Sundowner

  • Pete Bataillon posted
  • Interviews

Sundowner - Chris McCaughan

  • September 20th, 2013
  • Phone

Fresh off an energetic performance at Chicago’s Riot Fest, Chris McCaughan – the mastermind behind Sundowner (and one third of everyone’s favourite punk band The Lawrence Arms) spoke to Pete Bataillon about exactly what it was that inspired him when writing Neon Fiction and the stories behind the artwork, title and the new Lawrence Arms album.


Since the release of “Neon Fiction” how has the response been so far?

SundownerIt’s been really great you know, it’s been positive.  Yeah, I’ve been really excited about it.  So far I haven’t done too many shows yet, kind of getting going this week on some shows in the Midwest and I have some other things planned through the fall.  But just as far as people reaching out on the internet and stuff, on Twitter and Facebook and everything it’s been really cool so I feel good about it man.  People have had really nice things to say.  So far so good.

The shows that you’ve done so far, have they just been solo or have you had accompaniment with them?

No, I’m just playing solo right now.  Mainly because…well, it’s not really a real band.  Neil [Hennessey] and I kind of made the record as a band, a duo.  Although it reads more like a full band record and because we kind of live in different places now and some of the logistics of putting the band together it’s been for the moment best for me to do shows solo.  So I’m just getting out and doing stuff on my own right now.  Which is cool man because, as much as I would love to have a full band with me, I feel I’ve been playing solo for a long time, I feel pretty comfortable in that format and you know I wrote a lot of the songs to hopefully be able to translate both ways.  So hopefully they kind of come out in a cool way when I play them on my own to even though they’ll be different.

You mentioned living in different places now, and obviously you grew up in Chicago and I read that you have a sense of the seasons and the contrast between them. You’re living up in the Northwest now?

Yeah yeah, I am.

Do you feel any difference with that connection to the seasons of being in a different geographic location?

Yeah, well it’s definitely different.  You know, I really did grow up with an acute sense of seasons and I think part of growing up in the Midwest, and I’m sure in the Northeast as well, and other places.  You know there’s such a stark contrast in the seasons you know.  In Chicago I mean fall is pretty short, same as spring, you know it usually clicks over from summer to almost winter pretty fast. But yeah, it was always a way to mark time.  I always remembered things based on them happening in certain seasons.  My family always marked the passage of time by the changing of the seasons.  But the Northwest does have seasons and things definitely change.  It goes from these really beautiful three/four month summers that are outrageously gorgeous and perfect, and you know you get a fall, and then it starts to get cold and rainy.  Its not like the kind of cold in the Midwest, but you know there’s definitely like a shift and it’s not quite like, I’ve never really lived in California but I think it’s probably the seasonal change was a little more mild there.  So the Northwest has a seasonal vibe still.  But yeah, it’s not quite like that real contrasty Midwest season.  But it’s been interesting.  It’s been cool.  I still think about the world in that way, you know, being from there even though I live in a new place.

You mentioned working with Neil on the new album, and you did that at Atlas Studios right?

Yeah, we tracked it and mixed it at Atlas, and Justin Yates, who actually works with Matt Allison, was the one who engineered it and kind of helped produce it along with Neil and myself and then Neil mixed it.  We kind of did it over the course of a summer just trying to get everyone’s schedules working together so we weren’t able to just kind of do it in a block, which probably would have been ideal.  But it actually worked out really well.  It gave us some time to build this in the best way possible and since it’s not like a real band.  You know it’s not like 4 guys in a studio playing these songs.  It kind of gave us the chance to review stuff and make decisions along the way and so it was a cool process and a cool experience and it was really just the three of us mainly in the studio together.  It was cool man.  It was a really cool vibe. 

I was reading about how you really like working with the guitars and layering guitars when you’re in the studio.  What are your thoughts on layering electric on electric, say when you’re doing Lawrence Arms, versus putting electric and the melodies to an acoustic track?

Yeah it’s cool.  I have so much fun.  As much as I like to write songs and I consider myself a songwriter.  I think over the years I’ve kind of like worked at being a better vocalist and all that stuff.  But I really feel like I grew up as a guitar player and that’s one of the things that’s just so much fun being in the studio.  I love writing melodies and I love getting tones and like figuring out cool things to do with guitar work and just trying to you know, I don’t know just building songs on guitar is just something I really really love to do.  It’s definitely a different experience.  The Sundowner record was like this core acoustic kind of main rhythm and we just started to build around it.  We tried not to go too heavy on the super layering, like you know four guitars at a time kind of stuff.  I wanted to make it sound like you know it was playable. You know it’s really easy especially now with Pro Tools to start making records, it’s like “Ah man, we’re just gonna add another guitar there and it’s gonna get thicker and more lush, and I’m gonna put another melody there.” It’s easy to go overboard because it’s become a lot more streamlined to just keep putting guitars on top of guitars.  So I tried to keep it within reason. 

Actually, when we were doing the new Lawrence Arms record I felt the same way.  I was like “I want people to hear this and think that it would be possible for me to pull most of it off.”  Obviously with the Sundowner if I’m playing acoustic that becomes hard.  But yeah, we tried to get some electric rhythms and really build melodies into the songs that would kind of take them to the next place.  I think one of the really cool things for me about writing guitar stuff is that you have a song that’s kind of a skeleton and you get a chance to add all this flesh and stuff to it that takes the song to the next place and hopefully elevates it that much more and I think that’s the really great thing about being able to make records in the studio; it’s a really different experience than just playing live or just the writing process.  It really starts to become this whole different element and this different project.  It’s super cool and really really fun.  The great thing about being in the studio for me is just really getting a chance to try to write cool stuff and get a chance to experiment with different kinds of parts.

SundownerIt’s interesting that you mention tone.  I got to see you years ago with The Lawrence Arms but I haven’t gotten to see you play as Sundowner yet, but I see videos and some pictures of you and one of your acoustics that seems like its been through a little bit.  Is there any significance with behind that guitar specifically?

So I found an acoustic and I like old guitars.  I just like things that have been around and been played.  They make great new guitars too, but I don’t know, there’s just some kind of soft spot in me for stuff that feels like it’s had history and lives outside of me.  So I found this really awesome Gibson ’78 J45/J50 mashup  acoustic guitar.  I bought it actually after I made the last Sundowner record, so that was the acoustic we used on this record.  I just really love the tone of it and as a guitar player I really love the way it plays and everything.  It’s become the kind of guitar that I would never sell you know?  I think people who play guitar or play instruments in general have those instruments in their lives; you know what I’m saying? I just don’t think I’ll ever give this one up you know?  So that’s how I feel about the acoustic I have now; and actually that’s how I feel about the electric I have now which is really the only electric I own.  It’s a late 70’s Gibson goldtop and it’s what I’ve used on the recent Lawrence Arms stuff.  Sometimes I just play Sundowner live with the goldtop as opposed to just an acoustic and just go for the electric, which is really fun.  I think I’ve kind of learned how to go both ways with that.   Those two guitars man, those two 70’s Gibsons are the ones I guess I’ll just take with me into the ground.  Totally special guitars to me from the same era. 

With the theme and the content of “Neon Fiction” can you talk about little bit about that and how the thought process strung together?

Unlike a lot of records in my life, I never really set out, I know it sounds kind of trite or whatever, I never really set out to write this record.  I wasn’t like, “OK, I gotta make another Sundowner record” or “I really want to sit down and start writing songs to work towards a new record”.  I guess I was in a time in my life where the past couple years where I was just writing cause it’s just something that I do and it’s just the way I express myself in some respects.  So I was just writing songs and they just started to stack up and at some point I felt like I was I really like this stuff and I would really love to figure out how to make this record in a new way and have it shift perspective from the last Sundowner records.  So I feel like I came at this record from a little bit of a different perspective.   In the process of writing it I started to realize that a lot of it is kind of a transition record for me personally for a lot of reasons in my own life.  Kind of like a self-acceptance record; a little bit of self-actualization.  I mean I’m 36 years old so it’s taken a long time, but you know you just kind of continue to figure out what’s important to you, and how you want to live your days, and how you want to view the world.  So for me it’s kind of like a putting things into perspective record and on top of it a lot of it is about where I’m from.  Certainly a lot of it’s about my relationship with Chicago.  I think it’s a real city kind of record, which is sort of where the title came from and a lot of the songs reflect my life in the city.  But it’s also like a pushing forward record.  Like one of the main themes, I think, is to figure out what’s ahead.  So to me those are big themes.  But I think it’s kind of threaded through the whole record. 

You mentioned the Chicago connection and that being where the “Neon Fiction” came from.  What’s the meaning behind the album title?

Well, it doesn’t entirely come from the Chicago connection, but I was kind of having trouble naming the record to be honest and the mixes were getting done and we had been sitting on it for a little while and I was trying to figure out what the title was and in the past titles have come to me a little more quickly.  So I started thinking I was harping on this way too much.  It was actually when Ben Pier, who’s the photographer who shot the cover photo, who’s a good friend of mine.  He lives in New York City, and he came out and we actually shot the cover in Portland.  We spent a whole weekend just cruising around at locations and shooting stuff and trying to get down a cover but weren’t really sure and this is kind of the picture he pulled out and was like “man, I think this would be awesome”.  So it was really when I saw the cover that the aesthetic of the record and the themes all started to come together for me a little bit.  So that’s when I really started to be like “OK man, this is what the record is about”.  “Neon Fiction” just was just kind of like starting to kind of turn over in my head, I don’t know how to totally explain how I came up with it.  Nelson Algren, who’s kind of an infamous Chicago writer, had a book called “Neon Wilderness” and I had just been making connections in my head between writing, and cities, and neon.  So it all kind of started to make sense in that way.  So it was a little bit of a tip of the hat to that, and then it’s also kind of a silly play on non-fiction because I felt like the record was just so full of half truths.  Like a lot of it’s direct “yeah, this is kind of my life”, but a lot of it’s like this weird flipped half-truth story telling.  So it’s like while there’s some autobiographical songwriting going on and narratives and things like that there’s also a lot of stuff that’s just totally fiction.  So I guess that was my way of trying to synthesize that all into something that also when it comes down to it sounded cool to me.  I just wanted the title to sound cool to and look cool on the cover and kind of make sense with the whole aesthetic and so from that perspective I guess that’s how it really started to all come together. 

Obviously it’s been a long time since The Lawrence Arms has put anything out.  You’ve been doing Sundowner, Brendan’s been doing his projects, and Neil’s involved in a lot of things.  But as songwriters, do you and Brendan ever talk to each other about each other’s projects or do you just go your separate ways and do your own thing?

I think we definitely keep a dialogue going about songwriting and certainly I talked to Brendan a lot in making this record in various ways.  We’ve been friends for most of my life; most of our lives.  So I feel fortunate to have the people in the Lawrence Arms family and it also extends out to these other projects, it’s all kind of part of the same family and community.  So I mean Brendan and I have grown up together as songwriters and I think obviously we take sort of different perspectives and we have of different processes of how we get stuff down and how we write.  But I think we’re always interested in what the other person is reading and how the other person goes about writing.  Everyone writes songs differently and I think anyone who would say there’s a certain way to do it, I just don’t buy into that.  I think we all have different ways of getting stuff down.  So for sure me and Brendan do it in different ways which is awesome because it’s always cool to hear about how other people do it. So it’s nice to have that relationship. 

It’s like working on the new The Lawrence Arms record, we’re always sharing songs and it’s always cool to hear stuff, in its infancy, when it’s just written and how much it changes and evolves over time.  That’s part of what’s so fun about being able to still make records, and you just feel lucky to still be doing these projects in some way and be excited about how they’ll be in the end.  Most songs, even if you think they’re fully done when you write them, they start to take on a life of their own and then by the time you actually get them out there to other people’s ears you kind of release them.  Some people may be interested in what I was thinking, a lot of people also get to interpret them now and it doesn’t matter necessarily so much what my intentions were.  But that being said, that’s what’s cool about being in a band with two songwriters is that that you get different perspectives and someone who’s interested in how people make things.

SundownerHow did Riot Fest go over?

It was crazy man.  It was awesome.  It was a lot of fun.  Both Lawrence Arms shows were just kind of surreal more than unreal.  Just really awesome.  The whole weekend was crazy and a lot of fun.  It’s a hell of a festival.  We had a great time though, and The Broadways actually played on Sunday, which was really cool as well.

I know you get this a lot, but I gotta ask.  Any updates on the new Lawrence Arms stuff?

Well, basically here’s what I can tell you.  As I’m sure maybe you’ve heard, the record does exist now.  Everything is kind of in process so I can’t really give you any hard details about anything, but we’re really excited.  I’m excited about all of Brendan’s songs and my songs.  I had a lot of fun writing for it.  We had a lot of fun in the studio making it and we’re kind of starting to get closer to everything here. But I think before too long there’ll be news on that stuff.  But for now things are starting to come together so it’s exciting for all of us. 

What are you thoughts on The Fest coming up?

I’m sure it’ll be nuts man.  It’s always crazy man.  It’s been a while since we’ve been down there but the Lawrence Arms have played a bunch of the Fests over the years.  But I think it’s been a while for us, so this will be kind of a return to glory for us down in Gainesville man.  Should be really fun though.  I’m doing a Sundowner show with a bunch of the Fat Wreck bands.  It’ll be great.  It seems like the whole world descends on Gainesville for it so it should be pretty wild.

Anything you’d like to add at the end?

I’m excited about the Sundowner record.  I’m certainly excited for the new Lawrence Arms stuff coming up.  I feel fortunate to be in a position where I still get to share the stuff after so much time.  I’m just thankful that people are still interested in spinning the records and hopefully coming out to shows as I get the chance to do some dates.  Just thanks to everyone who’s always been supportive of all those projects that we’ve all been a part of.