Merge kicks off 2024, the year of our 35th anniversary, with a new Superchunk single!
Mac McCaughan on the two tracks:
The last years have often felt like an avalanche of loss—starting with Bowie and Prince, really, and then magnified by the pandemic and amplified by social media. Something that seems different recently is that we aren’t just losing legends from older generations—Pharoah Sanders or Toots Hibbert or Kidd Jordan or Tina Turner—but musicians we think of as peers and friends; people we have toured with and recorded with and shared beers with all over the world. It means of course we’re getting older, and while we know from an early age that yes, everybody dies, it doesn’t make these departures any less shocking.
When I recorded the demo of the A-side, I played a poor imitation of a Drive Like Jehu–type drum pattern; Rick Froberg was a musical inspiration. Lucky for everyone, I didn’t try to sing like him on this track. When we were thinking of covers to record for the B-side—dedicated to Hamish Kilgour in the runout groove—I came in one day and said, “What about an Alastair Galbraith song?” and Jim said, “‘As in a Blender’?” Galbraith’s meditation on mortality and the passage of time is somewhat more sanguine than ours and was exactly the one I had been listening to.