even just, I feel like dumb stuff played into it, like, I used to wear glasses cause I was like reading the lyrics from “Popular” on stage and stuff (laughs). There was a lot of Weezer comparing going on and I think they're awesome, but I don't really feel like that's a valid comparison. So when a lot of the press for Let Go was like, “Oh. Well that's a surprise. I didn't really take those guys seriously. That record's pretty good.” (laughs) You know, that felt like the general gist of all the press and you know, that's great. That was an improvement. That was a big improvement.

The atmosphere in which I wrote those songs and we worked up those songs was different and it was different because my life was in a particularly relaxed and low pressure place that it had never been actually. Not for our first records. I grew up in Manhattan. I think one of the truisms about New York is that it has this unearned reputation as being full of obnoxious people. But if anyone's gruff with you on the street and asks you to get out of the way or seems put upon, it's because it's so expensive to live there and people are stressed out and a lot of people have more than one job. So that atmosphere is kind of where I was for the first bands and the first records, I was either in school or I was working any number of jobs and paying a lot in rent. Nada Surf was the third band I was in. I was in one called The Cost of Living that was probably ‘85 to ‘88 or something. And then I was in a band called Because Because Because with a really great songwriter called Robert Randall, and a great drummer called Alex Gomez, who sadly passed away a few years ago. And Daniel (Lorca), the four of us, and then that band. And then Nada Surf started up. We made a 45 called “The Plan,” and then one night we were playing a show at a place called The Rebar. A lovely guy called Bobby McCain came up to me after the show and said, “Hey, I work at No.6 Records.” And that, that was my dream, you know, some guy from a label I thought was good, asked me for a tape. So I said, “Wonderful,” and I gave him a cassette. And the next day he called me and said, “Well, actually, my day job is at Elektra and I played it for a friend and he played it for his boss. And now they want you to come in.” And so we went up that day and they offered us a deal.

Meanwhile, two weeks before that, I'd met Ric Ocasek at the Knitting Factory in New York. I was leaving a show, he was coming in and I really liked him as a producer and I loved the Cars anyway, and so I introduced myself to him and gave him a cassette, and he was very, very nice about it. And I thought I'd never hear from him. But a couple of weeks after meeting Ric, he called me and invited me to his house and said, “Whatever this is, you should put it out, but if you ever wanna re-record these songs, I'd like to produce it. Are you on a label or anything?” I said, no, we don't have anything. And he said, “Okay, well keep my number. Let's stay in touch.” So that's how we ended up making a record with him. The reason I had the nerve to introduce myself to Ric is because two weeks before that, I was on the subway in New York and Mitch Easter was sitting a few seats away reading the daily news. And I love him and I love Let’s Active. And of course I love the production on the early R.E.M. records, of course, of course. They're incredible. And I was too nervous. I couldn't do it. I had a tape in my pocket, I couldn't do it. And it's really funny because I met him years and years later at a dB’s show where he was guesting on guitar. And I introduced myself and I told him that story and he said, “You chose the other path, man. Who knows what would’ve happened?” (laughs) And he is right. He's right. I should have said hi.

But so, our first record came out, High/Low. “Popular,” the single, took off much faster than they expected. We made a video for it pretty quickly, and that got a ton of play. It was the most played video on MTV for the whole summer of ‘96. That's all amazing. But our record wasn't in stores yet because all this happened faster than they expected. So this insane amount of crazy exposure happened with no record. And then as the single started to go down, the record came out. It did okay, but it would've done a lot better. I'm not complaining, this is just like, it seems like part of the story, I guess, you know? And then we started making a second album. And it was produced by Fred Maher, who I was a big fan of as a producer. He made the first Luna album, Lunapark, and Matthew Sweet Girlfriend. Anyway, so Fred Maher produced that, a guy called Chris Fudurich engineered it and then, you know, it was this period when commercial alternative being a really commercial thing, that window was closing. And so I think there was a little panic around records so our A&R guy was pretty panicked about it and didn't think that there were any singles on the record. I would say in retrospect, in our defense, that record's pretty good, and I think a couple of those songs would sound pretty good on the radio. Doesn't matter. So that record didn't do well “on phones.” It didn't get good “phones,” test marketing, but it came out in Europe on time. But then a couple weeks later, the Elektra decided that they weren't gonna put it out at all and dropped us. And then the labels in Europe had to not distribute the record anymore and it was gone and it was over.

So then I found myself back home in Brooklyn, got a job at the record store, waited until we could get the rights back to The Proximity Effect and put it out ourselves. By the time we were writing the songs for Let Go, I'd found myself in a really cheap apartment in Brooklyn with no real job pressure because I'd felt that I was supposed to go to grad school or be a teacher or go to journalism school, do something career-ish. But because the band had had some kind of success, it seemed like being in a band professionally was feasible, although it wasn't going anywhere after we got dropped, and I spent a good year and a half, two years, just bumming around. But you know, I worked in a record store and had come across a really cheap apartment. The life that I had was more music focused than it ever had been before, because, again, my rent was cheap and all I did was work at the store during the day, go see shows at night, write songs, mess around with a 4-track mess around with an 8-track. That's all I did, you know, for two years.

The music I was really into at the time was everything I'd been into before, which was just, you know, a combination of like nineties indie rock, eighties indie rock and classic rock and stuff. But I had this cassette that had Hank Williams’ Greatest Hits and the Kinks’ Village Green on either side. And I listened to that more than anything. That just kept on flipping in my cassette Walkman. This was post years of a CD Walkman, but for whatever reason, I still had this cassette Walkman. I love the Sony Sports Walkman, both the CD and the cassette ones, those yellow ones, you can drop them, indestructible, absolutely fantastic. I wish I had one now. I would probably be listening to it today if I had one. So yeah, Hank Williams and Village Green were probably my most listened to things then. I don't know if that had an influence, possibly. You know, another thing about being in New York as a band is that rehearsing is expensive. So I think that it led us to play really fast in the past, you know, and so that's not from like a hardcore past, and I'm not saying we're that fast but it's pretty, pretty bonkers. I saw like, there's a video on YouTube of us opening for playing with Superdrag in Knoxville, Tennessee and we were playing so fast. It’s ridiculous. And I think it's because this kind of training of when you're young, you know, you're paying like 14, $15 an hour for a practice space and you don't have a lot of time. You know, I don't think Slint would've happened in a New York practice space. Just there isn't time to just like be really expansive like that. I mean, maybe if you're really mature, maybe we were immature, I don't know what it is, but for us, it made us quick. But you know, we were slow to change. So it just took us a while to do anything except just the kind of most obvious to us, go, go, go. But Let Go, for some reason, I think, cause we just had all this time.

"Blizzard of '77"

“Blizzard of ‘77,” I wrote in a hotel that's like right downtown called the American Hotel in Amsterdam. And I was sharing a room with Daniel and he was asleep and I had this song in my head and I had been working on a couple of chords. So I thought all of a sudden I could maybe see how a lot of it would go. And I had the cheapest Tascam 4-track cassette, one that had like two faders and you had to choose for each fader if you wanted to be track one or two, or track three or four. I mean, it was like the most bare bones one that sounded terrible because the microphone picked up the sound of the motor. So there was a bassline like “ksssshhhh.” Yeah I have a 4-track version from the hotel and then next time we did it was at a studio called The Magic Shop in New York, where I was an intern in the early nineties for a couple of years, just making coffee and cleaning up and resetting the board and stuff. And my boss there, a lovely guy called Steve Rosenthal, gave us a couple of free days cause he knew we were, you know, maybe getting a little somewhere and also having this down period where we just gotten dropped and we were trying to do things ourselves. And so he threw me a, a nice bone, a couple of free days and we did “Blizzard of ‘77,” “Happy Kid” and “Neither Heaven Nor Space.”

But I remember writing “Blizzard of ‘77” in the bathroom while he was asleep. And it's pretty much as is somehow. That's a pro or con about some of our songs sometimes is that some of them I really work over, but other times I'll like just write something and it just feels done. And that doesn't mean it couldn't be better, it probably could. There's enough of a feeling there that I think, “All right, that's done.”

"Happy Kid"

It was mixed kind of haphazard, it was overdubbed haphazard, but it was tracked, yeah three songs at The Magic Shop and the Rest at Palendrome, which is a studio in Venice Beach where we'd made The Proximity Effect. And that's where we did the rest of it. So Chris Walla mixed three songs on this record, I think he mixed “Blizzard of ‘77,” “Killian’s Red” and “Happy Kid.” Yeah so the story about “Happy Kid” that I love is that we did it at Studio Litho, which is Pearl Jam’s studio in Seattle. And I'm eternally grateful to Chris for this because it happened because I'd been starting to talk to Josh Rosenfeld at Barsuk who I'd gotten in touch with because of the Death Cab record, Something About Airplanes, and also somebody that I'd worked with at Guitar World. I was a not very good music journalist a long time ago and knew the Barsuk publicist, but through these two angles, I was really interested in that label and was starting to talk to him and so maybe Chris had heard the CD of the rough mixes and was interested. But anyway, a hundred dollars a song, days off between tours, new girlfriend and sick. So all of those things, and he still did it. So I'm very, very grateful. And also, especially cause he did an amazing job. But, so with “Happy Kid,” he said, “Alright, well give me,” you know, I can't remember, “give me an hour. Let me just work on sounds and stuff.” So I didn't want to be in his hair, so I went and got a coffee or something and sat around and then he said, “Alright come and check it out.” And this is off two inch tape. He hit play on the machine and didn't touch the console, did not touch anything, and there was no automation on the console, so there are no mutes are unmutes. There are no fades, nothing. He just found the right balance and the right amount of compression for it just to live like that. I was very impressed. I've sat next to 9 million mixes and I've never seen anybody do one where nothing moved, and it sounded that dynamic, you know. It was pretty great.

I think the root of that song is a different song that I never wrote, but that I remember thinking about. I've always felt, you know, like a positive/negative person, you know, confident/zero confidence. I was a floater in school, you know, I had some friends and stuff, but I was also a loner. I was just always kind of a bit of both, you know. I was on the street, I was doing an errand. I used to live on 79th between Lexington and 3rd. So yeah, I was a few blocks from my house and I was thinking, “I've been happy, happy, happy, happy, happy ever since I was born. I've been sad, sad, sad, sad, sad ever since I was born.” And it had a little tune, which is really, really goofy. Nobody wanted it (laughs). I played or sang this song to the band and they're like, they're not having it. But it was, (sings) “happy, happy, happy, happy, happy ever since I was born,” like that. And I remember sprinting home because I had that melody and I had those words and I thought like, that was really something, or was not really something, that was something. So I sprinted home and anyway, it never got further than that. But that's the root of the song, you know, it's just that, that happy/sad thing. You know, it comes in waves. I've always felt like that. I'm happier the older I get, so it's less ping pong than it used to be, but it used to be a lot of ping pong between those two. Not in extremes, but enough to feel that pendulum swing. I mean, after saying that, if I'm running the lyrics over my mind, they just kind of, it all lines up with that.

The roller coaster imagery. I remember going up the Cyclone with a friend, the Cyclone at Coney Island, and I remember with a friend and his parents when I was like eight years old. And I think I was being all like, “This is easy!” On the way up, you know, “This is nothing, this is fun, this is awesome, look how far we can see, this is great. this is fun.” And right as it crests over the top it's like, “Oh shit!” (laughs). I always remembered that kind of, it's not chutzpah but you think everything's fine and then, there's a surprise (laughs).

"Inside of Love"

Just like “Happy Kid,” it's the only other time I ran home. I had something, I had the verses, “Watching terrible TV, it kills all thought, getting spacier than an astronaut.” I had a bit of that stuff, but I was in McCarren Park, which was near my house in Brooklyn, really crowded Saturday, a lot of people around, sitting on a park bench. And I finally could kind of see it, being inside it, talking about love as a place that I could be below that I could look up at, you know, that there would be gates around like a park, I guess maybe, cause I was sitting in a park, I don't know. But I sprinted home again, really crowded, I had to weave through people because I could feel that I kind of had that melody and I was gonna lose it.

I don't have incredible memory. I'm always very impressed by, you know, Noel Gallagher, the first couple of Oasis Records. He said that he never put anything on cassette or anything. He said, “If it's good, I'll remember it.” I have none of that confidence at all (laughs). I will forget it. Anyway, so I sprinted home. I had, I can't find it now, I had a red, red hundred dollar Danelectro six string that I really liked to play, sitting on my sofa unplugged. I mean, the impetus of the song is just pretty clear. I've always wanted a family and I've always wanted to be married, but I was also really scared of it. My parents didn't have a great marriage, so I was very afraid of getting it wrong. From living inside their not great marriage. I could see how sort of harrowing it could be if it wasn't right. I knew the chorus was gonna be about that. It was about, I had a yearning, you know, a yearning to be in love and to know love, and to know love that wasn't scary, to be inside it, rather than trying to get in it or out of it, you know, just to be in it and safe and happy and love and be loved, you know? But I didn't know how to express that.

There's something about some weird chords in the second verse that I'd sort of stolen from a Bossa nova song, but kind of in reverse. I think, “Quiet Night of Quiet Stars.” There's some shape in there that I was trying to cop. And then the only other change in that song, so that bit, that sounds like a bridge, (sings) “I know the last page so well. I can't see the first, it’s getting worse.” That that part, the chords creep up, that's where the Bossa nova chord is. That used to be the chord pattern of the entire song that happened two times a verse during the whole song until we got to Palendrome, the studio, where we were recording. And finally, thank God, it occurred to me that the problem was that the song was too fussy. So I took all those chords and it just reduced itself to a three chord song. For the verses it's just three chords. And so that was much better (laughs). And part of the impetus for fixing it came from a deadline and the deadline was that we were recording there and I have a friend, Danny Goldfield, who had a friend from film school who wanted to make a video and she said, “Okay, I want to do a video for you, is next weekend okay?” And we, you know, it was gonna be free or pretty free, at least, we're like, “Sure, of course. What song?” And we thought that was the best candidate. But I also knew there was, maybe we all collectively also knew there was something wrong. Like there was a fussiness, a fastideousness in it, it was overcooked. So that gave us the deadline fever to fix it. So I think it probably wouldn't have been fixed as effectively if it weren't for that deadline.

"Fruit Fly"

At the time, yeah I was just having takeout sitting at the dinner table and saw these flies flying around over probably yesterday's takeout. And I'm pretty tidy, but, you know, we've all had our moments. So I had a, I was having an untidy year maybe, and got up from the table, went into the living room, picked up a guitar, pretty much recorded that whole thing onto cassette, and then sat back down and finished dinner.

It's exactly as it was. I used to smoke pot. I don't anymore. It's been a kind of a long time, but I did then. So, you know, a lot of those songs were written high and I'm not embarrassed about that, like it's nothing to hide. Like I never, I came very late to pot, like really late, like late twenties, believe it or not. Once when I was 16, I didn't like it, but in my late twenties I did, and so I've never used this word, it's not germane to the story, it's not important to the story, but it is kind of, because, you know, instant songs like that just coming to you so fast, you really have to be out of your own way. And that's, I think, what pot did for me and now I managed to get out of my own way. Not as effectively as that, but more than I could have before. So for that and a bunch of other reasons, I don't do it anymore, but, it's never happened that easily or that fast before. I'm really grateful it did that one time. I remember like, it's somehow your fault. They wouldn't exist if I hadn't left that food out and now I'm going to take it away. You know, I felt bad for them and I felt a little cruel. That's why I say, sorry, in the song.

Another little thing about that song is that I was and have been sometimes self-conscious about how often I write like diary style, you know, just write about myself, my own feelings and my own experience, etc. That's most of the time, and I really admire people and songs where it feels like it's third person, you know, it's about somebody else. Like you don't remember at the time like listening to probably Cellar Door, that John Vanderslice record, unless that was after, I don't know. I think it was around then, you know, there's a song about an assassin and, you know, all this great kind of storytelling and, you know, Mountain Goats. There's a kind of writing that I just admire it from a distance and I was thrilled. I felt like for a moment I was thinking about a fruit fly, but of course (laughs), by the end of the song, I'm the fruit fly, or it's me, you know, and I'm just back to back to normal, regular programming.

"Blonde on Blonde"

I was going to a friend's birthday party, I needed to buy her a birthday present. This is when I was living in Brooklyn, and this was before there were enough shops in Williamsburg or any shops really, to get somebody a birthday present. So I took the subway into New York, the L train, under 14th Street and got out and it was raining. And I had Blonde on Blonde on my Sony Sports Walkman, Discman, I guess actually. And I had a parka on with a good hood and I was feeling pretty, you know, blue that day anyway. I woke up feeling blue, I don't remember why. And I remember feeling, having a moment of real gratitude for that record for Blonde on Blonde walking around cause it's so rich. But it's like gratitude for all recorded music. Just that there's this richness that we can access at any time and that, you know, I was dry from the rain in my coat and I had this incredible art in my, you know, this great music in my ears.

A lot of great records, you can get to know them really slowly cause there's so much, there's so much to discover. I've sometimes compared ABBA to like a candy bar and some other records, you know, particularly records like Dylan or like the Velvets that like you can listen to again and again and again and again and kind of hear new aspects to it. And I love ABBA, but you know, when you have a candy bar, if you have a Snickers bar right, the sugar rush and the taste rush just pins you to the ceiling right away, like wham, Snickers! And ABBA is like, bang, “Dancing Queen,” just “Take a Chance,” amazing. But it's kind of impenetrable. It's perfect, it's robust, it's a perfect machine. It is glorious and beautiful, but I can't really get inside it. Whereas like bread and butter or butter and oil or bread and peanut butter and honey or something, you know, these kind of more base and primitive combinations. They can taste different on different days, kind of sweet, kind of savory, complicated, you know? Sorry for that digression, but that's, to speak to how much, how happy I am to be born in the time of recorded music and they're Bob Dylan records that I have, that I'll be listening to years from now and still getting a ton out of them and it's amazing. So, that's the whole lyrical content of that song. I don't remember anything about writing the music except, you know, it's got this kind of, got a really peaceful, spacious feeling that is nothing like Dylan, but felt appropriate to the experience I was having.

Chris Fudurich, who we really need to give props to because he was the engineer on “The Proximity Effect” and Fred Maher was going to produce Let Go, but we really didn't have a lot of money. And he got a lucrative offer right before we started that record and he kind of had to take it. And we're friends, so it wasn't, we’re friends enough that he could be like, “Hey, is it okay if I do this?” And we're like, “Yeah, yeah, don't worry, you know, just of course go. You gotta make that money. So, of course.” So Chris stepped up and kind of produced the record with us and made a lot of wonderful choices, including drenching that song in reverb.

"Hi-Speed Soul"

That guitar at the beginning, that (sings riff) “na na na na na.” That is a Peavy amp about this big. Teeny, teeny tiny. And someone had said, and this confirmed the experience that like tiny amps can be really good to sound huge. Something about them, I don't know if it's easier to mic them or what, but yeah, it's really good.

Part of the lyric comes from a bar in Munich called The Atomic Café. It was a venue, we played it once and went there a couple times after shows it was like a rock disco, you know, like just a club. There were people who would play music and dance and stuff with really great DJs and at one point they played some Simon & Garfunkel song, so it wasn't soul but felt soulful. It was a Simon & Garfunkel song that they played at the wrong speed. It was probably, “I Am a Rock” and it was probably on 45 and managed not to sound chipmunky, just sounded awesome. Not criticizing the Chipmunks, they're awesome too.

The music, yeah, I mean it's definitely, somebody had just tweeted yesterday that they were saying something very nice about it, sounding like New order, and that's definitely true. I think we were going for that vibe. I have a demo of it that's even more New Order than it sounds now or than it did when we recorded it. I'd taken a super New Order-y approach to the bass on the demo and then Daniel did even more. He may have totally changed it and made it better, but that was the first element that sounded that way. But yeah, and then Ira, it just got more, more is more, more is better.

The rest of the song was about somebody I'd met in Stockholm. Didn't end up dating, just became really good friends and who spoke really quietly. And it was that feeling. I haven't like met, I wasn't like a super go outer, I mean to see friends, yeah and bands and stuff, but it's not like I've, I've mostly dated friends, you know, not people I met randomly. But this is somebody I'd met that night and had, was just really connecting with and that feeling of talking to somebody in a really, really loud environment and feeling like it's really quiet around the two of you is somehow that focus you can have when you're really interested in somebody, which I think is analogous to the way that, I really love watching movies on airplanes. I get much, much more emotional watching movies on airplanes, like get really, really connected to the story and something about like watching it on a tiny screen and you can't hear that well, you know, you need to go to it, to really pay attention.

"Killian's Red"

You know, I don't remember all the songs. I remember “Killian’s Red,” like I remember the day we put that together. I remember playing it for a few hours. The music, I don't know where that really comes from, that kind of droney, on the edge of dissonant, but not quite. I don't have the music lingo to describe what it is, the body of that song to say what it is. But yeah, just almost dissonant, but like the pretty side of dissonant maybe. And maybe it's not dissonant at all, maybe I'm misusing that word cause none of the notes actually clash, but it's a complex chord and a place that felt good to stay. And I really like kind of robotic arpeggios. Robotic in the sense that that’s an arpeggio that goes strictly up and down between the A string and the B string. I just sweep down, sweep up and sweep down, and sweep up and then just change things on my left hand a little bit,

Just like “Fruit Fly” actually, it's totally true, descriptive lyrics, I was in that bar, I'd left her notes waiting for her to come in. You know, that's all just diary true. It was a place called The Blue Lounge on Driggs and North 8th Street, Driggs Avenue and North 8th Street that's no longer there, but it's a bar that some of my friends and I used to go to.

I could sort of name the bands I feel like was probably influenced by, Blonde Redhead, possibly slightly baroque. My parents really listened to a lot of Bach and I asked my dad at one point, like “Was there one record in particular?” He said, “Absolutely, 1052.” But anyway, if you look up the work numbered 1052, it's really good. It's really good. And funnily enough to me, kind of sounds like Blonde Redhead and you can hear a 4/4 beat behind it. There isn't one, but it sounds like there is and it's really strong and I really like, I think they're called leading tones. It's when one little thing changes within a chord that kind of pulls you, something small and logical happens, and then another small and logical thing happens. I’m not explaining that well. It happens a lot at the end of Bach pieces. Anyway, that's all about that verse part. I think I had just bought Daniel, How It Feels to Be Something On by Sunny Day Real Estate. That was one of those records that I knew, I heard it and I was like, “He's gonna freaking love this record. The bass player is really good.” I think I bought him that a few months before that, which might have a bit of an influence on that bassline. Yeah, I mean it's, it's awesome. The bassline’s amazing, drums are amazing. Yeah. I remember practicing that a lot. Like we spent a lot of time working it up.

You know, I mean, there's a lot of yearning in it. It's definitely wanting to be wanting things to be happier and wanting things to be simpler and wishing they could be. The lyrics are kind of clear. I had a friendship with somebody that was complicated. It was platonic with the feeling of something more perhaps, but we weren't both single and that felt weird, but somebody I greatly admire and it didn't work out for either of us, but she was great. It was kind of a painful time, something I wanted but didn't want, if that makes any sense. I'll leave it there. But yeah, a painful time, but painful because there was something good, I guess is maybe another way to put it.

"The Way You Wear Your Head"

I’d just gotten this Dr. Sample, sampler Boss Dr. Sample, and the beginning of a song called, shit is it, “She Pays the Rent?” No, no, “Don't Give it Up Now,” I think it's called, it's on a record called Lyers Lyers Lyers. Yeah the Lyers, amazing Boston, garage, garage punk band, and it's just an F-sharp major with the E and the B strings open droning, and that's the intro of that song. So I looped it and just played it and let it play for, I don't know, you know, half an hour and just play it against it. And I love the feeling of moving whole chords. So I'm playing an F-sharp, F-sharp major with droning strings. And then I play a C-sharp major and then down to a B and back to the F-sharp all over this droning F-sharp major. So the chords are harmonizing, making like giant chords. And I liked how it felt, I liked how it sounded. It reminded me also of some of the, some of the density, I'm not comparing it, it's not as good, I'm totally not sending myself flowers, but there's a lot of density on, on My Bloody Valentine records, like chordal density. And it was just reminding me of that in an inspiring way. So it was really fun to write a song to, and it came and I wrote it pretty fast.

I love that feeling when a song comes together because of sound, because the sound is distracting you enough that you're not present to criticize yourself, and so you're just writing stuff without questioning it. I think a lot about that inner critic. I sometimes think of it like, as an eyeball up in the corner of my room, you know, looking down and like watching me write something and like, “That's kind of dumb” (laughs). You know, or “That's not sincere or that's too sincere,” or some kind of, some criticism that you can't really say anything about. You're like, “Alright, start over.” But I wrote that really fast cause I was just so happy in this kind of world of, of sound, these big harmonizing chords. And so yeah, that came together pretty quick. There's a vocoder on it, on the recording. It's pretty buried, but it's a Digitech Talker, but it almost had to be wrestled out of our hands by Chris Fudurich because I just wanted to put the whole record through that thing. It is so exciting. So what you do is, I mean, there are a lot of ways to use a Vocoder, but the way we were using it was to have the guitar be the trigger and the voice be the gate. So you play chords and no sound comes out, but if you talk or sing into a microphone, whatever you talk or sing will come out as those notes. You know, it's beyond fun. It's so much fun.

There's a Cheap Trick lyric in it. “I want to want you, I need to need you, I'd love to love you.” Or Cheap Trick, rip off. We still love playing it live, I mean, it's never not super fun. It's like a, it's not a roller coaster, but it is like an amusement park ride, and it's just fun to get on, you know?

"Neither Heaven Nor Space"

There's a dream space. Liminal is not a word I feel confident using, but I think that means liminal is the space between two things, liminal space. That I feel like I'm in a lot when I'm listening to music or at a concert or making music or thinking about music or something. There's this kind of other place, you know, takes you somewhere, takes me somewhere. And that place is neither heaven nor space. It's really high up. It's not quite in space yet, it's not quite heaven, you're floating there. It's kind of what I always wished the name of our band meant. Cause it doesn't really mean anything except that we were gonna be, Daniel thought we should just be called Nada, like nothing. But it was a stage where we didn't really want to try very hard, we just wanted to do it for fun, you know, and early on sometimes the idea of having like a name and a bio and a photo, it seems kind of a silly or like a drag or something. But there was a band called Nada already and I liked the idea of surfing on nothing. It's just like dreaming, daydreaming. But “Neither Heaven Nor Space” is kind of what I had in mind with the band name, you know.

I think we'd just been rehearsing a lot and that's always a really good time to try to do some vocals cause if we'd been rehearsing a lot, that means I've been singing like four or five or six hours a day for a few days. And as a singer that's really good cause as high as you're gonna get, you're gonna get there then cause you'll be in better shape and it won't feel so strainey. Whereas like if we hadn't been singing a lot, I probably couldn't have done that. Yeah, it is, it's pretty stupid high. Having done it in shows since then, I've had to work my way up to it. But yeah, I love how it came out, you know, it's just, we were just exploring, you know, I'm not saying that we're often trying to sound like anybody, but definitely not then, you know, just seeing where it took us, following he chords and seeing what it wanted to be like. And I love how it ended up, but yeah, it's all kind of accidental, you know? Yeah I don't know what it is, but something about that, whatever that is, the B7 just kind of pumping along on it. Like already there was a lot of space and I think we just tried to build that out.

"Là Pour Ça"

So, Daniel wrote and sings, "Là Pour Ça.” He and I are both bilingual, well, he's trilingual. He was born in Spain, grew up in Brussels part of the time, and then ended up in a French school in New York where I was. I mean, his French is much better than mine. But we did a 31 day tour through France in ‘98, but he'd been wanting to write something in French and had been collecting kind of expressions and little turns of phrase.

I don't want to speak for him, but it sounds like a love song to me, being there for someone. Like, “that's what I'm, that's what I'm here for.” And I think I helped with the music. Again, that's another thing kind of borrowed a little bit from Bossa nova. I'd learned like maybe two Bossa nova songs, you know, probably the two big ones. So “Quiet Night of Quiet Stars” and “Girl From Ipanema” and I can't really play them all that well, but I really like that guitar style and that style. Anyway, there are some neato keyboards probably played by, probably by Joe McGinty in New York and or Louie Lino. Both of them. Shit, I don't really remember precisely. Joe McGinty has played a ton of super cool keyboards on our records and so has Louie and I sometimes can't remember who did what. Yeah, I mean it's great. You know, Daniel sings it really great and, you know, it's fun to do something in another language.

"Treading Water"

Just a super fun riff. It's in three, which was unusual for us at the time, or ever, which makes it really fun. Or it's in five, shit, I don't know. I can't count. Maybe in five, the riff at least. Again, you know, I can always play the “name that band, name that influence” thing. And I don't want to, I don't know, I mean, it's really us, but I was a really big Chavez fan. It's a New York band in the late nineties, mid to late nineties. I can see that shape I was playing, I was probably thinking of something of theirs. I really loved those kinds of songs that have parts that feel like different landscapes, you know?

The “treading water, treading white wine parts,” that song have that kind of bit of free fall or space walk, you know, feels like it just all of a sudden goes into slow motion, like you just stepped off the spacecraft or something, and then it's back to just rocking. I love changes like that. We were chasing that kind of a change and you know, not just feel and dynamic, but you know, change in psychological feel, psychological space of a song. And in fact, we have a song on our new record right now that we've just been working on where it's got a dropout in the middle and it sort of feels like the highlight of it. I'll think of it as an anti-chorus from now on, and I'll try to make more of them.

"Paper Boats"

It's just more of the same thing, it's like the more happy/sad, poor man's existentialism. You know, just thinking about being. The peace of feeling like you're just floating through your life, that's like aspirational zen or something, you know, wanting to feel peaceful, even if you don't, but you want to. So sometimes it's like doing some deep breathing or something can help calm you down if you're feeling anxious. I think that was a version of that without thinking about it. I was whatever, 28 or 29, 30, I can't remember how old I was when we made that record, but like I hadn't yet discovered, like now I'll often do some kind of deep breathing to help with anxiety, and I didn't do that or know about that. But I think imagining myself being a boat, floating downstream was like a version of that, like reaching for some kind of stillness, okayness. I think that's the thrust of that song probably.

When the express train passes the local, that's really specific. When you take the 6 train in New York, which goes up Lexington Avenue, if you're on the local and you sit facing West, the express train is across the track from you, and there's a certain spot where, I think at 42nd and 59th, you’re two floors down and then by the time you get to 68th, you're one floor down. But at some point there, the express train, it's gonna pass you, if you time it right, the express train will pass you and it will rise up cause it's skipping straight to the next station. For a moment, you're going at roughly the same speed as the express train passes you, it'll look like it's just floating in front of you and it just lifts itself. Like it's made of air. It's a neat moment. That's what that's about, specifically.

We'd finished it kind of in a haphazard way. We did some overdubbing and mixing with Bryce Goggin, a wonderful producer at a converted church in upstate New York. That was a really great experience. We'd worked with him before on some other things so he'd become a friend. He's really great. And then we did some stuff at Louie Lino’s house. He's now our permanent keyboard player. But back then just was helping out and helped with some overdubs and some mixing as well, and Chris Walla for a few songs. So it was very piecemeal. But as we went along, before it was a definite finished thing. We were sharing it with friends and were getting wonderful feedback about it. But also I think we, we knew it was, I mean, we really liked it, you know. From the beginning of making it, even just the demos, but as we were recording it, I think we thought it was pretty good. So that's a great feeling. If you make something you think is pretty good, that can fuel your happiness for months (laughs). You know, it's really great and in fact, my whole life I've had this sense that when I'm feeling, sad or out of sorts, kind of the first thing to check in with is like, “Have I made anything lately?” Cause if I haven't, yeah, I tend to feel a little bit unfulfilled or something, or that something's off. And I know that's really common and that's, maybe most people who make music feel that way. One way I've kind of described it in the past, it's like something about writing a song about something kind of puts handles on it. It installs handles on it so you can lift it and put it somewhere, you know, or stack it or get it out of the way (laughs). It just makes, it seems to make emotional quandaries more manageable and just comfort, you know, I mean, just a rhyme and a melody, you know, if it's a little catchy, just makes me feel so good. And that's why I spend so much of my time listening to records, you know, I mean, I basically feel, I'm mostly a music lover and a record consumer, and then I have this hobby of doing it myself sometimes. Luckily the hobbies managed to take up a big place in my life, you know, and I manage to serve it, and carve out time around it, but it really is a hobby.

So UK first, and that was our track listing, like the band's track listing. But then when the record ended up on Barsuk, Josh Rosenfeld there, has become a great friend, he's a really lovely guy and he's kind of a classic A&R guy in that he really cares about the material and he really cares about sequencing and he had some suggestions and we liked them. I can't remember, there is one thing where there's one song that's on one version and not on the other. I'm not sure about that decision. “End Credits” is one of them and “Neither Heaven Nor Space” maybe. But yeah, we really liked his advice and we were ready to give it a go. Partially also probably cause the other version had been around for a bit, so that meant that maybe we were ready to hear it a different way. We were more months past how we thought it should be. And I know that's confusing for fans and I apologize for that, but it felt okay at the time to take a fresh look at it.

You know, as the years have gone by, we are the band that had, “Popular” band, the band that had that single, but it's not the centerpiece of what people say anymore. So as the years go by, every record seems to get, you know, press, that just makes more and more sense whether the person likes it or not. At least they're just evaluating it as a new record by a band who's made a bunch of records rather than comparing it to like something from 1996. So it's been better and better and it started getting good right then. There's a kind of purity to our first record, I mean, kind of a lot really, cause we just, you know, wrote it in a vacuum as a band nobody had ever heard of, in our practice space. And our second album, which I really like, but there's a self-consciousness to me at least being watched for the first time. And also we were on a more commercial label than we'd intended so there was a kind of worry about being commercial enough, or whether being purely ourselves was not commercial enough. But Let Go has a special place for me because I do remember the change to being unselfconscious. So it's the beginning of feeling like ourselves. I don't mean to speak for everybody, but I think the other guys might say that too. But yeah, definitely the beginning of really feeling like myself. A lot of that pivot had to do with the stuff I was saying at the beginning, just about my life having changed and being in a more relaxed place. No rush, take my time, low rent. You know, and I think that maybe allowed a little more variety into the songwriting, possibly. That leisure, which I treasure, you know, I haven't had, I have not had as leisurely a life before that period of 1999, 2000, 2001, before or since. I wouldn't trade, you know, I have a family now, it is really wonderful and I'm happier than I have ever been, but that kind of like endless days, endless weeks, endless months, kind of long vista, whatever, was pretty sweet.

Recorded music has had an enormous place in my life as a companion. Like recorded music has been my true full-time forever companion and I've gotten so much out of it and so much specific, but also just in a general sense, I've gotten so much peace and centeredness out of listening to records and favorite songs, you know. So that's a long way of saying when people say, “I really like this,” or “This music helped me,” or something, it feels really fulfilling because, you know, like, I'm paying the rent (laughs). I mean that in a totally positive way, you know, it's a lousy analogy, but paying back for all this that I've gotten. Paying back, at least in part. So Let Go is often the center of conversations like that. So it definitely holds a special place in my mind and heart. Because of that, I have nothing but good memories of making it. And it was a really adventurous time too, because we were making something on our own for the first time, you know, so it was a hustle, but a really fun one, a really fun adventure. Yeah, so it's just a happy object in my room (laughs) and I'm thrilled to pieces that it's a happy object in anybody else's room too.

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Nada Surf. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase Let Go. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"Blizzard of '77"

"Happy Kid"

"Inside of Love"

"Fruit Fly"

"Blonde on Blonde"

"Hi-Speed Soul"

"Killian's Red"

"The Way You Wear Your Head"

"Neither Heaven nor Space"

"Là Pour Ça"

"Treading Water"

"Paper Boats"

All songs written by Caws/Lorca/Elliot

songs as pets (BMI)/karmacode (ASCAP)

Produced by Chris Fudurich, Louie Lino and all present.

Recorded and mixed at Standard Electrical Recorders by Chris, Resonate by Louie, The Magic Shop by Juan Garcia, Higher Power by Bryce Goggin and Litho by Chris Walla.

Keyboards by Joe McGinty, Chris Fudurich and Louie Lino. Pedal Steel by Louie Lino.

Mastered by Emily Lazar at The Lodge, assisted by Sarah Register.

Episode Credits:

Intro/Outro Music:

“Blue” by Rosetta from the album, Eternity

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam