Superchunk – Here's To Shutting Up

To write the songs for Here's To Shutting Up, we met a few times a week in Jim's garage (he lived way out in the woods) for what seemed like months.

We started from scratch, with no demos or concepts, and just played instrumental music with our usual gear plus a Casio. Sometimes one of us would play the keys instead of his normal instrument, or Jon would sit down on guitar and we'd use the Casio drum machine for the beat. We ended up with a lot of ideas and a lot of good names for it: "Frank's Bath", "There's Something About Marvin" and "Bestial Warning", to name a few. We'd record the exercises on MiniDisc or cassette, and I'd drive around listening to these demos and making up words. Looking back, the themes have a lot to do with touring and travel ("Out on the Wing," "What Do You Look Forward To?"), coming home ("Rainy Streets," "Act Surprised"), the 2000 election ("Florida's on Fire"), and late capitalism ("Late-Century Dream," "The Animal Has Left Its Shell")

Once we got the songs into a recognizable and playable form, we recreated them in acoustic form and recorded these "demos" at my house so we wouldn't forget how they went and so we could learn how to play them. Some feature the whole band, others feature me learning Jim and Laura's parts from the practice tapes and playing them on acoustic guitar

We recorded the album in the Cabbagetown neighborhood of Atlanta at Zero Return, the studio run by Brian and Rob (aka Birdstuff and Coco the Electronic Monkey Wizard) of Man Or Astro-Man? Brian Paulson came with us to produce it. The studio itself was amazing. We also slept in a dorm-like environment there and stayed up too late. We had some great guest musicians on the record, including the first appearance of a pedal steel on a Superchunk album, played by John Neff of the Athens band Japancakes. Local Chris Lopez (The Rock*A*Teens) stopped by to sing background vocals on "Art Class (Song For Yayoi Kusama)." I asked him to sing harmonies on the chorus and he was like, "Harmonies? Oh, I can't sing harmonies." I still don't believe him, but what he sang is fantastic

We took the record home and mixed it in the basement of Jim's house in the woods where Brian Paulson had set up his studio. Here's To Shutting Up was supposed to be released on September 18, 2001. On September 11, obviously, the world changed. Our release date was pushed back a few weeks, but our tour dates remained and we flew to Japan in October

It was a WILD time to be touring the world. Reactions ranged from "Thanks for giving us something else to think about" to "Why are you here?" We flew home from Japan and made our way to the UK the day the US started bombing Afghanistan. That was the climate, and the climate was not good for playing rock music. People's minds were on other things. Our friend Annie Hayden (from the band Spent) joined us on keyboards and guitar for the US leg, which was an exciting addition to our line-up and a fun way to play old songs in a new way

We had some great shows along the way and were able to tour with excellent openers like Rilo Kiley, The Good Life and Aereogramme. But the anxiety in the air and the length of the tour was exhausting. Some of the most fun moments of the tour were the acoustic in-stores we did, which you can hear on the first Clambake we released. _Mac McCaughan.