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The Cutie effect
Nada Surf find a new kind of popular
BY MIKAEL WOOD
Related Links

 

Nada Surf's official Web site

Sean Richardson reviews Nada Surf's Let Go.

Jonathan Perry reviews Nada Surf's performance at the Middle East’s upstairs (2003).

Sarah Tomlinson reviews Nada Surf and Ozma at the Middle East (2003).

Matthew Caws knows the music industry. He’s not likely to be surprised when something unexpected happens. In 1996, his New York–based guitar-pop trio, Nada Surf, had an MTV hit with "Popular," the lead single from the band’s Elektra debut, High/Low. If you remember more about the ’90s than "Smells like Teen Spirit" and "Undone (The Sweater Song)," you’ll recall "Popular": over a deadpan groove that keeps igniting into knowing post-grunge fireworks, Caws lays out his "teenage guide to popularity." It’s 12 easy steps to hanging with the star quarterback and bagging the hot cheerleader. It’s the listener’s job to figure out that Caws is kidding.

After "Popular" ran its course, Elektra wanted more of the same. Instead, the band offered up The Proximity Effect, a more serious follow-up, which Elektra declined to release. "We asked for the record back when they decided they weren’t gonna put it out," Caws says today, as we stroll along the East River in Manhattan, near his childhood home on East 81st Street. "And they asked for way too much money, because they didn’t really want somebody else to put it out and do well." According to Caws, Elektra wanted $200,000 for Proximity; at the time, he points out, Moby had just defected to V2 and sold 10 million copies of Play. "So we just waited," the singer shrugs. "It was like a year and a half, or two years, and in the end they gave it to us for free."

In August 2000, the band, who headline the Paradise this Saturday, released the disc on their own Great Utopia label. "That went pretty well," Caws says, "but it’s obviously very limited. You can’t really get many records out into the stores if you’re just a dude." So when Nada Surf completed their next album (recorded and funded entirely by the band), Caws went looking for help. He’d been a big fan of Death Cab for Cutie’s first album and had toured with Rilo Kiley, so he "picked up the phone and called Josh [Rosenfeld]," owner of the Seattle indie Barsuk.

"It was pretty instantaneous," Rosenfeld says of his decision to release what became 2002’s Let Go. "Matthew and [bassist] Daniel [Lorca] and [drummer] Ira [Elliot] are such good players," his e-mail response continues, "and Matthew’s voice is so beautiful, that it didn’t really feel like we needed any convincing on the musical front." (For the record, Rosenfeld hadn’t heard "Popular" when he signed Nada Surf. He finally heard it "maybe a year or so ago.")

Let Go revealed a softer, gentler side of Caws’s songwriting. The album is full of folksy acoustic guitars and careful vocal harmonies — much more Death Cab than Weezer — and it won the band a new, devoted following in the indie world. "It struck us by surprise," Caws says of the album’s sales, which, he mentions, hit 50,000 today. "I wasn’t expecting it’d do that well."

The once ironic Nada Surf were, ironically enough, reborn as a more earnest, Death Cabby indie act. Their new album, The Weight Is a Gift (Barsuk), switches between lush midtempo ballads and a mild power-pop crunch; Elliot and Lorca drive the music with a taut, steady groove that occasionally recalls classic soul recordings. Caws’s writing is as detailed as it was on Let Go, but it’s more involved, too — a deepening he credits to a series of substantial developments in his personal life. He laughs, saying that, for him, getting up on stage and singing new tunes like the disc’s title track and "Always Love" — in which he warns himself that "hate will get you every time" — is "a very self-help experience. . . . We need to play new songs at shows, so I have a motivation to boil a problem or a regret down to three minutes and make it rhyme. That puts little handles on it — you take it out of yourself and put it on the table. It really helps get it out."

Nada Surf + Say Hi to Your Mom + True Love | Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | October 8 | 617.228.6000


Issue Date: October 7 - 13, 2005
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