This article was originally written for Death+Taxes. The version that appears here is significantly longer, given that a lot was cut for reasons of word count — not really a problem here at The Scowl. The interview was conducted in April, 2007; a little over a year later, the band would play their last show in New York City.
“I think we figuratively wrote literal lyrics about the end of our band,” Jesse Woghin says. And then he laughs, which is encouraging. He and Sam Axelrod are recounting the circumstances that led to the creation of their second album, All That to the Wall. “I wouldn’t want people listening to it thinking it’s…a rock opera about a band breaking up,” says Axelrod, and that’s understandable. All That to the Wall is melancholy and anthemic, personal and universal, confined and spacious. It’s a contradictory record, and yet a cathartic one; late in the interview, Woghin and Axelrod will suggest that its predecessor’s title — Such Triumph — would work equally well for it. And none of this even touches on the album’s homages to Bob Dylan and, well, Steve Winwood.
The Narrator’s debut album, Such Triumph, felt like a summation of all that was right about guitar-driven indie rock in the 90s: fuzzed-out riffs, rolling basslines, distinctive vocals from both Axelrod and Woghin. That one saw release in 2005, and the band toured steadily behind it. In 2006, Woghin joined Chin Up Chin Up full-time on bass. “We were writing this record for a while, and went through a real dry period. That was the end of the line for [original drummer] Nate [Heneghan], that period of time…I think a lot of us had a pretty bad year last year,” says Woghin, “in very different ways.”
For the recording of the album, the group enlisted Oxford Collapse’s Dan Fetherston and Russian Circles’s Dave Tuncrantz to handle drums for different sets of songs. Since then, they’ve found a permanent drummer, one Kevin Vlack. Stylistically, Woghin describes him as “60-40 towards Dave… He really does fall somewhere in between. Definitely a little bit towards Dave in the way things are coming off now. It’s interesting… I haven’t heard any of our live performances to date with Kevin other than playing them, so I don’t know how it falls, but playing it, things definitely feel the way they should feel.”
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Throughout All That to the Wall, the voices of Woghin and Axelrod remain distinct: Woghin exploring personal territory on increasingly wide canvases, while Axelrod moves from detachment to engagement in a series of urban landscapes. “Dusk is a fine time to exit the city,” he sings on “Start Parking”. Cities occur repeatedly in his lyrics; does he mean Chicago, the city in which he currently resides; New York, the city in which he grew up, or something else? “Some of them are Chicago, I guess, and some of them are New York. I lived in New York for the first nineteen years of my life… And some of them are both, or neither. I’m into…cities,” is his reply.
Woghin’s lyrics may be the most immediately striking on the album. “Breaking the Turtle” opens with an impassioned “This is a song for the NASCAR generation”; there’s also the remarkably catchy “SurfJew”, the album’s first single. “There was a lot of debate over that,” Woghin says. “It was the song that didn’t have a good title for a really long time. I think it just came from…we were drunk and playing it, and I finished off the lyrics. It had kind of a surf feel, and it’s about being Jewish, a little.”
“We have working titles that are stitched together,” Axelrod adds. “That was the one that never progressed to a real title.”
“In all honesty, I was wanting to call it that for a long time, but there were some people who were not into that idea,” Woghin says. “Dan Fetherston said, ‘You have to keep that as the title’. And I was like, ‘Well, Dan’s got my back, and he’s kind of in the band, sort of.’ That was fifty percent.”
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Halfway through the album comes The Narrator’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “All The Tired Horses”. Sparsely arranged, heavy on the vocals, it doesn’t sound like anything else the band has played. But then again, as Axelrod points out, “it’s the least Bob Dylan song Bob Dylan ever wrote.” (Find a copy of 1970s Self-Portrait and decide for yourself.) The press materials, seemingly inexplicably, contain a number of references to Steve Winwood.
“Sam was definitely listening to a lot of it, Woghin explains, “and I can distinctly remember buying “Roll With It” on cassette, and being real into Winwood for a while. Sam and I both, wherein Sam was kinda bringing that back due to his dad.”
“My dad used to play that all the time when I was a kid,” says Axelrod. “I either forgot about it or subconsciously rejected it, because it’s….sort of terrible in some ways. …maybe a year ago or so, I heard “The Finer Things” on the radio. ‘Wait a sec…I love this song’. My dad keeps giving me casettes, because he doesn’t play them any more. He gave me his Back in the High Life casette… I just started listening to it a lot. And then I got Arc of a Diver again…he just writes really good songs. And we have that song “[Panic at] Puppy Beach” on the record; Jesse has this keyboard part…”
“The idea at first was to make it sound like those Hal Hartley soundtracks…[t]hat Hal Hartley, horrible Casio sound. And then we thought, let’s make it sound like that crossed with Winwood keyboards.”
“Which sounded really good, but doesn’t fit with our sound at all. Some writeup that we got here — I guess they were being serious — said that our Winwood influence shines through. Which I think is kind of ridiculous, because I don’t think we sound like him at all.” Here Axelrod pauses. “We’re into him.”
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Throughout the album’s lyrics, there’s a sense of melancholy, a sense of fatalism. Woghin explains that, with the upheaval in their lives, “I think I’ve ruminated a lot more — Sam, too — on what it would be like to end things. And what it would be like to end this thing that’s very much your life.”
Axelrod agrees: “That was going through my mind a lot when I was writing the lyrics. Because the band is such a big part of my life, and our lives, if you’re writing about things that have to do with yourself, in a lot of ways, our lives revolve around the band; they’re one and the same. There’s just a thing that kept coming up, a theme… It’s in almost every one of the songs. It is, sort of, at least the ones that I sing. Not specifically. Things ending, leaving, quitting. Things like that.”
Woghin clarifies things somewhat: “For me, this is how my sense of humor works, and how my family’s sense of humor works…. For me, at least, so many things — my dad, my family — writing that I like, authors, people like Vonnegut or George Saunders, they write a lot about the end of things. That sort of finality is a lot funnier to grapple with than a lot of other things. Maybe a lot of people won’t get this, but a lot of the lyrics are funny, to us. I think. Maybe it’s one big inside joke, and maybe that’s a really bad thing for a record to be, but I think there’s universal things that people can take away from it.”
“Or at least regional,” Axelrod says.
“Even if they don’t want to hang out with us,” says Woghin. “It’s all over the place.”
