Superchunk

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

We started from actual scratch with no demos or concepts, just playing instrumental music with our usual gear plus a Casio. Sometimes one of us would play the keys instead of our normal instrument, or Jon would hop on guitar and we’d use the Casio drum machine for the beat. We ended up with a LOT of ideas and plenty of good names for them—“Frank’s Bath,” “There’s Something About Marvin,” and “Bestial Warning” to name a few. We recorded practice onto MiniDisc or cassette, and I would ride around listening to these demos and thinking of words. The subject matter, in retrospect, has a lot to do with touring and travel. We recorded the album in the Cabbagetown neighborhood of Atlanta at Zero Return, the studio built 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 there in a dorm-like setting and stayed up too late. We had some great guest players on the record including the first appearance of a pedal steel on a Superchunk album, played by John Neff of Athens band Japancakes. Local Chris Lopez (The Rock*A*Teens) came over to sing backup 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 did sing is awesome. We took the record home and mixed it in the basement of Jim’s house in the woods where Brian Paulson had his studio set up.