Search Results for:

GRANDADDY

Grandaddy

Blu Wav

    Grandaddy release a brand new studio album Blu Wav via Dangerbird Records.

    A prolific storyteller, Jason Lytle is inspired by the overwhelming beauty of nature to the mundane moments that spark life’s strongest memories. Introducing pedal steel into the band’s repertoire for the first time, buoyant lead single “Watercooler” comments on the dichotomy of both. It was inspired by having his own outdoorsy rock guy (in both senses of the word) lifestyle while his partner had an office job. Lytle shares, “Most of my relationships have involved girls who worked in office settings. This song is about the end of one, or perhaps a few, of those relationships. Listeners will also notice the pedal steel on this track and eventually on many others from the forthcoming new album. It’s a first for Grandaddy, and I couldn't be more thrilled about this fact.”

    With the album title Blu Wav meant to be a literal mash-up of “bluegrass” and “new wave”, the new collection has a distinct feel, a uniform vibe, and a somewhat unexpected sound. It was conceived as Grandaddy maestro Jason Lytle was driving through the Nevada desert, and Patti Page’s "Tennessee Waltz" came across the classic country station on the radio. He was immediately intrigued by the possibilities of what it might sound like to keep the slow sway and sweet, simple lyrics of the bluegrass waltz while adding layers of dense synthesizers and the electronics of new wave. It incorporates the lo-fi lushness and sometimes-psychedelic orchestration Grandaddy is knownfor with Lytle’sfirst foray into true country. Seven of its 13 songs are waltzes, and as Lytle notes, “there’s an inordinate amount of pedal steel.”

    STAFF COMMENTS

    Barry says: Another beautiful transmission from Lytle & Co, this time the album is built on the sadness of the untimely passing of bassist, Kevin Garcia. There are references to him and their time together, obviously but it's all presented in the typically swooning, country-tinged thoughtfulness that Grandaddy are known for. Blu Wav is classic Lytle, just understandably a little sadder.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Blu Wav
    2. Cabin In My Mind
    3. Long As I'm Not The One
    4. You're Going To Be Fine And I'm Going To Hell
    5. Watercooler
    6. Let's Put This Pinto On The Moon
    7. On A Train Or Bus
    8. Jukebox App
    9. Yeehaw Ai In The Year 2025
    10. Ducky, Boris And Dart
    11. East Yosemite
    12. Nothin' To Lose
    13. Blu Wav Buh Bye

    Grandaddy

    Sumday: The Cassette Demos

      "Sumday is all glorious, throbbing heart." - PITCHFORK
      "the band also reaffirms a gift for creating melancholic melodies that are surprisingly sturdy and self-assured." - ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
      "cool indie-rockers make a summer blockbuster." - SPIN

      Complete 4-track demo version of Sumday recorded by Jason Lytle Available for the first time as part of the Sumday 20th anniversary

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Now It's On (cassette Demo)
      2. Yeah Is What We Had (cassette Demo)
      3. I'm On Standby (cassette Demo)
      4. Passed Out In A Datsun (cassette Demo)
      5. The Go In The Go-For-It (cassette Demo)
      6. Stray Dog And The Chocolate Karaoke
      7. The Group Who Couldn't Say (cassette Demo)
      8. OK With My Decay (cassette Demo)
      9. Lost On Yer Merry Way (cassette Demo)
      10. The Warming Sun (cassette Demo)
      11. El Caminos In The West (cassette Demo)
      12. The Final Push To The Sum (cassette Demo)

      Grandaddy

      The Sophtware Slump....On A Wooden Piano

        Jason Lytle set up a new plan when he decided to re-record the songs from Grandaddy’s “The Sophtware Slump.” Twenty years ago he made this ageless record while red-eyed and running around a sweltering slipshod home studio in his boxers using some gear he planned to return to Best Buy as soon as he was done. For this new, piano-centric “The Sophtware Slump,” Lytle traveled around Los Angeles, sourcing studios and pianos like a master chef selects foods from a farmer’s market. He identified three instruments and three studios that would suffice. Everything was in place. As with many best-laid plans, his were scuttled. In this case by a pandemic. So two decades after making a DIY masterpiece, Lytle found himself recording those songs again, sweating in his apartment again, trying to create a controlled environment while surrounded by chaos.

        “I wrote a list of things I had to work around here,” he says. “Traffic. Pretty strong from 8-10, commute times. Then 2 to 5. Helicopters, garbage trucks, weed whackers, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, motorcycles that inevitably always drive by during the middle of a take, sports cars, lots of fancy luxury sedans with no mufflers, parrots.”

        Parrots.

        So unlike the old days where the coming and going of birds could be electronically punched in, Lytle 20 years after “The Sophtware Slump” found live birds willing to contribute to his album, and at no cost.

        He laughs at the challenge of reinventing the album. Twenty years bought him no new comforts.

        “Because of the pandemic, all of the sudden, I was looking at a real deadline to make the damn thing,” he says. “Here we go, just like the old days. If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.

        “Not that much has changed.”

        Yet many things have changed since Grandaddy issued “The Sophtware Slump” in May 2000. Back then, Grandaddy felt on the cusp of something: A band of underdogs pushing to reach for the sky from their modest existence in Modesto, Calif., a place like many other American towns and cities filled with those nurtured by its stasis and those seeking escape by any means. For Grandaddy – the rockers being Burtch, Dryden, Fairchild, Garcia, Lytle -- escape came in the form of these songs envisioned by Lytle, a magpie drawn to some shiny objects, but also others with less luster, like a seemingly antiquated keyboard. “Under the Western Freeway,” released in 1997, served as a trailhead with songs about solitude and communication as well as the eeriness of a meritocracy. “The Sophtware Slump” was a wide-angle progression with basement symphonics making for songs that somehow split the difference between meticulous and scruffy. But lyrically and thematically Lytle also took a big step with “The Sophtware Slump,” hinting at some of the cultural tangles the rest of us wouldn’t identify until years later. In an age of unprecedented connectivity, his songs spoke to significant solitude. As technology arced ever upward, he saw built-in obsolescence, as though he popped the lid off of next year’s model and found its expiration date.

        He saw lovely vistas pocked by tire fragments, lush forests adapting to abandoned appliances and a lot of people disinterested in trying to make sense of it. The imagery was sad and funny, so the songs were, too.

        Then, as now, Lytle was drawn to what he calls “the confusion and uncertainty of where we’re headed.” The contrast between anxiety and tension and pastoral serenity set up little twisting tempests. The songs on “The Sophtware Slump” weren’t prescient as much as they were attuned to cultural trends just starting to take shape. Lytle says “in order to make the cut, each song had to have the ability to stand alone lyrically. . . . My intention was shelf life.”

        Grandaddy guitarist Jim Fairchild, who has played these songs thousands of times, wanted to know what the songs sounded like in this earliest form. He wanted to hear what he calls “the totality of that original vision. I wanted to hear THAT version of the album.

        “With the scope of what Grandaddy has done and what Jason has done in his career, I thought there was room to pay greater attention to my favorite view of him, which is as a songwriter.”

        This newly recorded “The Sophtware Slump” does just that. The songs’ skeletons are the same, but the bones dance differently. Slower songs like “Undearneath the Weeping Willow” make a natural transition to this sparer presentation. Greater revelations occur with the once louder songs like “The Crystal Lake” and “Chartsengrafs.” The effect at times is that of unfolding an origami dinosaur and refashioning it into a swan. The album’s sharp melodic sense isn’t dampened at all, but the words step forward, which only enhances the aspirational lift at album’s end, about aiming toward the sky.

        Lytle only allowed his air conditioner to hum over one song. Fittingly it’s “Broken Household Appliance National Forest.”

        And here we are 20 years later. Grandaddy isn’t exactly what it once was, no longer an entity caught in three-year cycles of making music and touring. Grandaddy isn’t what it once was, corporeally, either as Kevin Garcia, beloved for far more than his duty as bassist, died in 2017.

        Lytle states an aversion to nostalgia, likening it to a scene in which a group of workers on a freeway stand around and watch one guy doing everything. “I feel like I’m one of those guys standing around,” he says. “And I don’t like that feeling.”

        But he admits 20 years lends the songs and his relationship to them a different perspective. “It was important to me to see this as being its own entity.”

        So this new “The Sophtware Slump” isn’t a recontextualization of old songs as a stealth anthology for newcomers – “Introducing Jason Lytle!”

        Nor is it a series of demos, rough sketches scattered like crumbs for the peckish completists. It’s more like a shadow sibling to a record that has entranced, beguiled and entertained fans for two decades, one that has seen its audience grow during that time; a record that has prompted young musicians to start their own bands to get out of their hometowns.

        STAFF COMMENTS

        Barry says: It can be a strange experience hearing an album that's so well known turned on it's head and rerecorded entirely differently. Is it more shocking then, to hear the voice we know and love singing the same beautiful refrains over a much more restrained, oft minimalistic backdrop? It could easily be, but in the capable hands of Lytle, it's nothing less than astounding.

        TRACK LISTING

        SIDE A
        1. He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's The Pilot (Piano Version)
        2. Hewlett's Daughter (Piano Version)
        3. Jed The Humanoid (Piano Version)
        4. The Crystal Lake (Piano Version)
        5. Chartsengrafs (Piano Version)

        SIDE B
        1. Underneath The Weeping Willow (Piano Version)
        2. Broken Household Appliance National Forest (Piano Version)
        3. Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) (Piano Version)
        4. E. Knievel Interlude (The Perils Of Keeping It Real) (Piano Version)
        5. Miner At The Dial-a-View (Piano Version)
        6. So You'll Aim Toward The Sky (Piano Version)


        Latest Pre-Sales

        158 NEW ITEMS

        E-newsletter —
        Sign up
        Back to top