Here's To Shutting Up

Description

To mark the 20th anniversary of the album, Merge Records is reissuing Superchunk's Here's to Shutting Up (2001), an indie rock band from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, adding a bonus CD that compiles the acoustic demos. To write the songs for Here's to Shutting Up, the band Superchunk would gather in Jim Wilbur's garage, who lived far out in the woods, a few times a week for what seemed like months. They started from scratch, with no demos or concepts, simply playing instrumental music with their usual gear as well as a Casio. Sometimes one of them would play keyboard instead of their usual instrument, or Jon Wurster would pick up the guitar and they'd use the Casio drum machine for the beat. They ended up with a lot of ideas and a lot of good names for them — "Frank's Bath", "There's Something About Marvin" and "Bestial Warning" to name just a few. The rehearsals were recorded on MiniDisc or cassette, and Mac McCaughan would drive around listening to these demos and searching for lyrics. The theme, in retrospect, has 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 the late phase of capitalism ("Late-Century Dream", "The Animal Has Left Its Shell"). After giving the songs a recognizable and playable form, they were recorded as acoustic demos so they could learn to play them. Some have the whole band, others are learning Jim and Laura's parts from the practice tapes to play them on acoustic guitar. The album was recorded in Atlanta's Cabbagetown neighborhood at Zero Return, the studio built by Brian and Rob (aka Birdstuff and Coco the Electronic Monkey Wizard) of the band Man or Astro-man? Brian Paulson came in to produce the record, which features John Neff of the band Japancakes on pedal steel and Chris Lopez (The Rock*A*Teens) who came in to sing backing vocals on "Art Class (Song for Yayoi Kusama)". Here's to Shutting Up was supposed to be released on September 18, 2001. On September 11, the world obviously changed. The release date was pushed back a few weeks, but the tour dates remained and the band left for Japan in October. It was a strange time to travel the world. The band flew to the UK on the day the US started bombing Afghanistan. The climate was far from ideal for playing rock. People had other fish to fry. Annie Hayden (of the band Spent) joined us on keyboards and guitar for the US tour. There were great shows but the fear in the air and the length of the tour were exhausting.