Seattle band Great Grandpa are a Rolling Stone Artist You Need to Know. (From left: Pat Goodwin, Alex Menne, Carrie Goodwin, Dylan Hanwright, and Cam LaFlam.)
Chona KasingerWhen Pat Goodwin brought an acoustic guitar onstage at a sold-out Great Grandpa show in Brooklyn this past fall, one audience member responded by shouting “Free Bird!”
“I wish we fucking played ‘Free Bird!’” Goodwin told the crowd.
“I really don’t,” said lead singer/bassist Alex Menne.
Acoustic guitars are still somewhat of a novelty at Great Grandpa shows. The quintet, which formed in Seattle in 2014, have spent the past few years expanding upon, if not quite discarding, their early grunge-garage associations. With Four of Arrows, their remarkable second studio album, they deepen the four-chord feedback-pop of their 2017 debut, Plastic Cough, into a more contemplative, textured folk-rock in the vein of artists like Big Thief and (Sandy) Alex G.
“I think we felt obliged to operate within this paradigm: This is who we are, we’re a garage rock band, we play in basements and we have loud amps,” Goodwin says. “But suddenly, once that happened, it was like ‘Well, this is our real band, and now we have this platform. What do we actually want to make?’”
The band, comprising Goodwin, Menne, Cam LaFlam on drums, Dylan Hanwright on guitar, and Carrie Goodwin (currently on touring hiatus as she finishes school) on bass, worked hard on Four of Arrows, often building out songs with multiple distinct parts and melodic structures. The foursome spent the majority of a recent interview after their show in Brooklyn dissecting the intricacies of that process: explaining how fragments of verses and bridges from various voice memos ended up getting rejiggered and combined into the 11 songs that make up the album.
“It was like one of those YouTube videos where someone is painting something, and you’re not sure what they’re painting,” Hanwright says of the recording process with producer Mike Davis. “And they’re rotating the canvas and you’re like, ‘What the hell is happening?’ and then all of a sudden they rotate the canvas just right, and the painting is done, and all of a sudden the vision becomes clear, and it’s like, ‘Whoa.’”
Part of what further distinguishes and complicates Great Grandpa’s working process is that each band member contributes lyrics to Menne, who then interprets the songs as the group’s frontperson. Before that happens, there are extensive conversations about each song’s meaning and inspiration; the process of internalizing another person’s narrative can be intense.
“It’s emotionally challenging, but also emotionally very rewarding,” says Menne. “There’s a total lack of self-consciousness, where you’re like, okay, I can see this song for what it is instead of being like, ‘Does this thing that I made myself suck?’ But it is also really challenging just to get into that headspace. For this album, I was allotted a very safe space to just do what I needed to do to get into the zone. There was a lot of crying in dark rooms in the studio.”
The first show Great Grandpa ever played was Halloween 2014, at a friend’s house where several bandmates had previously lived in in Seattle. The band was supposed to be a side project: Hanwright and Pat Goodwin had been in another band they describe as “loud, noisy” and “overwrought,” while Menne had been playing “annoying sad folk music in my bedroom.”
Great Grandpa was something different. Early songs like “Cheeto Lust” and “Mostly Here” were unadorned, hook-filled, lo-fi power-punk. “It felt so refreshing to play in a band where you could come to the practice space and everyone could learn the song in one day,” says Hanwright. ”Just simple pop music. It felt like this breath of fresh air.”
But after releasing Plastic Cough (with its irresistibly catchy single “Teen Challenge”), the band quickly grew wary of being tagged with contrived labels like “bubblegum grunge.” “I hate that phrase so much,” says Menne. “I literally despise it…I know people who use it to describe themselves, and that’s totally cool. But I just feel like when it’s that rock critic voice using it, it seems very condescending — like, ‘Oh, your voice sounds like a lady.’”
“We’ve never subscribed to grunge, but we’ve gotten that label our entire existence,” says Goodwin. “I’m convinced it’s only because we’re a rock band from Seattle.”
“Well, we did label ourselves ‘grunge-pop snack-rock’ for a while,” adds Menne.
Within moments, the band steers this heightened conversation about labels and genre into something more up their alley: “AC/VC”, one of their favorite YouTube mashup videos, which merges Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” and AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” (“We used it once as our walkout song,” says Goodwin).
Several of the best new songs on Four of Arrows (“Treat Jar,” “Bloom”) began, it turns out, with Pat Goodwin making up placeholder lyrics about his family’s late dog Wilson. “I remember sitting with a guitar, just singing to him,” Goodwin says. “The original fake lyric was, ‘Wilson looked at me/He said, take me to the treat jar/Take me to the treat jar/Won’t you please.’ He would look at you, and then he’d look at the treat jar, and then he’d look at you again.’”
“Classic dog stuff,” says Menne.
Eventually, Hanwright reworked “Treat Jar” into a moving pop-punk anthem about the crushing demands of working service jobs. “Bloom,” meanwhile, which features the instant-classic opening lines, “I get anxious on the weekends/When I feel I’m wasting time/But then I think about Tom Petty/And how he wrote his best songs when he was 39,” also began as a song about Willie (“He’s a good boy on the weekend,” etc.).
“All the songs are secretly about Pat’s dog,” jokes Menne. Goodwin came up with the Petty line later on, as a lark, before recording a rough demo. He wrote the song’s semi-nonsensical chorus — “Step into whatever you want to/And let your spirit bloom” — simply because he loved the way the words sounded. (Afterwards, he sent the chorus to his friend Isaacc Reiger of the band Strange Ranger with the note, “Yo I know you like Third Eye Blind; Do you like this chorus?”)
As the band moves forward with Four of Arrows, they’ll continue figuring out how to break out acoustic guitars without “Free Bird” heckling at future shows. “We’ve definitely had conversations about wanting to break out of the emo world, so to speak,” says Menne, “and gear more towards the, I don’t know what you would call…”
“Adult contemporary?” says Goodwin.
“Indie alternative,” Menne says with faux-seriousness.
“It’s less trying to fit into a world, and more just getting out of a constraint of playing only with loud, all-dude emo bands,” says Hanwright. “It’s more about a world where we can do our own thing and just be ourselves.”
“Step into whatever we want to?” says Menne.
“And let our spirit bloom?” says Goodwin.
“Damn,” says Hanwright.
“Damn,” says LaFlam.
“I feel hella motivated now,” says Goodwin.
ON THE RISE
I've sometimes felt as though every piece of music is an exploration of our perception of time. What sparked the idea of focusing on time as the main focus for your new work?
The focus on time in this work emerged quite unconsciously.
What actually happened is that the title came last, after I received an email from John (Benedict ndr) regarding the production timeline. In the middle of that email, those two Latin words appeared, and for me, as an Italian reading them in an English context, they had an almost striking, illuminating effect.
At that point, I went back to the pieces I had written, listening again to how they had been developed and recorded, and also considering the broader time span over which the entire EP had been composed. It became clear to me that Tempo Fugit was the most fitting title to represent the work.
I've been listening to Tangerine Dream's Zeit a lot recently but that album is based on a very specific concept of time, as pioneered in the West bei Parmenides, that time does not, actually, move. What are your own reflections on time?
Time is perhaps the most objective construct that exists in nature, and yet the most paradoxical aspect of it is that it is entirely perceived in a subjective way.
At times, time seems not to pass at all; at other times, it rushes forward, or even feels as if it stops. But this sense of flow, its rhythm, its pace, is not determined by time itself, it is determined by us.
This is precisely why I see it as such a fundamentally objective dimension. It is inescapable, it is constant, and yet our perception transforms something absolutely objective into something deeply subjective.
Time is not just the medium through which music flows, it can also be a musical tool in its own right. How did you work with it for Tempo Fugit?
For this EP, I worked with time in two main ways.
On one hand, there are pieces built around a very clear and explicit temporal reference, a metronome. On the other, there are works that were recorded almost entirely without any fixed time reference. This applies both to the piano pieces and to the electronic ones.
In some tracks, the presence of a grid allows for a very precise perception of construction, almost as if the composition were being built brick by brick. In others, there is a deliberate need to remove any external reference and instead follow what I would describe as an inner sense of time.
These two approaches reflect the way I usually compose, and they are both clearly present and articulated throughout this EP.
Many contemporary composers have tried – or are still trying to make – time transparent by opting for extreme lengths. Your music, however, is quite to the point, on your earlier van Gogh EP even radically so. What is satisfying about concision for you?
I don’t usually approach composition by asking myself how long a piece should be.
When I work on immersive projects, of course, there are specific durations dictated by the storyboard. In those cases, the shorter the piece, the greater the risk of it sounding like a jingle. It becomes more difficult to preserve an emotional depth rather than just leaving behind a catchy motif.
At the same time, I find it very interesting to impose, in a way, constraints of brevity. I have written pieces that last twenty minutes or more, though they are often less suited to streaming platforms, and in some cases they have not even been officially released, as they belong to installations or more experimental contexts.
On the other hand, I also created a collection of one hundred one-minute pieces as part of a creative exercise called “100 days.” The idea was to repeat a creative act every day for one hundred consecutive days. My approach was to sit at the piano, even before having my coffee, and write exactly one minute of music.
Over time, this became a fascinating process. In the beginning, I relied on a timer, constantly checking the clock. But toward the end, I developed an internal sense of that one-minute span. Despite differences in tonality, meter, and tempo, I could almost instinctively feel when to begin and when to end each piece.
That experience taught me that duration is not something I impose from the outside, but something that can be internalized and shaped from within.
I understood that the process on Tempo Fugi was very different from piece to piece, with some finished quickly while others taking a lot of time. What is it about some works, do you feel, that makes them harder to nail down – how would you describe the sensation that something is “done”?
In this case, it was not really about how long it took to finish each piece. The tracks were written at different times, sometimes even years apart.
What happened later, when I listened back to them, was that I felt the need to create a stronger sense of cohesion across the EP. By “cohesion,” I mean introducing elements that could give more consistency to the role each track plays within the overall narrative.
So I revisited older demos that had been sitting in my archive for quite some time, pieces I still considered valid, and approached them almost as a form of rearrangement within the context of the EP. It was not about struggling to complete a piece, but rather about shaping it so that it could fully belong to this specific body of work.
For me, a piece is finished when I feel a strong coherence in the message I want to convey, when every sound has found its place, and when the musical discourse flows naturally and feels complete. It is not something I can define in purely rational terms. It is, above all, a sensation.
Since the process for Tempo Fugit was quite extensive, were there possibly overlaps between tracks composed for this project and the Van Gogh show? If so, how similar do pieces composed at the same time but for different projects tend to be?
There was no overlap. The music for the Van Gogh project we are referring to was written before the pandemic, whereas the material for Tempo Fugit dates back, at most, to about two or three years ago.
If we talk about similarities between pieces, I would distinguish between two different aspects.
From a purely musical perspective, meaning harmony and melody, it is actually more likely for similarities to emerge over time rather than within the same period. When you develop a certain awareness in your musical language, it naturally creates a kind of continuity, almost like a diary of melodic and harmonic ideas that evolves over the years.
On the other hand, pieces written within the same timeframe may resemble each other more from a sound design perspective. For example, if you are exploring a particular instrument, a specific synthesizer, a new effect, or even a certain way of miking the piano, these elements can shape the sonic identity of multiple pieces. Even choices like register or tonality can be influenced by those explorations.
So, if there is a form of resemblance within the same period, it is more likely to emerge from the sound and the tools being used, rather than from the underlying musical writing itself.
The release opens with a piece called “Repetition,” which called to mind a sentence by Ryoko Sekiguchi: “Time doesn’t pass, it returns.” How do you see that yourself – and how do you use repetition and variation in your work?
I see repetition as a beautiful form of communication, where the reiteration of an idea actually allows that idea to emerge more clearly.
The presence of a pattern becomes almost a kind of subtle game with rationality, with perception, with the listener’s intelligence. It invites a process of recognition, almost like solving a riddle.
This is what I find particularly compelling about minimalism. An idea is explored, listened to, gradually exhausted, then transformed, and the cycle begins again.
Since one part of the project seems to have been to use music to capture specific moments in time – how do you see the relationship between the moment and the music created in it? Quite often, sad music gets written in happy times of an artist's life and vice versa, so it seems like a complex relationship.
I agree that it is a complex relationship, and I would even extend it beyond the idea of writing sad music in happy times, or happy music in sad ones, as a way of balancing or compensating.
For me, it also involves the relationship with instruments. My work moves between acoustic instruments, like the piano, and more electronic forms of production, and I often experience this dialogue between emotional states and sound through them.
For instance, I might be drawn to more experimental electronic instruments during a more rational phase, while in a more instinctive or emotional moment I might turn to something structurally more defined, like the piano. In this sense, the contrast or interplay between different emotional states becomes symbiotic with the choice of instruments.
So yes, I would definitely describe this relationship as complex, but also deeply fascinating.
Luca Longobardi Interview Image (c) the artist
“I see repetition as a beautiful form of communication, where the reiteration of an idea actually allows that idea to emerge more clearly.“
