Interview: Doug Martsch of Built to Spill

As Doug Martsch and the rest of Built to Spill walked to the front of the stage at the beginning of their show at First Avenue in Minneapolis, they projected a sense of calm, casually slinging their guitars over their shoulders and addressing the crowd. They’d been here many times before, and they’d surely played these songs more times than they could remember. Apparently no one had informed them that phoning it in after 15 years on the road was acceptable — even expected — evidenced by how passionately they blazed through a long setlist that felt as alive as anything heard from younger or hungrier bands.

The crowd — a mix of everyone from 18-year-old college freshmen to 38-year-old parents-of-three — fed that energy right back. Absent from every face was the look of malaise that seems to permeate most indie rock shows. Instead, everyone was smiling, singing along, clapping, swaying. The show was more than a Built to Spill show, it was a celebration of everything that a rock show is supposed to be.

Martsch started strong and didn’t let up for a second. Past the serious looks, the determined focus, and the passion he poured into every verse, you could see that he was still having fun. I spoke with him shortly after the show.

What’s been the highlight of the tour so far?
Hmmm…oh! Playing with the Butthole Surfers in Royal Oak, Michigan.

Was that something that was planned ahead of time, or did the opportunity just come up?
Well, Paul Leary, their guitar player — we were fans of their music, and we had a song on our new record that we wanted him to play a guitar solo on. So we contacted him and he did it at his studio, then just sent us the track, and he was really nice. Anyways, I was telling someone about that and they were like, “Yeah, I heard they were playing shows again.” So I called our booking agent, someone in his office booked them, and then we were both playing the same day in Detroit so we put our shows together and got to play together. They’re one of my favorite bands ever.

Is there anything else you’re really looking forward to?
Yeah! We have a bunch of shows with Dinosaur Jr.

When you were here in Minneapolis, you had an after-party at Grumpy’s [a local bar] and spun records for everyone. Is that something you’ve been doing a lot of, or was it more of a one-time thing?
I’ve been doing it a little bit, but it’s sort of a weird setup. It’s nice — it’s something to do instead of just going and sitting on the bus — playing records and dancing and stuff.

Your new album definitely feels like a Built to Spill album, but there’s new sounds in there. There’s tracks like “Aisle 13″ that start out a little weirder, there’s places where you’re using different instruments, there’s places that get a little darker than your past records. What do you think led to the sound of this album? How did you guys get to that place?
I don’t really know. I mean, we just sit around with guitars and make up songs, and I don’t really know how we get from one place to the next…we kinda play what comes naturally to us. We’re also influenced by a lot of different kinds of music, a lot of different things, and we bring that into it.

So it happens organically, then? You guys don’t go into the studio and say “Okay, we’re gonna try to do this specific thing.”
Nah, it’s just a batch of songs that all happened to be written in the past two years. Writing songs is just stumbling across things, stumbling upon things, and then kind of figuring out the most effective way to interpret the things that you stumbled across. And when things are interesting about music — rhythmic things, melodic things, harmonic things, production value things — you just intuitively kind of try to make it sound like good music. You try to make it sound like good music within the limitations you have as a musician or an engineer.

This was the first time that you guys tried recording digitally.
Yeah, it’s the first album.

If you’d been so comfortable for the past 10 to 15 years recording on analog equipment, why try recording digitally this time?
Well, when we made our last record, we bought a bunch of tape. Then a few months into the project, all the tape companies went under, so people talked about there not being tape anymore. Pretty quickly some new people started making tape, but they kind of had to start over again. Not totally from scratch, but somehow the technology was kinda fucked up during this transition. So people making records on tape were having a lot of trouble in the couple of years that followed, after all of the original tapes were gone. The new tapes were shredding during sessions — just really subtle shredding, like there’d be a little residue of dust by the tape head after you ran the song.

But you do that enough, and if you’re overdubbing (which we do tons of) and then mixing it, every pass of a mix is doing that to it again. So there’s not a lot of people that are feeling comfortable about making an album totally on tape right now. So that was part of the thing, and then part of it was that I’d discovered Pro Tools — lot of bands were using it, and it seemed like it sounded fine. So I actually really enjoyed being able to work on the record at home, working on mixes and edits and stuff at home. It was really fun. We recorded basic tracks on tape — we recorded the drums and bass on tape — and dumped that into Pro Tools, and then mixed the whole thing onto tape at the end of the process.

So that it didn’t feel totally digital?
Yeah, exactly. We [originally] mixed it with some plug-ins and stuff, sort of a producer’s style of mixing. And then decided we wanted to go back and redo it all, mix it back onto tape, and use only outboard gear — not use any digital plug-ins that were part of the computer. We tried to keep it as unaffected by that stuff as possible, tried to just use Pro Tools as a tape machine.

You said that you guys drew on a lot of albums from the past when you were recording this album, a lot of nostalgic stuff. What were you listening to when you were writing the album? Were there any influences that really stood out, or was it more of a grab bag?
It was a grab bag for sure. I got an iPod a few years ago, so the stuff I’ve been listening to has been all over the place. Old soul and reggae are kind of my favorite things. That stuff doesn’t really come out a lot on the record — maybe in subtle ways. I’ve been listening to things I grew up with.

I think the fact that we’d been playing one of our old records on tour, while we were working on the new record — that had a bit of an influence.

Are you planning to do any more solo work anytime soon?
Nope, I don’t have any plans to do anything right now — just Built to Spill stuff, just touring. I’m kind of gonna sit around, maybe fuck around and make weird music for myself for a little while.

Not with any plan to release it? Just making it for yourself?
Yeah, exactly. Just stuff that I don’t have to worry about the audience for. Just to fuck around with sounds a little bit. I haven’t done that in a long time.

How much does the audience play into stuff that you’re writing now? When you sit down to write a song, do you still write for yourself? After all of these years, after developing this recognizable sound, how much pressure is there when you’re writing?
I’ve always written for an audience and for myself. It seems like there’s no difference. Most of the music I really love — other people love it as well. So, I figure if I’m making music that I appreciate, other people are gonna appreciate it. That’s the simple logic to me.

When you guys performed at the Pitchfork Festival a few months back, you did the “Write the Night” setlist where the fans determined what you were going to play. Was that pretty much what you expected, or were there some surprises in there?
You know, it was real close to what I expected. We’ve always tried to do that anyways — we’ve always tried to play the stuff that the crowd wants to hear. [When] the crowd’s into it, that totally inspires us and makes it fun for us. I have no problem playing whatever people want to hear. Just judging from what people yelled out over the years in responses to songs and whatnot, we pretty much intuitively figured out this thing.

Except for the songs we just won’t play, or can’t play, or you know, just really don’t want to play. Like, we’re not gonna play “Cortez the Killer.” Or…there are a couple songs that are just not fun at all to sing, or for some reason one of the guys hates the song, he thinks it sucks, so we don’t play it.

Are there any songs that you really loved when you wrote, that held some special place with you, but that people never got into?
Oh yeah, totally. There are a lot. I think there are songs that maybe I didn’t do a great job with — maybe that’s more what I’m talking about. I’m talking more about recordings, I guess. And then I think they would be more popular with people if I had really done them right.

You guys do a lot of cover songs live. Are there any songs that you would really love to cover, but that you haven’t been able to get to work?
There’s probably a few, but we went ahead and did ‘em anyway. But right now we’re not playing any [covers]. And yeah, you gotta think about it. You can’t just play a song you love. It has to be something you can pull off to some degree.

It has to be something that you can really make your own?
Not even so much that as preserving what’s great about it. Even if you’re not making it your own, being able to get across what makes the song great. When we do live covers of songs, generally we do ‘em real straight up, we don’t try to make them our own, we try to stay as true to the original as possible — for the most part. There are some exceptions. They’re really fun to do, we have a blast. But we can’t think of any lately. It’s been a whole tour now where we haven’t really done any because nothing’s inspired everyone at the same time.

So you guys will only try something out if everyone is into it?
Not necessarily, we’ll try to talk people into it sometimes. Of course I have to be into it, because I’m gonna be the one singing every night. And I don’t want to play something that’s gonna be a drag for other people [in the band]. That’s no fun. We have plenty of songs, there’s plenty of music we can all enjoy, so I never push the issue on that kind of shit.

You guys have been around for so long now — You’ve seen things change by leaps and bounds since you started playing. What do you think of the current music scene, how do you think it’s changed since you’ve started? What’s the difference between indie rock in 1996 vs. 2009?
Well, I don’t know. I can’t really speak for much except for my own scene, you know? And my scene seems pretty similar to the way it was back then. There’s new people, but…there’s the same form. It’s just different people filling it.

I can only speak for Boise, too. I don’t know as much about a national scene, what people are doing everywhere else. But in Boise the scene’s still pretty cool. There are some really good bands and clubs, people understand what it takes to get things going on and what it takes to make things happen. It’s cool.