The making of foolish by superchunk - featuring mac mccaughan, laura ballance and jim wilbur

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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.

Superchunk formed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1989 by Mac McCaughan, Laura Ballance, Chuck Garrison and Jack McCook. Their first single was released that year on Merge Records, a label started by McCaughan and Ballance. Their self-titled album followed in 1990 and was released on Matador Records. Around this time, McCook left the band and Jim Wilbur took over on second guitar. No Pocky for Kitty followed in 1991, as Jon Wurster replaced Garrison on drums. They released On the Mouth in 1993, which turned out to be their last record for Matador. For their fourth album, they toured their way to Minnesota to record with Brian Paulson at Pachyderm Studios. Foolish was eventually released in 1994 on Merge Records.

In this episode, for the 30th anniversary, Mac McCaughan, Laura Ballance and Jim Wilbur reflect on how the album came together. This is the making of Foolish.

Laura Ballance: Hi, this is Laura Ballance, bass player of Superchunk and co-founder of Merge Records. I'm here today, talking about the Superchunk album, Foolish. It was hard, it was really hard being in a band with Mac. Having broken up. Sometimes I kind of questioned our decision to keep doing it (laughs), but it seemed, it seemed to, you know, it really did feel like I didn't want to give up being in the band, because of giving up on the relationship, you know. Cause it felt like an important part of my life. Yeah, I think it was hard for both Mac and I being in the band together. But it did really feel like both Merge and Superchunk were something larger than us, you know, and that we felt like we needed to keep doing it. But it was not fun for several years (laughs). It's so long ago that we made this record that I can't say that this is entirely accurate, but I feel like it didn't really sink into me how much Foolish was about our relationship, or that I felt like it was about our relationship. Later on, I confronted him about it being about our relationship, and he denied it. You know, because lyricists are allowed to take liberties. It's all about writing and telling a story, whether it's true or not, you know. But it didn't really sink into me how much it was about our relationship until we were recording. Because I couldn't really hear all the lyrics that well when we were practicing or playing live. So it didn't start to bother me as much until we were recording and then it made me, it was very upsetting (laughs).

Mac McCaughan: This is Mac McCaughan from the band Superchunk and we are talking about our album Foolish, which came out in 1994. We have been doing a bunch of touring since we started basically. But, you know, with each record, the shows got bigger and the crowds got bigger. And so it was becoming much more of a full time job, you know, doing Superchunk. And we had previously recorded No Pocky for Kitty in Chicago and On the Mouth in Los Angeles. And so we were in this habit of like, going to a place, camping out, kind of staying at the studio or staying in the city where we were making the record away from home, and just kind of like doing a record that way, which allowed us to, you know, whether it's like the most efficient way to work or not, I don't know, but work long hours and kind of make a record in short amounts of time because our budgets were not big, you know. Like we didn't No Pocky and we recorded it and mixed it in three night in Chicago with (Steve) Albini. On the Mouth, we did in Los Angeles with John Reis producing, and I feel like we probably spent, I'm sure it's on the back of our record, but five days doing that one, and we did a little bit of mixing when we got home. And this record, I think we felt like, “Oh, we're like stretching out a little bit.” I think we had four or five days booked at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis. And then we had mixing time booked at Albini's studio, which at that point was still in his attic at his house. The way that we ended up working with Brian Paulson is that he was recommended to us by Unrest. In addition to Unrest, of course, he did, he had done Slint and other stuff that we liked, but really the, him making the Unrest record at Pachyderm was, I think the draw for us to go there.

Laura Ballance: I can only guess that part of our decision to record at Pachyderm had to do with Albini suggesting that it was a good place to go and that it was not that expensive. Definitely Brian's approach was very different than Steve's. Much less punk rock, you know, with Steve, if you got through a take, you were done (laughs). I feel like with Brian, we probably did more takes of everything than we had, we were used to doing.

Mac McCaughan: Our recording time for Foolish got shortened because, I mean, we must have been getting like some sort of special rate at, at Pachyderm, maybe through Paulson or because they needed to fill the space. But then a major label band came in and said, “Oh, they need like the last two days of your recording or whatever.” So our recording time got shortened once again to something like three days. So we still ended up doing it in that crazy way of just working all the time and, you know, recording tons of songs in a very short amount of time.

Laura Ballance: I actually, I found my planner from 1993 and 1994, which is very handy for this. But we toured our way from Chapel Hill to Minnesota in order to record at Pachyderm. We usually did this when we went to record. We would play a bunch of shows on the way and basically practice the songs as we went. In my planner, I have us down for being there from November 30th to December 3rd, which would have been four days. I totally forgot that about us losing a day. That's sort of crazy. Three days.

Jim Wilbur: Hello, this is Jim Wilbur and I play guitar in Superchunk. I think right around then was when the band became everyone's kind of full time job. We were touring all the time. And when we weren't touring, of course we were like practicing and writing songs. So a normal week of being home would be practicing at, you know, 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning, four times a week, sometimes five times a week, just, it was sort of like a job. And we were out in Jon Wurster’s basement out on old 86 in North Carolina. We would meet out there, we'd drive out there together sometimes and just spend lots of time in this dingy basement coming up with songs. And it definitely felt like we were broadening our, you know, sonic palette, if you want to say that, but that was an organic outgrowth of just the fact that we'd been like touring constantly. At that point we were definitely becoming more collaborative, but I think the collaborative aspect of it is what led to like, just the way that there were really quiet songs on that record, or more dynamic, maybe, or more complex, rather than just have like, you know, three minute punk songs.

Mac McCaughan: I think that there was a feeling, at least on my part, but I think we all shared it, of, you know, like, “Let's get away from, or possibly just turn on its head the idea that like punk rock and the kind of music that we're making has to be distorted and that that's where its power is coming from.” I mean, I think we've always kind of pushed back on like the, any kind of like macho aspect of, you know, punk rock and like loud music, even though obviously there's a long history of that. I think for that reason, like we've always tried to like come at it from a different angle and bring a different vibe to that.

Laura Ballance: And I feel like touring as much as we had been for the previous couple of records for On the Mouth and No Pocky. I feel like I was finally at a place where I had more comfort and confidence in playing and I felt like that pretty much was On the Mouth, too But playing was much more natural to me at that point. And I felt like a competent musician (laughs), which I definitely hadn't for the first two records.

Mac McCaughan: So I remember some of the writing for Foolish happening at my house with us playing acoustic guitars and Laura having her bass. If you're plugged into your amps and you have to be loud enough in a practice space to like play over the drums or whatever, it's just going to be a certain thing, you know? So having time to write on acoustic guitars, even though we knew we weren't going to be recording the songs with acoustic guitar. Being able to write a little bit that way and make demos on a 4-track that way, I think really allowed us to hear what the songs could be in a different way. And so while there are songs on the record that could be on, On the Mouth or any other record in terms of there being loud rock guitars and punky kind of songs, the songs that were the most striking and that's why we, for instance, put “Like a Fool” first on the record because it's gonna make you, even if you already like Superchunk or like the other records, it's still gonna make you like notice like something is different. And a lot of that is like, that's another song I think that was written on acoustic guitar and just the clean guitar sound alone when the record starts, I think is probably something that people weren't expecting.

“Like a Fool”

Laura Ballance: For the first minute of “Like a Fool,” it's very sparse and I'd certainly felt very exposed. Like my playing was very exposed and I needed to be careful, which I wasn't used to doing. Most of what I did was kind of, you know, thrashing around. And if you hit the wrong note when you're playing that few notes, it really sounds extra bad. But there's a soaring thing to that song that I really like. The slow start and the way that it kind of gets to rolling along. I think it's a really pretty song.

Mac McCaughan: When I hear that, like the verse guitar part on that song, for instance, it makes me think that, you know, knowing we were going to be recording with Brian and thinking about, again, the bands that I mentioned before, Slint and Unrest, both of those bands have like a super clean guitar sound at times. That I think really it's a little bit of a chicken and the egg thing like, did we write these songs with a clean guitar sound in mind because we knew that Brian could capture that and still make it sound powerful or did we write them and then choose Brian, you know what i'm saying? Like it's hard to know like if we were writing with with Paulson in mind even and knowing that we were going to record that way or were we just writing songs like this and then realized that he would be the perfect person to capture them, you know.

Jim Wilbur: I mean, those songs probably came out of the fact that we were just standing there looking at one another, thinking, “I don't want to play loudly right now, because I'm, you know, my ears are fried.” And somebody probably just started strumming a couple chords and then it's as simple as that. I mean, and all of a sudden you have like a couple parts that you arrange into a song and then 30 years later, you're talking about it. But I mean, in the moment, it was probably something just as prosaic as just like needing a break from the distortion pedal. I do remember thinking like, “Oh, this is really slow.” But we were all kind of like, into that, we were like, “Oh, this is totally cool because it sounds like us, but it's not cut from the same template of like what we would normally be trying to do, which would be, you know, like a fast three minute punk songs.” And yet it still sounds like the band.

Mac McCaughan: A lot of my lyrics, even to this day come from like memories of dreams, you know, and odd images or because rarely do I remember a dream and it just makes sense as like a plot line or something, but it's more, you know, images or flashes or something like that. And, you know, this song really did come from that. But I think that if you just write a song that's like about some indecipherable dream and you don't offer any sort of way in for a listener, like a reference point or a something that feels tangible, then that's maybe harder to get into as a listener or harder to connect with. And I think that, you know, you want your music to connect on some level. So I think sometimes it's like taking an image from a dream that you don't really know what it means and then trying to imagine a context for it and build a context around that. I mean, I think it has to have an effect, whatever you're going through, you know what I mean? But I never have felt like a tortured artist or anything. And again, I think that a lot of times, like, you're taking a very small thing and then making a song out of it makes anything feel like, “Oh, that must've been a big deal, that song,” you know, “they made a whole song about this,” but a lot of times, like, it's literally, a feeling you had for an hour or a day or, or something that was strong enough to make you write something down or, like, come up with a thought about it or an analogy about it, or a verse about it or something. But once you make a song about it and you put it on a record, I think that it gives the impression that like, “Holy shit, like that must have been a huge like year out of that person's life,” you know, but it's not necessarily, it's not necessarily that.

Jim Wilbur: I didn't really listen that closely to, you know, the lyrics. Could never hear them when we were practicing. Mostly because they weren't written while we were, like, coming up with the arrangements. And then by the time we were recording them, you know, it'd be like, “Oh!” They're not super specific, but you could tell that they were definitely, you know, personal and heartfelt. I mean, on “Like a Fool,” like, what's the line, something about, “I held the letter stuck on the end of a piece of wood over a pool and I jumped in?” I mean, yeah, okay, maybe that refers to, like, your relationship with Laura, but it really, you know, it could refer to a lot of things. I give Mac a lot of credit for writing lyrics that are open to not just interpretation, but to like, they can like speak to people's own experience and feelings because they're not so specifically about him.

Laura Ballance: I feel like during that time, I was drinking a lot and I had also started seeing a therapist. So I feel like I was kind of a mess around that time. It was pretty hard to be in a band and not drink a lot at that time (laughs). But I guess some people did it. When we were touring on Foolish, whenever we played “Like a Fool,” there were times where I'd be standing on stage playing that song and just crying because I felt so depressed about it. Or under fire or something. You know, it's that weird combination of being angry and sad and frustrated.

Mac McCaughan: You know, when you're 25, 26 years old or whatever, and you're in relationships and then relationships are breaking up and you do feel like a fool, frankly (laughs), a lot of the time, you know what I mean? And a lot of people have, you know, people are going to take whatever they want from any record so that in some ways it's foolish, let's just say it, to like, try to like convince people that “No, this record is, that song's not what you think it's about, it's about this other thing.” Because in some ways, like, who cares if someone's like getting something out of a song or connecting with it in some way, like, that's great. Bands that we grew up listening to, like R.E.M., like you really had no idea what those songs were about, but somehow still could connect with that, you know, and so a lot of it's on the listener to take away what they will. But I will say that as much as was made about this being a breakup record, a lot of the songs are about other relationships in my life at the time, not necessarily my relationship with Laura Ballance.

Jim Wilbur: I'm not going to speak for Mac, but a lot of his lyrics probably at least tangentially, or, you know, in some way had to do with his relationship with Laura. I mean, it would be abnormal, I think, if that wasn't the case. I do remember, I remember the night I moved to town to join the band because I had come down from Connecticut like, you know, three years before Foolish. I remember sitting on the porch with Laura and a couple other people and we were just talking and I remember her saying, “When we're playing live, when I listen to the lyrics, I feel like I have to apologize after every song.” And it was like, you know, we were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and jolly, and she just came out with that and it was sort of like a sobering moment of like, “Oh, all's not well in paradise,” kind of thing.

Mac McCaughan: Examining lyrics from records that you made in your 20s is painful because they're so young (laughs). They're so kind of like, not super self-reflective and there's a good quote that I like to cite from an interview with Greg Cartwright from a few years ago where he's talking about, probably talking about like Oblivians records or something like that and he's saying like, “Yeah, you know like you hear lyrics from songs that that you wrote when you're younger and they're like from a time when you're angry because you didn't realize that everything was your fault,” (laughs). So, I definitely had that feeling listening to, you know, records that we made in the early 90s.

“The First Part”

Jim Wilbur: Okay, “The First Part,” I do remember Mac started that song off by just playing his, like, the kind of like, the strummy guitar stuff. I played the (sings guitar riff) “dang dang dang dang dang dang,” that single note lead-y kind of hook-y riff that goes throughout the song. I played that probably the first, in the first minute of him playing the guitar chords. And Jon was just like, keeping that beat and it was like, I never changed it. I played that just off the top of my head within the first two minutes and for the rest of time that was like, “Okay well, that's the part now.” There's times like even now when I'm playing that on stage and it goes through my head that, it's like, “Where did it come from? And is it good or is it bad?” I mean, I have no idea. I mean, it's just like it was just the first thing that happened.

Mac McCaughan: We practiced so much back then, writing songs, I don't really have specific memories about most of the songs in terms of like, “Oh, that day that I came up with that riff or whatever.” And a lot of it, in a good way, it was just that, you know, you're kind of in a zone of some kind where it's, you know, if you're writing 17 songs for a record, like clearly, the songs are coming pretty easily. Mostly the music, I mean, writing the lyrics is harder, you know, but I think that it was clearly going to be a single.

Jim Wilbur: “The First Part” I think is my favorite song on Foolish. I always have enjoyed playing it live. There's something about the beginning of it, like playing those chords that I always found really physically gratifying. This sort of like just digging in and just, you know, making a lot of noise at the beginning of it was very pleasing to me.

Mac McCaughan: “The First Part” is, both the verse riff and the chorus riff are super catchy. And again, finding a way to play the kind of music that we liked playing, but using a clean sound on the guitar. And I remember one thing that really helped us play these songs live or helped me play them live and feel like it, like my guitar wasn't like puny sounding because, I really just had, still like a pretty small amp and a (Gibson) Melody Maker guitar. But Annie Hayden from the band Spent, guitar player from Spent, her guitar always sounded awesome. And she was often playing like really clean tones, but very strong sounding. And she's like, “Oh yeah, I use this, it's a bass EQ pedal,” but she uses it on her guitar and you can change the EQ, but also it has a volume boost. So, when you step on it, your guitar is still clean, but the EQ is, like, kind of juicing it up a little bit, and the volume jumps up a little bit. And her giving me that tip was very influential in terms of, like, what our guitars sounded like on the next couple records.

I think that the lyrics for “The First Part” are kind of self-explanatory, it's literally called, “The First Part,” so, you know, it's again, about the uncomplicated time of a relationship. Or it feels uncomplicated. And maybe it doesn't last that long, but maybe if you've been in a long relationship, that by the end is super complicated, that's like a, that's a whole new feeling.

Jim Wilbur: And then the rest of it was just like, because, “Oh, we need a chorus, and we need a bridge.” And then that whole outro section was just, you know, jamming out, you know. It was like, “Oh, we got a song.”

Mac McCaughan: I love playing that section of “The First Part” live still. It's really fun because it's a fun build up and I don't remember working out that last part, but I feel like it's, again, it's just kind of this thing where like, I'm playing something over and over again, and then Jim starts playing something else. And then once you have kind of like the interlocking parts, then I think that in our laziness or our traditional way of thinking we're probably just like, “Okay we do this four times we do this four times you do this four times we do this four times and then we end like that.” And i will say that I feel like the ending of “The First Part” and those kinds of builds and like interplay really came together in the way that they did because we got to play some of these live before we recorded them, which doesn't always, it didn't always happen then and it doesn't, hardly ever happens now. But I feel like, you know, playing songs live obviously, you understand what works just through repetition, you know, and I think that that ending of the first part is another example of that.

“Water Wings”

Laura Ballance: “Water Wings,” for some reason, I have some kind of mental block and I could never remember how it started, like, what the first couple of notes are. Practically every time before we would play it live, I would be standing there and going like, “Okay, let's see, it goes, which are the notes? It goes, da da, da da." You know, like, I was always getting it wrong. And if I started off wrong, I was doomed. So I do not like that song (laughs) apparently.

Jim Wilbur: “Water Wings” is I don't have any memories about that, but I would imagine that might've been one of the more difficult ones to, like, get into shape. Because so much of it relies on the bass and the bass riff. Laura is such an idiosyncratic bass player, and she takes time with figuring out what exactly what she wants to play over, you know, the point is it's like it's super simple. It's like three chords like, (sings guitar riff) “duh nah nah nah” and she's doing (sings busy bass riff) “doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.” Yeah, like a lot of times we'd be like, “Oh my god, Laura, you're making it more complex than it really needs to be.” But God bless her, it's the sound and it wouldn't be the same without her coming up with those ideas. So for that reason, I think that song must have like taken more time, and it must have been frustrating for me to be playing the same (sings guitar riff) “duh nah nah nah” over and over and over and over again.

Laura Ballance: I could not keep it in my head and I apparently would try to forget it every chance I got. But I know a lot of people like it.

Mac McCaughan: “Water Wings,” this is weird because like there's some songs that I associate with other bands, like, “Oh this was influenced by so and so,” but then when you listen to the song it's not really, doesn't really sound like it, you would never know that, you know. And I associate the song “Water Wings” with the band the 3D’s. And David Mitchell and David Saunders’ guitars in that band were a big influence on us in general starting with On the Mouth, I'd say and continuing on this record and like our song “Hyper Enough” from the next record was like in my mind a total 3Ds ripoff, but “Water Wings,” I associate with that band, and I'm not sure exactly why, but when I think of that song, I think of that. And this is one of the first songs that we use a different tuning, a drop D tuning, which gives the song and a couple of other songs on this record, like a different feel than we had had before

Laura Ballance: More than I should have, I'm sure. I took everything personally so I'm sure I also took the “Water Wings” lyrics personally. That one in general didn't bother me as much as some of the other ones, like “Like a Fool” and “The First Part.”

Mac McCaughan: The aspect of “Water Wings” that's about trying and failing, basically. I think “Water Wings” is like a reflection on, or just a frustration with negative thinking. And my reaction to, like, negativity, which is to push back on it. Now, I think that, like anyone, I can certainly have negative thoughts myself, but I tends towards, you know, like, “Let's try this. Let's do that. Let's, you know, this'll be great or whatever.” Like that's, at least, that was my attitude then. And so that's, like the song “Seed Toss” is a similar subject matter, just kind of like pushing back against negativity.

“Driveway to Driveway”

Mac McCaughan: “Driveway to Driveway,” we knew was going to be one of the singles off the record, but at the same time, I feel like the popularity of that song, if popularity is a word that fits, didn't kind of happen until a while after that record came out. Like, yeah, it was a single, we made a video, it’s on MTV and stuff, but I feel like it has grown in the way that it’s seen by fans.

“Driveway” was another song like, “Like a Fool,” that I remember working out, especially the main riff on that song, and the chorus as well, on acoustic guitar.

Jim Wilbur: Well, “Driveway to Driveway” was weird because it was, if I remember correctly, we actually like, figured it out on acoustic guitars. And if I remember correctly, it was just me, Mac, and Laura over at his house one afternoon, or maybe in the morning, and he had that idea, I mean, he had that riff, and that's the whole song, really. Because, I mean, the bass and my guitar are playing pretty much the same thing. And that chord progression just was suggested by that catchy riff that Mac is playing through the whole thing.

Mac McCaughan: When I hear it and think about writing it, it seems like definitely the kind of thing where you'd be just like sitting on the couch with a guitar, just kind of like playing it over and over again before trying to turn it into like a band song, you know. I mean, that's a problem that I run into sometimes is, writing a guitar part that I can't sing over because I can't do both things at once (laughs). So, yeah, I think it just naturally ends up that, you know, the riff becomes the intro, and then the verse becomes something I can sing over easily, which is basically just playing an E chord over and over again. And then, the chorus, I mean, again, it's just, you know, playing these parts with lots of open strings ringing and stuff like that just sound really beautiful on an acoustic guitar. And I think that, you know, deliberately writing on an acoustic just automatically gives the songs a different feeling than past records.

Writing these songs that way and recording acoustic versions of them on the 4-track was kind of the first time we had really done that. And I'd always liked it when bands, you know, bands like Yo La Tengo and things that we were listening to a lot of the time had different versions of the same song, you know, that you could hear. And if a song was good, you know, it held up in these different settings. And so, you know, writing a song on acoustic guitar and then amplifying it for the record, but then still having this version of it that's like an acoustic version, that was very appealing at the time. And “Driveway to Driveway” is a good example of that.

Jim Wilbur: It is weird because it's sort of, it's a different kind of song than we had had up to that point.

Laura Ballance: “Driveway to Driveway,” I was never a big fan of. I really found it boring to play. And I imagine when we were first recording it or first working on it, it didn't seem that boring. But by the time we, you know, once you play it 100 or so times, it loses its allure. I found it plodding and boring. I am not surprised it's a fan favorite. I've come to realize that what I like is not usually what everybody else likes. It's hard for me to know what is going to be popular with people. But “Driveway to Driveway” is not a song I would have picked as one of those.

Mac McCaughan: Even if you only have one song that people want to hear every night, that'd be great. So, I think that it's awesome that this song connects with people and that people still want to hear it.

Jim Wilbur: I would attribute any kind of life it has, to the lyrics. I mean, it's, it's pretty enough, but I mean, if the lyrics didn't speak to people, I don't think the song would still be played every night. So kudos to Mac on that.

Mac McCaughan: I think it's about, not so much going across country, but just like a blurry, like a blurry night at a music festival, basically, you know, and the driving in question was actually in golf carts. Because we were at, I don't know, Glastonbury or Reading or something like that. Golf carts, not so exciting, but, you know, kind of funny. It's not about Laura, so I can just go ahead and say that (laughs). But again, who am I to say what people take from a song? It's not, you know, it's, it's truly not up to me to decide that.

I mean, we made a video for it. So it was a single obviously off the record and then we made, actually made two videos from this record at the same time. And our friends Peyton Reed and Phil Morrison are both great directors and both from North Carolina. They must have come up with this idea together where they were both going to collaborate on both videos, though one of them would kind of be like slightly more like the director for one and the other person for the other one. So Phil Morrison was kind of like the lead director, I guess you'd say, on the video for “The First Part.” And then Peyton Reed, who has an affinity for what this video is based on is essentially like The Philadelphia Story or movies like that. Peyton Reed took the lead on the “Driveway to Driveway” video. And we filmed them both. Could we have filmed them both in the same weekend? I don't know. I feel like it was both over the same few days in different sites around Chapel Hill and you know, “Driveway to Driveway” was filmed at like a frat house on the UNC campus, which is supposed to be like a mansion, you know, in the video or whatever. And there's a lot of people involved, especially in the “Driveway to Driveway” video. Cause there's like kind of like party scenes, you know,

Jim Wilbur: We did “The First Part” video and the “Driveway to Driveway” video on successive weekends. And at that time, there was like the viability of getting played on MTV and having that be a real like boost to like sales and live ticketing sales, you know, like it was in our minds that we wanted to like, to promote the record and to like do the work that it took to reach more people. The concept of like, “Oh, they didn't want to be popular. That's why they didn't sign to a major label,” or like, ‘They didn't want to sell out.” It's like, it wasn't a question of not selling out, we wanted to sell as many records as humanly possible, you know, like we wanted to play the largest shows humanly possible. We just didn't want to do it through a system that we found kind of like, corrupt. We wanted to like achieve success on our own terms. It was never a question of like, “Oh, we don't want to like sell records.” So anyway, so we're making these two videos and they were fairly, you know, I mean, a lot of people were involved. Professional filmmakers, you know, we weren't screwing around. We wanted to like really, you know, go for it.

Laura Ballance: (laughs) When when we made the video for “Driveway to Driveway.” So something that happened during recording at Pachyderm with Brian Paulson was he and I started flirting and we wound up in a relationship. And he was actually coming to visit me when we were making the video for “Driveway to Driveway.”

Mac McCaughan: During the mixing process, I think is when I started to notice that like Brian and Laura were kind of starting a relationship. And so I'm like, “Great, now we're like, you know what I mean? Like, you're going to start going out with the guy producing this record? And we're stuck in an attic together for five days or however long?” You know what I mean? So, the end of the process was kind of like that. But, you know, we all loved Brian, so it wasn't like a problem. But I remember thinking like, “Oh, one more like, you know, wrench in this whole situation.”

Jim Wilbur: There was definitely a chemistry between them. It was awkward (laughs) definitely, I guess. Much more so for Mac. I don't know, for me, if I was being honest, I was probably like, you know, “Mac's a good friend of mine and Laura's a good friend of mine.” And it definitely would have been like, “Oh, this is just, this is weird. You know, like I wish this wasn't happening right now.”

Laura Ballance: The video shoot, the dates being set for that happened after I had planned for Brian to come visit me, so it was poorly timed. I was not happy about it, and I think that I did not have the best time shooting the video for “Driveway to Driveway.” Though, Peyton was always really fun. He directed it, Peyton Reed directed it, who like, came up with a fun concept, definitely for the video, and really rallied people to come out and dress up in old style outfits, And I mean, I wish I had been more engaged in the whole process, because it could have been really fun, but I was mad (laughs). I was mad a lot back then.

Jim Wilbur: Laura playing Mac's girlfriend in the “Driveway to Driveway” video is definitely, I mean, you would think that was a really bad idea (laughs). You know, on paper, it looks horrible, but in reality, I think it kind of diffused, I mean, to a degree, it kind of diffused the whole, the conjecture about like, “What's going on between those two?” You know, it's sort of like, “Okay, well, we can like, we can do this and maybe laugh about it,” even though in reality, it was not funny and there was definitely tension.

Mac McCaughan: I think at the time we were just like, rolling with it, even though obviously, you know, Peyton and Phil knew that that was going to be a talking point or whatever, you know, a thing in the video, but I don't remember it being weird or hard or anything like that. Cause it had been a while since we had broken up by the time we were making that.

Laura Ballance: It was enough time that Brian and I were going out and I think it certainly didn't make anything any easier between Mac and I.

“Saving My Ticket”

Mac McCaughan: It's funny, there's a couple songs on this record that in my mind, I was like, “How did we get away with putting such similar songs on the same record?” That would be “Without Blinking” and “Saving My Ticket,” even though maybe they're not as similar as I think they are, but, you know how I was saying that you associate certain songs with certain other bands as influences, even though they don't necessarily sound like those songs? And I associate this, when I think of “Saving My Ticket” and the riff from “Saving My Ticket,” I think about the Replacements as a real influence. And maybe I was thinking about that because we were recording in Minneapolis or I don't know why, but like in the opening riff of this song, it reminds me of the Replacements.

Laura Ballance: Okay, “Saving My Ticket,” I don't remember anything about writing it. I just remember that it seems like it was never a song that was going to be a fan favorite or our favorite. It seems like it was doomed to be one of those songs that we never played live, hardly ever.

Jim Wilbur: Those songs are so simple. It was almost like we had a formula, but it wasn't a formula where we played the same thing over and over again. But the formula was sort of like, “Let's just do the simplest,” I'm going to call them modules or, you know, like parts. But like, each part is so simple. And then we just came up with so many of them, that putting them together, like then sometimes there would be like parts that seemed, you know, a little more like tricky, but that was just, they were always just sort of like, “Well, we have to like do something to like glue those things together there.” But like “Saving My Ticket” was definitely like, I mean, again, it's just like two chords. I mean, it's like (sings guitar riff) “duh nuh nuh.” I mean, a chimpanzee could have come up with that. You know what I mean? But we did (laughs).

Mac McCaughan: I think it's again, maybe just a little bit about trying to maintain like a positive outlook on things, which isn't always easy, but you know trying to kind of look forward rather than back.

Jim Wilbur: I can remember practicing all these songs over and over and over again but like they came out of like such a lot, like an abundance of material that we were just generating like seriously. And just throwing it all out there and just seeing what, you know, what we didn't hate. It's like, “Well, how's that? I kind of like that.” And then we’d tape it. And then, you know, the next week we'd come back and it would be, you know, “What about this part? What about this part?” And then like, a lot of things got shit canned that maybe would have made an even better record, I don't know. I mean, there were just a lot of ideas floating around. There was no labor over it, really.

“Kicked In”

Mac McCaughan: “Kicked In” is another song where we started using different tunings. And I feel like it gives “Kicked In,” like a real kind of darkness that's kind of cool. And the setting for “Kicked In” is we had a nickname for this, which was, “a chappy mess.” Meaning like a party in Chapel Hill in the summertime, that's just like sprawling around someone's house, like out into the street, out into the yard. People are wasted, like, you know, like it's going all night, like that kind of thing. So “Kicked In,” I associate with like late nights in the summer in a hot town, you know, like Chapel Hill.

Laura Ballance: “Kicked In,” I don't know, I didn't hate it, I didn't love it. Could have done without it, but it's not the worst. It was mildly fun to play.

Mac McCaughan: The title and that lyric comes from like having my house broken into, to be honest (laughs), which happened more than once in the neighborhood where I was living at the time. But it's not really, I don't think about that when I think about that song, but that is kind of where that lyric comes from. But yeah, other than that, it's just about, you know, being, just being that age and staying up all night in the, you know, sitting on the front porch or whatever.

“Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything”

Laura Ballance: When I think about “Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything,” it was pretty fun to play. I didn't get sick of it. It was alright (laughs). I wish I could remember more about the process of recording, but probably we flew through recording all of the songs so fast. Because we had so little time to do it that there wasn't much time to like for anything to become an issue. We just had to get it done and move on.

Mac McCaughan: “Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything,” when I think about the riff, like the opening riff, and then the outro, and the fact that we were kind of going for these different guitar tones than we had gone with on past records. I think about Bernard Sumner of the band New Order, because he has like the best, like, strumming, like fast strumming hand and tone that's like a cutting, like choppy strumming guitar tone. And that's, again, what I had in mind, even though it's not really what the song sounds like at all. But like, Bernard and David Gedge from The Wedding Present both have like these amazing clean, like, maybe a little bit of edge of distortion, but mostly like clean, fast strumming, guitar sounds that I'm really into. And that's kind of what I was thinking going into “Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything.”

Jim Wilbur: I love that song and I love playing it and we still play it fairly frequently, because I do not play on about half of it. It starts out, the first part on “Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything.” is that (sings guitar riff) whatever. And then immediately like after that part, which I'm sure was just a part that we generated, like all the others, existed on its own and then there's like a really long time after that where it's just Mac’s guitar and Laura's bass and Jon’s drums, where I just stand there (laughs), like an idiot. And it's not only just that part, it's like that part and then the succeeding part, which is basically just in the second half of the verse I think. It's weird to think like why I chose not to play on that part or whether I was instructed not to by everybody else. I love that song just because of that dynamic of where I just lay out for most of it. You know, it puts a lot of space in the arrangement and, you know, just lightens things up. Two guitars can often start to eat each other when they're blazing away at the same time.

Mac McCaughan: I like playing this song still. It's got a cool, like, interplay with the guitars and the bass coming in and out, dropping in and out, and then getting very R.E.M.-y at the end of the, there's like a guitar picking part that, in my mind, I was associating with like a Peter Buck kind of part.

Jim Wilbur: We'll play really quietly and slowly to make sure that, you know, it all kind of like locks together a little bit. But that all started back around that record, really, I think. Because the records before that were much more, not simplistic, less nuanced, maybe, I guess. But we started thinking more about like guitar interplay, I think, on Foolish.

Laura Ballance: I didn't take the lyrics to that one personally because I never had to put a date on anything. I can't remember dates for anything. It must be Jim Wilbur that this song is about, not me.

Mac McCaughan: I can't remember the exact impetus for this song, though the vibe is, the vibe is what it is. And I think it's, yeah, about pushing back against or like, like bristling at I don't know, people who were just keeping a score all the time. Not being able to let things go. You know, but like I said, I don't remember the exact, if there was even something that precipitated the writing of this, it's just more that kind of feeling.

Laura Ballance: “Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything,” it was fun to play. Though, sometimes, the end, when we would do it live, would just go on forever. There would just be, endless jamming going on, which was never that exciting for me because I was just playing two notes the whole time, but It could be fun.

Jim Wilbur: That song has definitely evolved live where we take the outro and we break it down. It's just an E. It's just basically everyone is just hitting E and the drums keep going and then we add in a bunch of octave-y kind of like little mini builds and crescendos. But it's really, it's just an E chord being, you know, screwed around with.

Mac McCaughan: I'm assuming that we had been able to play it live a few times and kind of jammed that out, certainly in the practice space, but also maybe live. And when we do it live, it's always different, you know, that outro, but it's always fun. And again, like thinking about the bands that were influencing us at the time, they were bands that had more space on their records than our records had ever had, you know, and had more, maybe more improvisation, you know, than our records had had before.

It's in some ways weird because like we were incorporating more kind of improvisation into what we were doing. But at the same time, we're still trying to make a record in three days, so it's not like you can just do like, “Let's just do,” and you know, we're recording on tape, of course, like there's no Pro Tools or anything like that, so you can't just be like, “Let's just jam for 20 minutes and then take the best parts,” or like, “Let's just play the song 50 times and see which ending we like the best,” you know. I mean, who knows how many takes we got to do of this song, but luckily, like, we ended up with one that had a good jamout at the end.

“Without Blinking”

Mac McCaughan: Again, like, “Without Blinking,” I conflate with “Saving My Ticket” because I feel like they both had this kind of midwestern rock, Magnolias, Replacements, Hüsker Dü, you know, bands we loved like that, kind of feel to the guitars and the riffs in those songs.

Jim Wilbur: That's another song that maybe that kind of goes along with “The First Part” where I was like learning how to play the guitar a little bit and doing more than just playing, you know, barre chords or octave chords or, you know, like one note, single note, not leads, but like kind of melodic lines to like, you know, go along with the main guitar riff or whatever. But like slowly incrementally, I've gotten to the point where I can kind of play a guitar after 30 years, but it always happened in those kind of moments where it was just like, “You just got to try,” you know, like, “I can't just play the D and the G and the C over and over and over again.”

Mac McCaughan: The lyrics, it's pretty much what I was just talking about, the lyrics for “Without Blinking,” like a lot of these songs have this very not self-reflective, just kind of like frustration, you know, with a relationship or with relationships in general or something. I think that there may be vulnerability, but when I say it's not self-reflective, it's like, like pointing fingers, which is not like, you know, it feels very like one-sided, you know, because it is. But having said that, I think it's, it's often a case of, again, like taking some incident or a feeling that you have, like I said, it could be a day or an hour or once or five times or whatever, and turning it into a song, which makes it seem like, “Wow, you really go around all day, every day, like, thinking about this,” but it's like, no, you don't, you just think about it long enough to write a song and then maybe that’s what allows you to move on.

Laura Ballance: Okay, “Without Blinking,” was another song that I think didn't need to be on the record. I often think about this, about how many records we've made where there's like three or four songs that we continue to play and the rest of them, it seems like the world could have done without. There's always songs on every record that are, that some people like, even though most people don't. And so perhaps all these songs have a place in the world. But I often think about how the whole concept of the album is a construct. And at some point in the, I don't know when it was the 1960s, the 1950s, but the idea of putting, filling up a 12-inch piece of vinyl on both sides with music was not always how music was meant to be consumed, you know, it's something that someone made up in order to sell this bigger thing for more money. Before that it was, you know, mostly singles. And I think that a cool thing about singles is that people are more likely to just do songs that are well thought out and likely to catch on with people. Whereas when you do an album, it seems like more often than not, at least half of it is filler. And “Without Blinking” might be one of those songs.

“Keeping Track”

Mac McCaughan: I mean, to me, that song is like, it's so 90s sounding, especially the bridge that comes after the chorus. We haven't played this song in so long. We played it a couple of years ago, a few times. And one reason that “Keeping Track” is hard to play now is because I don't have, the bass EQ pedal that Annie Hayden recommended that I get because it broke a long time ago and I haven't gotten another one and playing my clean guitar part on this song feels very like, a little like puny to me now when I try it live. But I do remember, you know again, this is like a different kind of tuning than we had used in the past and thinking like, “This sounds cool,” and feeling like this is like in the mode and in the zone of like what Brian Paulson does best when he's making records is like record songs like this. So yeah, it's also when we try to play it now I'm like, “How did I sing this song?” Parts of it like go way too high (laughs).

Yeah, I think again a lot of it's about, a little bit similar to “Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything,” “Keeping Track,” I mean, I don't remember writing the lyrics, but it sounds you know, like it's again about bristling at someone kind of making an account, making an account of everything, you know and keeping score really. Accounting as a metaphor for personal grudges.

Laura Ballance: I did all the accounting. “Keeping Track” definitely felt like one of the songs that I took personally and that it felt like Mac was telling me something. That one does seem like it was, it was about us in some way or him resenting me in the way I was.

Mac McCaughan: Well, that noise section is what I'm talking about when I say it's like the most nineties moment on the whole record, I think. And being in this like, drop D tuning allows that part to have kind of a heaviness that otherwise it wouldn't have had. And yeah, super fun to play.

“Revelations”

Jim Wilbur: If I remember anything about “Revelations,” I remember that it and “Keeping Track” were kind of, they ended up next to each other on the record, but in my brain they seem like, I feel like we probably like, wrote them on the same day, or they came out of the same practice, or they came out of maybe, I mean it's possible that at one point, they shared parts, you know what I mean? Like before they had like solidified into a solid arrangement and Mac wrote words for it, they might've been one song and that we broke it into two pieces or bits of one ended up with the other. They've always been connected in my mind, I guess.

Mac McCaughan: Again, like this song, we almost never play live. And then like we played a few years ago and just trying to relearn it. It's just like a strange, strange song. And I feel like on “Revelations,” there's a little bit of like Nirvana aping on the chorus riff. But in general like, I don't know, I don't really know what to think about this song, it's strange. It's maybe like the next stage after “The First Part,” in terms of like, if that was a song cycle, it's like, you know, it's when things start to get complicated.

Laura Ballance: Okay, “Revelations” feels like another one that could have been, should have been buried out behind the barn. To me, We wouldn't have much of a record though without, with all these songs that I'm saying bad things about if we took them all out, it would be, it would be half a record. We'd have an EP here.

“Stretched Out”

Mac McCaughan: I really liked this song and, and the influence of like New Zealand bands. You know, we talked about, the 3Ds earlier, but I love the way it came out because it came out sounding like maybe one of the most different sounding songs for us, in terms of the chords and the cleanness of it, you know, and the kind of relaxed feel of the whole thing. But consequently, we almost never played it live. I don't know if we ever played it live. Maybe it was just like too relaxed or something. But I really like the recording of it.

Laura Ballance: No (laughs). No, it's terrible (laughs). I feel like it seems, it really feels like there were several songs that were not fully realized, and I think “Stretched Out” is probably one of them. It feels sort of a little stretched out.

Jim Wilbur: I never liked it (laughs). I mean, I feel like by the time we recorded it, it was sort of like, we just, it was unfinished. It was sort of like, “Well, this is what we have so far and it needs more work, but we're just going to record it and maybe figure out something to do to make it interesting.” I say that at the time, that's how I felt. Since then, I've come to really like it. And when we rerecorded it for the acoustic version of the record, a couple of years ago, five years ago, whenever that was, I liked it a lot more. It just goes to show like you can do something and be dismissive of it. And yet it can have a life of its own. And then, you know, come back to remind you that maybe your judgment wasn't so great to begin with.

Mac McCaughan: I mean, I feel like it has like a sense of resignation about it, but not an unhappy one. That's the vibe that I hear too, even though I don't remember writing the lyrics for “Stretched Out.” I feel like the influence of New Zealand bands writing these like very beautiful pop songs and having some real strummy guitars, but then also having some kind of gnarly distorted guitar, you know, like David Mitchell style leads was something that was super influential for us, and we're still using that trick on our records. But I mean, to me, like that is like a perfect combination of things when it comes to this kind of music is like, some like real beautiful, like chimey, jangly parts, and then like a little gnarly thing thrown in there as well.

The guitar solos are pretty much always free form, unless it's like, really sounds like a written part, you know what I mean? It's usually just, “Let me just try this a few times and then hopefully we'll get one that works.” It's like me standing in the booth, like, with headphones on, like, “Okay, just rewind it one more time. I'm going to get it this time.” You know what I mean? And like, I'm sure everyone who's in the control room is just like, “Oh my God.”

“In a Stage Whisper”

Jim Wilbur: And the thing about that record, we recorded 19 songs in three days, which was nuts. And something that we shouldn't have done, probably. But at that time, it was all about, like, “We got to get as much value for our money kind of as possible,” but it might have been better for everyone concerned if we had been able to like decide ahead of time, which ten or twelve songs we wanted to focus on and left seven of them to just not be dealt with. I'm not saying like that as regret, but like in reality, it might've been better if we had just figured out out of the nineteen songs that we had written, you know, which ones we were going to focus on. I think with those, the last two songs being so, you know, quiet and different, maybe I'm remembering that the decision was like, “Yeah, we're going to do these songs purposely so that they can close out the album.” There was no way they were going to fit anywhere else.

Mac McCaughan: Beyond having, “Like a Fool” first, I'm sure that we moved stuff around a bunch, you know? And I'm sure a song like “Revelations,” we were like, “God, where do we put that? That's weird.” Though I am also sure that “In a Stage Whisperer” was probably always going to be the last song.

Jim Wilbur: I think at that point we were like, just seeing how little music we could play to create a song with, cause it's super minimal. I mean, it's, if you solo each instrument and just hear what each person is playing. It doesn't sound like anything, you know, it just sounds like, it's remedial. And yet it sort of came together.

Mac McCaughan: That was a song that, I mean, that was written in the studio, basically, “In a Stage Whisper.” And Laura plays guitar on that song. I'm pretty sure she bought a guitar on this tour and we bought a synth also. And so the synth is like droning throughout “In a Stage Whisper” and Laura's playing guitar. And I feel like the guitar solo on this, I was thinking about you know, like Robert Fripp playing guitar solos like this on a Blondie song and how this kind of like, I don't even know how to describe the sound, but that's definitely like a guitar sound that I've tried to get many times.

Laura Ballance: I am not sure, but I think that “In a Stage Whisper” was probably the last thing we recorded. And it probably, I don't know, I imagine it happened late at night. But I can't remember why this happened. I had, on the way to this recording session, I had bought a guitar, somewhere in Ohio, I think. And it was not my idea. It was someone's idea that I should play guitar on this record. And so that repeating guitar line, that very simple repeating guitar line, that is me playing a guitar for the first time in my life. And it made me really nervous to do it. But Mac was always pushing me to do new things, even if it made me really uncomfortable. And that is what I think about when I hear “In a Stage Whisper.” And it's a, I have mixed feelings about it, like he would push me to do things that I was not comfortable with, which was really good in a way because it could open me up to doing new things. But then again, it was scary and made me feel vulnerable. But like, you know, without Mac, the pressure from Mac, I wouldn't be in a band at all. I would never have been in Superchunk. I would never have played in any band. I had no desire to play in a band. He somehow convinced me to do it. And I'm grateful that he did.

Mac McCaughan: I feel like some of that is like from making Portastatic records. You know, where the vocals aren't as loud, they're not as shouty, and I remember playing a Portastatic show, probably around this time, or maybe, I mean, a little before this, but probably around this time, and I was sitting down and playing a Casio and singing and someone said like, you know, “You seem really different when you're sitting down.” And kind of thinking about that a lot. And my range is so like high, basically, you know, singing words in a lower range, it's hard for me to do that and project. It's hard for me to do that and be in tune. So I just didn't really do it very much. And then for that reason, I'd never got good at it. But I feel like this again, if we’re trying to make a record that sounds different and clearly this song sounds different, it's got like this synth on it droning and that's like this kind of quiet song. Like it, it would have sounded very out of place to have my normal, like singing style on this one. And I feel like it was a fun thing that worked out. And again, another song that we never played live, you know, until we did Acoustic Foolish. Well, ironically, this song is about, I think it's just about, like, gossip, and trying not to pay attention to it. But then, there I am writing a song about it that then, now, you can, like, dissect it and analyze it. And maybe that's, like, counterproductive, but yeah, just about, you know, probably like a small social scene and feeling like everyone has an opinion about what you're doing in your personal life (laughs).

Right so we recorded in Cannon Falls and Pachyderm and then we drove down to Chicago and mixed the record there. Albini's studio was in his attic. And so that's where we worked on that. And I remember working late nights there. Meanwhile, Steve is like putting together Shellac singles on his living room floor downstairs. Like the first Shellac record, I think was being assembled down there. And, you know, we knew Steve obviously from making No Pocky. Bob Weston was working there. It was cool, it was like familiar Chicago, you know, people that we knew and liked. And like I said, I remember doing that mixing process, kind of finishing a couple of the songs, like “Foolish,” the song, “Foolish.” And maybe “In a Stage Whisper” too. Stuff we hadn't had time to do in Cannon Falls.

By the time it's recorded and out in the world, you're moving on a little bit to the next thing. You're playing them every night, of course, but it's out in the world. People are gonna listen to it and take from it what they will, you know. I can't speak to what that painting is about. Laura will have to explain that, cause I still don't understand it.

Laura Ballance: Mac is not the dead rabbit. I had recently watched that Michael Moore documentary, Pets or Meat, and it really made an impression on me. And I clearly, I felt like the record was very much about me, and so I decided I was going to paint a self portrait, but I was going to paint myself looking older than I was (laughs), which I don't think I really succeeded in. It doesn't, I don't look that much older. But I felt like just doing a self portrait was inadequate and like, like there's not, it's not a very sophisticated piece of art. There had to be something in there that was kind of representative of our relationship, you know, and I felt like that's the rabbit. And the image being kind of like, you know, I'm indifferent to the relationship and the dead rabbit. But yeah, it's not much more complicated than that, I guess.

Mac McCaughan: We had been on Matador and this was the first album that was going to be on Merge, except we had done Tossing Seeds on Merge. So I guess in my mind that aspect of it doesn't seem as significant as maybe it seemed from the outside or something like that, you know, because I kind of felt like we were already doing both things, you know.

Laura Ballance: So, 1994 for Merge, it definitely felt like, “This is real. We're really running a record label. It's not just something we're going to do for a little bit and it's going to go away.” We were working with more and more artists and putting out more records. We had an office that was not inside my house for the first time.

Mac McCaughan: That shift felt more gradual. It didn't feel like, “Okay, now it's happening with Foolish.” Well, I remember the reactions that like our friends and our booking agent and people first hearing it just being very surprised at the sound, but very positive about it. So it was a good feeling. I think people reacting well to something that you felt like was not really going out on a limb, but definitely a different sounding record.

Laura Ballance: I think it came out well, except that I, in hindsight, I would have liked to ax half the songs. But I think it sounds really good in comparison to On the Mouth, like On the Mouth feels much more punk rock and raw, and this record does feel a little bit less, less punk rock, more, I don't know, a little smoother around the edges. I think I lean towards liking the punk rock sounds more, but I liked this record.

Jim Wilbur: At the time, I thought like, “Wow, this is a really good sounding record.” You know, “This is, it sounds like the band and it sounds like us.” And part of the aesthetic was to not be too slick anyway. So the fact that it's murky in places and, you know, the energy of it is that like, it goes back to like how quickly we recorded it. I mean, there was no time to like, labor over it, every single element of what we were recording. And it was sort of like, you have to make decisions based on like, you know, time constraints, like, “Well, this is good enough. And then we're going to stick with it.” You know, like you could spend another week trying to figure out how to make the snare sound better, but “We're going to go with what we got right now.” And Leonard Bernstein said once, “To achieve great things, you need two things. You need an idea and not quite enough time.” And that's sort of like what we had in that moment.

There was never like a moment where I thought the band was going to break up. There was definitely like tensions and animosity, but also, you know, love. I mean, we were family, kind of. Still are to a large extent. Foolish is like an awesome thing in my life, you know. I feel proud that I was part of it. And to this day, when we play songs from that record, the response that we get from people is always gratifying, and there's something about the fact that it's perceived as a dark, dark record, or you know, like a breakup record, you know, or sad, or emotionally distraught, and yet it's fun to listen to. And enough people have enjoyed it or have taken something away from it, that it, you know, it's gratifying to like, in some small way have, entered into other people's lives in that way. And it was really, you know, just a group of 23, 24 year-old people doing what they love to do.

Mac McCaughan: What I appreciate about the Foolish record is that it really does sound like an album, both from the sequencing and the sound. And, you know, you may not know the context unless you heard what our records sounded like before and after or whatever, but it's clearly us doing something different. And so in some ways transitional, but at the same time, like, I feel like it stands on, you know, as its own kind of artifact of a certain kind of nineties guitar rock record and has a lot of songs on it that we still play live, both because people really connect with them and like them, but also because they're still fun to play. So yeah, I mean, if you make a record that people still want to talk about 30 years later, like, that's pretty satisfying.

Laura Ballance: I feel like Foolish is an important Superchunk record. It's definitely the Superchunk album that I have heard over and over again from our fans more than any other, that it helped get them through a really hard time, or, you know, that it meant the world to them. And I think that even though it was a difficult experience for Mac and I both making it and playing it for years after, I'm really glad we made it because t's so meaningful to so many people. It's a, you know, a document of a failed relationship (laughs). And I think people really appreciate when people make themselves vulnerable like that, you know, putting their emotions out there. And it helps people.

Outro:

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

Credits:

"Like a Fool"

"The First Part"

"Water Wings"

"Driveway to Driveway"

"Saving my Ticket”

"Kicked In"

"Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything"

"Without Blinking"

"Keeping Track"

"Revelations"

"Stretched Out"

"In a Stage Whisper"

All songs written by Mac McCaughan, Laura Ballance, Jim Wilbur and Jon Wurster

Recorded by Brian Paulson at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota

Mixed by Brian Paulson and Superchunk

Episode Credits:

Intro/Outro Music:

“Fearless Dealer” by Generifus from the album, Rearrangel

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam