As indie rock institutions go, you can count most of them on one hand: Pavement, Superchunk, Dinosaur Jr., so on. But you’d better save a digit for Built to Spill, the Boise, Idaho band that’s released seven albums to date. They’re one of the few indie rock bands to sign to a major label and not just do well but expand upon their success and credibility alike. In fact, 15 years after inking a deal with Warner, they’ve given the label – and us – such classics as Perfect From Now On and Keep It Like A Secret. The band’s three albums last decade weren’t too shabby, either, spanning the loose sprawl of You In Reverse and the more succinct pop of Ancient Melodies of the Future. Last year’s There Is No Enemy has its own thoughtful pastures to explore, with a more pronounced country influence and less storm and shadows overall. Most of it all, it feels comfortable.

The same could easily be said, by now, of frontman Doug Martsch’s voice and guitar work. Singing with a dreamy, modest, half-raspy softness, Martsch has accidentally developed a reputation as a bearded, cuddly guitar god for everyone from jam band stoners to indie rock nerds to classic rock holdovers. Comparisons to Neil Young have been liberally applied, and to be fair, the band did a 20-minute rendition of ‘Cortez the Killer’ on its live album. But there’s always been something unique in Martsch, whether fronting Built to Spill and his earlier band the Treepeople or dueting with Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson in the oddball ’90s outfit the Halo Benders. It’s something to do with his tender voice, sublime guitar passages, and unperturbed presence, although all of those can fall away during a particularly damaging bout of jagged, marathon rock.

Despite such legendary status, Built to Spill has only been to Australia once, in 2008. The band is back for seconds this summer, and Martsch kindly engaged in a long interview in advance of the tour. Topics on the table: getting older in a society that thrives on youth; lifting melodies without realising it; reuniting Martsch’s high school band; how musical originality is overrated; and playing at a bowls club in Sydney with no stage.

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Built to Spill is famous for these big, sprawling guitar songs. Do you ever feel beholden to do that sort of thing?

No, not really. I kind of … (Pause) no, I don’t. (Laughs)

Do you ever write something that doesn’t quite fit the Built to Spill mould?

I don’t think there is a mould. I think we can do anything. I mean, we have our limitations, but I don’t think it limits what kind of music we can play. So no, I don’t at all feel that way. Y’know, our records are full of songs that don’t do that kind of stuff.

I know on There Is No Enemy, there’s trumpet on ‘Things Fall Apart’ and keyboards and cello elsewhere.

We’ve always had stuff like that. There’s been lots of keyboards and cello stuff. I guess the horns are a first. I wrote a part that I thought might sound cool with a different instrument. I thought a trumpet would sound really nice there, just playing around making music and thinking about different ideas. To me, it’s all about servicing the song. I don’t think we have a sound, so there’s nothing that we have to do. We can do whatever we want.

Is it tougher to challenge yourselves after seven albums, or is it the same as ever?

I mean, I haven’t scratched the surface of music. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. So there’s plenty of room to expand and do new things. That’s never been a problem for me. The problem is taking your ideas and trying to pull it off and play well and sing well. As far as ideas, no, there’s no shortage of those. There’s an infinite amount of things you can do with music.

You’ve done a solo record and albums with the Halo Benders. Do you have any other extracurricular stuff coming up?

Yeah, actually, I got some guys together from my old high school band, Farm Days. We’re gonna make a record, hopefully at the end of the year when we’re done touring the States. It [was] me and Brett Nelson, our bass player, and then Andy Capps, who played drums on There’s Nothing Wrong With Love. He passed away and now our sound guy is playing drums. We got together and learned all our old songs to play at a benefit show. Some other band got together from back in those days, so we decided we’d try it. And we had such a good time, we decided to keep doin’ it. We wrote some new songs and yeah, hopefully we’ll get something recorded soon.

What does that band sound like compared to Treepeople and Built to Spill?

Um, well … y’know, we thought we were like the Replacements or something. It’s kinda pop. Brett’s bass playing is really busy, super note-y. My guitar playing is pretty basic, mostly just rhythm guitar. Really bad lyrics. The songs are super fast; I don’t know if they were supposed to be or if our drummer could only play one speed. He only played one beat the whole time. We were young musicians. I don’t really know what was going on. But learning the songs [again] was really fun. Like I said, the lyrics are horrible, but the music was really cool. It went over really well, too, at the show.

It must be a strange thing, almost like slipping into your old skin.

(Laughs) I wouldn’t go that far. It was mostly cool to hear that the songs were still somehow engaging and interesting. That they weren’t just total crap.

When you guys write set lists for Built to Spill, is everything up for grabs?

As long as we know it. Usually we’ll know 40 or so songs [at one time]. And it’s from everything; there’s a song from every record we know. Part of it is to be fun for us and also for the audience. My feeling is always like, if someone just owned one of our records, they’d at least get to hear one song they knew. I don’t stick to that as a hard and fast rule, but it’s generally what we try to do. It also has to do with mixing up tempos and making things move along in that way. It also has to do with which songs happen to be going well for us at the time.

Do you have certain songs you save for the encore?

Sorta, yeah. There’s definitely things that we play up front usually, because they’re easier to sing maybe, [to] get my voice warmed up. Or easier for the sound guy to deal with, to dial us in. Y’know, the first few songs of a show are generally pretty crappy-sounding. And then we save what I think are the hits – what seem to be the songs that people are yelling out for the most – towards the end. But at the same time, we bag all that too. I’ve been having the other guys in the band write set lists, and sometimes friends or fans that I’ve met. It gives us a different kind of energy, to start off with some song that I would never have started a set with in years. It keeps it interesting for us, I guess.

That’s the exciting thing about seeing a band with a proper back catalogue: you never know what they’re going to play.

Sure. That’s how I feel too.

Do the songs themselves change much live?

Yeah, and some songs have more room for improvisation that others. Sometimes it’s just the guitar solo that you can do something different with. Sometimes you can change the rhythm parts or the whole feel of it. We don’t mess with the songs that much, but there’s definitely space to move around.

How did you find it when you played Australia for the first time two years ago?

It was good. I enjoyed seeing a little bit of the country. As far as shows and crowds go, I can’t tell the difference. Everywhere seems kind of the same to me. There’s always a handful of people that are fans and into it, and people that aren’t and have just shown up. (Laughs) There’s no noticeable difference between the fans that I could tell.

You played a party at a bowls club in Sydney…

Yeah, it was something the record label set up. It was weird. There was no stage.

Were people actually playing lawn bowls?

Yeah. We played for a while before the show. It was fun.

Did that experience influence the video you made for ‘Hindsight’?

No, that was all [the video’s director] Bob Odenkirk. It was all his idea.


Built to Spill - 'Hindsight'

How did you come to work with him? I’m a huge Mr. Show fan.

Well, we discovered Mr. Show on tour one year. None of us had HBO, or at least I didn’t. Then I found a friend that had a few of them recorded, so we’d been watching them and quoting them all the time. This is probably in like 2000 … I don’t know, I have no idea about time these days. Maybe 2002? Anyway, we were big fans and when we played in L.A. at this record store, we saw Brian Posehn in the audience, because he’s so tall. Next to him was Bob. I couldn’t wait to get through the set and hopefully go say 'Hi' to them. I did and it was great. He was a big fan. We kept in touch. He’d come to our shows when we were there and I’d talk to him on the phone sometimes. He’s really cool to talk to. He’s really forthcoming, talking about his career and what he’s up to. Then someone asked us to make a video and he was our first choice. We made the last record in L.A., so he came and visited the studio a couple times and wrote me a really nice email when the record came out, telling me how much he liked it. It was fuckin’ beautiful. And it was fun chit-chatting with him for a month before we made it, batting ideas back and forth. And then one day of shooting. It was just a completely pleasant experience.

It’s a really wistful video. It’s sweet but sad as well.

Yeah, well, getting old is sad. I don’t see how you can think about becoming a senior citizen without being sad. It’s hard to think of heading towards the end of this. And so many things we value are youthful things. We live in such a horrible, youth-worshipping culture that elderly people don’t have the same position they had in the past. They don’t have much purpose in this world, this American world that’s all about buying and selling things. There’s really not much interest in old people. They’re not sexy.

They’re not marketable.

Yep.

That’s a good segue to the song ‘Planting Seeds’ from There Is No Enemy. You cite Bill Hicks and there are lyrics about buying and selling (“They’ll play your favourite song just to sell shit to you”; “Just because you love something doesn’t mean it’s yours to buy and sell”). Where exactly did that song come from?

I don’t know. It’s about that sort of thing, about advertising, but some parts aren’t. The older I get, I have a harder time trying to write a song that really sticks to one subject. It’s almost stupid when it does. It seems like the better songs veer off in other directions. Maybe it feels claustrophobic to keep it at a single subject, unless somehow you get something super clever going on that really does stay in some boundaries. ‘Planting Seeds’, there are so many words in that song. I wrote it down and it was a whole piece of paper. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t remember exactly how it formed and how it turned into a song about that.

Do the lyrics ever come first in the songwriting process?

No, never.

It’s just you writing on guitar usually?

Yep. Sometimes I’ll sit with a recorder and just make up chord progressions and melodies and sing them out and listen to it later and figure out which ones are interesting. Because sometimes I’ll find that the chords I’m playing, knowing the names and the shapes of them, will bias me or give me some prejudice in different ways. But if I do something and then listen to it later and I don’t know what chords I’m playing, it sounds more like music to me instead of mathematics or something. I guess a good example would be if I have something that’s just a G and a C back and forth. To me, that seems kind of stupid and it’s hard for me to get into that. But if I come up with a really nice melody that goes over the top of it, it can be great. And then if I forget about it and listen to it a month later, it’ll sound really nice and I’ve forgotten the fact that it’s just a G and C going back and forth. I’m just hearing it instead of knowing what’s going into it.

So you almost have to fool yourself into forgetting the technical part of it and just feeling the emotional part?

Yep, exactly. It’s almost like too simple. The best things are the simplest things, but at the same time, you strive to be original and you don’t want to be too simple. If you get a nice melody or something rhythmically going on or some variation in the chord, it gives it its own thing. It’s trying to make something simple but make it original and new. Not real original: I don’t mean earth-shattering originality, but as long as it’s not plagiarism, stealing someone else’s melodies. And I’ll do that a little bit. I won’t steal them, but I’ll notice them later. Sometime I’ll bag it, sometimes I’ll adjust it, sometimes I’ll say, ‘Aw, fuck it.’

Are there some examples of that you can think of?

Sure. Like the melody of ‘Randy Describes Eternity’ is the same as some Elliott Smith song. It’s actually a Heatmiser song [‘Something to Lose’], off Cop And Speeder. [Sings] “I’m sick of my plans” … that’s the same melody as ‘Randy’.


Built to Spill - 'Randy Described Eternity' (Perfect From Now On) live in 1999

It’s funny, I assumed it would be something from a famous guitar band, like Television.

It’s usually from some different, weird, other place. There’s a melody in ‘The Source’ – [Sings] “When you see a documentary and know the outcome / And that it's fucked” – that’s the same as “She got down but she never got tight / But she’ll make it alright.” Y’know that song, fuckin’ ‘Blinded By The Light’.

Well, there are so many melodies, and we’re swamped with them our whole life. It makes sense that they come out unconsciously.

Exactly. And that’s what music is. It’s not about being original and all that. That’s bullshit. It’s about passing things on and sharing good ideas and putting them in different contexts. I’ve never … well, it’s been a long time since I’ve been obsessed with being original. And once I got over that, I think music became a lot funner. I think a lot of bands would be smart to not worry about being original. I thought that about Modest Mouse: I felt like they were shamelessly ripping off the Pixies and I liked it. It was like, ‘Just go for it. You love that, you think it sounds great, just go for it. You’re not gonna sound like the Pixies. You just aren’t. And eventually you’ll come into your own and have your own way of doing stuff.’ Unless you’re really rippin’ something off … I don’t even know if people rip people off for real. I’m sure they do, but my mentality is so different than that that I don’t even know.

Doug Wallen

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Built to Spill is playing both the Peats Ridge and Pyramid Rock Festivals this summer. Side shows below.

Dec 20 – Metro Theatre – Sydney, NSW
1 Jan – The Corner – Melbourne, VIC
2 Jan – The Zoo – Brisbane, QLD
4 Jan – Rosemount Hotel – Perth, WA