Guster
Ganging Up on the Sun
Guster have always been hard to peg. The three founding members of the Boston-bred quartet famously met during their freshman orientation at Tufts University in 1991. They built their fanbase the grass-roots way through constant touring. Tens of thousands of college kids can recite every lyric they’ve ever written. Oh, and they used to invite a group of unwashed hippies who went by the name “Trippin’ Balls” to open their shows. Is it any wonder people often consider Guster a jam band “even though we can’t improvise a lick and generally write three-and-a-half-minute pop songs”? says drummer-percussionist Brian Rosenworcel.
The band’s new CD, Ganging Up on the Sun, will kill off anyone’s assumption that Guster is a younger, more hygienic version of Phish. The album, their fifth, is a pop record in the best sense of the word pop: melody-minded, breezy, free-spirited, literate, and even rockin’ on a track or two. Yes, you can apply similar adjectives to the band’s previous albums—2003’s Keep it Together, 1999’s Lost and Gone Forever, 1996’s Goldfly, and 1994’s Parachute — but this time around, Guster are “more fearless than ever before,” says singer-guitarist Ryan Miller.
“This album has our loudest song (“The Beginning of the End”), our quietest (“Empire State”), and our longest (“Ruby Falls”). “One song has one of our most sincere lyrics (“Hang On”) and definitely some of our most cynical.” While Miller doesn’t cop to any specific lyrical themes (“I write a melody and words pop up around it”), he does note that most of the words were written against the backdrop of “a president taking a country to war based on some very dubious rationale.”
You can hear a thread of dissent in songs like “Captain,” “Lightning Rod,” “Manifest Destiny,” and “The New Underground.” “But I never want to be preachy,” Miller says. “I’m not telling you whose face to throw a pie in. I’m just trying to exorcise some frustration, some anger, and maybe a provide a channel for someone else’s frustration and anger.”
Ganging Up on the Sun’s sunny, driving-with-the-top-down melodies, vintage harmonies, and warm guitar jangle do recall artists you’d associate with the ’60s and ’70s — bands who also wrote during a time of war and societal mistrust of government — such as CSNY, Mamas and the Papas, Fleetwood Mac, the Band, the Rolling Stones, and Tom Petty. Are Guster wearing their influences a bit more on their sleeve this time around?
“The word ‘classic’ was used a lot throughout recording as a goal for the sound of this album,” singer-guitarist Adam Gardner says, “and it definitely has a more classic rock feel to it.” Adds Rosenworcel: “I think when we switched from the ‘just guitars and percussion’ shtick to using whatever was in front of us, we ended up sounding more like bands we were listening to.”
The shtick he’s referring to is Guster’s early years as a trio when, onstage, frontmen Miller and Gardner stuck to acoustic guitars and Rosenworcel played bongos with his bare hands. They’ve come a long way since then, and even added a member. Ganging Up on the Sun is Guster’s first album as a four-piece: Joe Pisapia, a Nashville-based multi-instrumentalist who played on Keep it Together and performs with them live, joined full-time when they began recording the new album.
“Joe is by far the best musician in the band,” says Miller. “He can play every instrument and has taken our level of musicianship up about seven notches. Brian, Adam, and I spent ten years together in rooms, buses, and vans — it means so much to have this new energy as part of our equation. It still feels very much like Guster, just a more confident, muscular, refined Guster.”
Not only did Pisapia add texture and oomph to the tracks by playing banjo, dulcimer, trumpet, and lap steel guitar, he also served as producer for half of the songs, which were recorded at Nashville’s Sound Emporium and completed at Pisapia’s home studio, Ivy League, from January to April 2005. The second batch were recorded later in the year at the secluded mountaintop studio Allaire in Shokan, New York, with Ron Aniello, who also worked on Keep it Together.
“We were really just trying to make an album of great songs that feel good to play,” says Rosenworcel. “We’re pretty open-minded stylistically.” One of the highlights is the lead-off single “One Man Wrecking Machine,” which is about a guy who wants to go back to “the good ole days” and hang out with his buddies, get high, and make out with the hottest girl in school, as Miller puts it. “I’ve had that fantasy my entire adult life,” he says, “that I could go back to high school and take all my ‘adult knowledge’ and use it to get me laid. Like, what if I had the confidence of a 30-year-old man as a high school sophomore?”
Another highlight on Ganging Up on the Sun is the seven-minute “Ruby Falls,” a celestial epic that features an uncharacteristic muted trumpet in the outro (“I listen to that solo and think ‘that’s on my record’?” says Rosenworcel). “Personally, I can’t wait to play ‘Ruby Falls’ live,” says Miller. “Not just because I love the song, but because I think there’s a power to it that may even be bigger than what we captured in the studio. Or I could be wrong and we’ll sound like the Carpenters.”
“I just love that our band feels unpredictable right now,” Rosenworcel says happily. “I love that no one knows what to expect from us.”
(June 2006)