Photo by Paloma Bomé via Nada Surf - Facebook
Nada Surf
Nada Surf
Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws would like to extend thanks to a certain something for helping him with his songwriting on his veteran band’s marvelous new album, Moon Mirror: his alarm clock.
While writing songs for the album, he would set his alarm for 5 or 5:30 a.m. to get up before the rest of his family in their Cambridge, England, home. In practical terms, it meant he could write in his living room and have a larger space. But the early morning impacted Caws even more deeply, he says.
“I always wondered, like, why early morning felt so good to be alive,” says Caws, whose band returns to Milwaukee on Friday with their first album in four years. “You know, it’s a good feeling early in the morning, but for writing, it was great because my inner critic is trying to still sleep, and I just felt more free.”
It took away the pressure of feeling like he had wasted time and needed to catch up somehow or do better, Caws says.
Cool Idea
Moon Mirror by Nada Surf
“There’s no day to waste,” he says. “Time doesn't exist. It’s all free. And that sort of translated into not being self-conscious about what I was writing, you know, like, ‘Oh, is this good enough? Or is this a cool idea, or fresh’ or whatever those stupid ways of thinking that have nothing to do with just trying to be honest or trying to say something truthful to yourself.”
Filled with Nada Surf’s trademark smart, exciting pop, Moon Mirror, the group’s 10th album since forming in 1992 (“the indie-rock grownups in the room,” Robb Shefield calls them in his glowing Rolling Stone review) was released in September. Highlights include the propulsive “Intel and Dreams,” with its “good chord/bad chord” refrain, “In Front of Me Now,” a jumping ode to present-mindedness, and the human-connection seeking title track.
Caws says connectedness was heavy on his mind as an American living in England, watching primarily U.S. news.
“Obviously, increased division is sort of central to American reality right now, unfortunately,” he says. “The moon, symbolically, and it’s just sort of something I scribbled down on my phone at 4 a.m. or something with insomnia one night. And it was just a whole little paragraph about how the moon, aside from the sun to see, is the only object we’ve all looked at, you know, you and I have looked at images of the same thing we’ve both seen, you know, the Eiffel Tower, but not everyone has seen it in person.”
But the moon has been seen by all the billions of people alive now – and that has been true since human life began, Caws says.
“So, I was thinking how, it’s not a mirror, but myth is so important,” he says. “And maybe there is something a little mythical about the moon. And maybe we do, maybe subconsciously realize that we've all seen it, you know, it's a common experience. And maybe, just maybe, if I can see it, and you can see it, maybe we can see each other.”
All Over the World
Interestingly, the members of Nada Surf are looking at the moon from different cities and continents these days. Caws calls them a New York-band in which “no one lives in New York anymore.”
“I think it’s contributed to our longevity, because we’ve all allowed each other to continue our adult lives and go where the wind takes us,” he says.
Moon Mirror also marks Nada Surf’s first album for New West after many years on Seattle-based Barsuk Records, whose owner, Josh Rosenfield, has “semi-retired,” Caws says. It turned out that New West’s Brady Brock, the label’s senior vice president of media and reissues producer, was a big fan of Nada Surf.“I kind of like that they’re an Americana label, and we’re not really an Americana band,” Caws says. “I feel like if we’re outside of their outside of the center of their wheelhouse, they must be sincere, because they certainly don’t need us.”
Nada Surf performs Friday night at the Vivarium at 8:30 p.m. Their New West labelmates Office Dog will open.
Get Moon Mirror at Amazon here.
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