Built to Spill interview

Self-professed “fanboy” Darragh McCausland talks to Built To Spill main man Doug Martsch about their upcoming tour dates.

For their current series of European gigs, Built To Spill are playing all of their epic 1993 alt-rock classic Perfect From Now On in its entirety. The album is a true benchmark. Not only did it define their career, it married the questing, far out guitar sounds of Dinosaur Jr and Crazy Horse to a whimsical, melodic and lyrical sensibility redolent of contemporaries such as Pavement. It is a meandering, cosmic sprawl of an album that always chooses the scenic route; only one song clocks in below five minutes.

Ahead of their Irish date in Whelans, I get a rare opportunity to talk to their frontman and songwriter, the wonderfully bearded and angelically voiced Doug Martsch. Now is about the right place for my disclaimer. I am a drooling fanboy when it comes to Built To Spill. A sick, irrational, drooling fanboy idiot, like a ten-year-old McFly worshipper. Getting a chance to talk to someone like Doug is one of the reasons I started writing for Analogue in the first place. So when I pick up the phone to chat to him, I am experiencing a dose of dishwasher tummy, a mixture of raw nerves (what if he’s a grump?), excitement, and the obvious need to temper my sycophantic instincts. Thankfully, I manage to keep my inner teenage girl in check and ask Doug (who turns out to be very soft spoken and open) some sensible questions. Beginning with the current tour.

I ask him what it is like to return to the Perfect From Now On material in such an exhaustive way after what must presumably have been a long break from most of it? “Yeah”, he says a little wearily, “we started working on doing this a long while ago, and now I really don’t know what to make of it.” How come? “Well we’ve been doing that album for about two months now, and I don’t know. I mean it’s just a bunch of fucking music.” He sounds a little exasperated. Perhaps it is because with Built to Spill being a constantly evolving touring force, he now feels constrained by having to play this stuff in full every night. I ask him if there is anything he would change in those songs, now that he’s coming back to them, especially considering the bands reputation for tweaking things live? Or is the album like Ronseal and, like it says on its tin, perfect?

Doug tells me “You know when we first came back to the album we tried to play everything as close as possible because we had been playing some of the songs and they had changed over the years. We never try to stick closely to our records that way. So we did try to do that. But now, we’re sort of fucking around with it a bit. To some people it might sound changed. To others it might not.” I’d warrant that for fans of Built To Spill, a bit of tinkering with the source material will be forgiven. After all, the band thrives on a live reputation that sees them playing lengthy sets with beefed up versions of songs, which often sound even better live than on record. For my money, the definitive version of “Stop The Show” is on their live album, Live.

For a band that tends to look forward, two months is a long time to be spending in bed with so many old songs. Considering that they are reportedly putting together songs for a forthcoming release, I wonder if working with the old stuff will have a creative impact on their new material? Doug tentatively admits it might. “Maybe so”, he says. “The new album was going to be a bit more stripped down and coming back to Perfect From Now On has me thinking more in terms of adding layers and stuff. I think we were starting to do that anyway, but I think with the Perfect From Now On stuff at the fore, I’m a bit more excited about getting back to do that.” But first there is the question of the road.
Built To Spill seem to be always on the road. Like Bob Dylan, the last few years saw them on a seemingly never-ending tour that has criss-crossed North America and Canada with the odd jaunt across to Europe. You would imagine that Doug would enjoy touring. I ask him if, like in the Lee Marvin song, he was born under a wandering star? Funnily enough, he doesn’t like being on the road.
“No I’m not the travelling type at all”, he says. “I do like playing live and doing all of that. But if I didn’t have a reason to be out in the world, I wouldn’t be at all.”

In saying this, he does acknowledge that after so many years playing in the States, they want to bring live shows further afield. Ireland is a case in point. Doug says that “the tour was all set up but we didn’t have any shows in Ireland but we made sure with the booking agent that we get to play there and Scotland.” This meant the band adding ten days onto their tour in order to play for two dates. I secretly and deludedly fancy that this is because of the begging messages I personally left on their MySpace page to play here.

Another MySpace page that sees its fair share of begging messages belongs to The Halo Benders, Doug’s on-off project with K Records main man Calvin Johnston. Fans are always anxious to hear new material from this group, whose brilliantly odd songs have to be heard to be believed (much of their material sounds like two completely different songs being sung at once and, curiously, works brilliantly). He tells me that this project is still alive, if a little delayed.

“We got together a couple of years ago and wrote some songs. But then Built To Spill became so overwhelming and it just fucked with the schedule of everyone. One of the guys went to school full-time. But we have a batch of songs that everyone is pretty excited about, so maybe when Built To Spill have a break we’ll get back around to it,” he tells me, providing a bone for material-hungry Halo Benders nuts to chew over. He also laughs when I request “Virginia Reel Around the Fountain” as an encore in Whelans. “Maybe if you or someone else shouts it out loud enough, sure,” he says. Well, Mr Martsch, that better be true because I can shout pretty loud.

Something casual Built To Spill watchers may not know about Doug is his interest in Reggae music. One of the more recently recorded Built To Spill tracks, “They Got Away” has a distinctly reggae sound. He tells me he only got into reggae in his 30s, when “someone gave me a really nice Lee Perry compilation. From listening to that stuff for a couple of years that song grew out of a sort of a jam that we did.”

The song marks an interesting departure for the band and although Doug tells me “it’s just a one off”, it will be fascinating to see if any of Perry’s vibes rub off on the next record’s sound.
The song structures on previous Built to Spill records can be crudely divided into two different types, the eight minute round-the-solar system epic (“Goin’ Against Your Mind”) and the punchier, hookier short track (“Centre Of The Universe”). Doug says that he doesn’t deliberately plot a course toward either one of these poles. “The songs sort of tell me what they are doing themselves”, he laughs, sounding a bit Zen. “The song is there and it looks after itself. There are lot of songs where we have done everything we could to shorten them but they just won’t let us.”

This is a lovely insight. It’s nice to think that Built To Spill songs exist somewhere “Out There” and that Doug just plucks them from the ether. It certainly befits a catalogue of music which, for all its catchiness and big hooks, has at its heart a sort of cosmic unknown; an awestruck wonder at the universe around us. Such wonder is beautifully expressed in the first song the band will play in Dublin next week, “Randy Describes Eternity”, where phased, squalling guitars carry a beautiful vocal line which contains the best metaphor I’ve ever heard to describe infinity. Amidst all of this, Doug decides he’s going to be “perfect starting now.” With a bit of luck, it will be the perfect start to a perfect show.