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
As Belle & Sebastian share their buoyant 2026 Scotland World Cup anthem ‘It Only Takes One Lion’, frontman Stuart Murdoch has spoken to NME about capturing the feeling back home and his hopes for the team since childhood.
Released today (Tuesday June 2), the Scottish indie heroes’ bid for their nation’s tournament anthem was written after the team’s surprise 4-2 qualifying win against Denmark.
“I felt like we were watching history in the moment, like the hand of God from the old National Lottery adverts was pointing at us,” Murdoch told NME about that game-changing victory. “It was meant to be. Scotland aren’t a terrific team and Denmark are better, but it just felt that day that Scotland were destined to win. Three out of the four goals were things of beauty.”
Produced by and co-written with Pete Ferguson and premiered at the band’s recent London Royal Albert Hall show as part of the anniversary tour for their classic first two albums ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’, the soaring song is intrinsically Belle & Sebastian as it morphs from a hymn to a an orchestral disco jam as Murdoch sings of a nation’s hopes and his own boyhood dreams.
NME spoke to Murdoch from the band’s North American tour, where we found him in a graveyard in Texas. “I was just looking for a park because Austin is a pretty scary place downtown now, so I’ve ended up in the Texas Cemetery,” he shared via Zoom.
Was there anyone famous buried there?
“I was looking around and I found the founder of Austin City Limits, which is pretty cool as that’s where we’re playing tonight. I’m looking at one now and it just says, ‘Martin: he loved the law’. Then underneath it says, ‘Billie Louise: she loved the lawyer’.”
We joke that there’s the opening to a Belle & Sebastian song if there ever there was one. “It’s great! It’s given me inspiration.”
For now, read the rest of interview with Murdoch below as he tells us about Scotland’s chances, 30 years of hurt, if fans will be singing it at the top of their lungs in Canada, the US and Mexico this summer, and what’s next for the band.
NME: Hello Stuart. Here we are with ‘It Only Takes One Lion’ Who needs three?
Stuart Murdoch: “Who needs three? Good question. I wouldn’t know!”
What’s the mood been like in Scotland since you qualified?
“It’s funny. I’ve noticed this everywhere: with the World Cup there’s a mixture of cynicism and anticipation. When the actual tournament starts, everyone will get excited about it. Because of FIFA, the peace prize, the ticket prices, people seem quite down about it. I found that in Mexico. They were quite fed up with the general hype about it. I’m in the States just now and you shouldn’t believe all the hype: people are people. The States are just as ‘great’ as ever. We love coming here, we love the cities. The general sense of North American optimism will make for a good tournament.”
“With Scotland though, people will definitely be excited about it. You have to understand, it’s been 30 years since Scotland qualified so I think everybody and their dog has written a song for the team.”
How do you meet the challenge of penning a World Cup anthem, when there have been so many legendary bangers and absolutely shite duds?
“I never planned it. I woke up with a tune in my head and a feeling. That’s the way it should always be for songs. I couldn’t control myself and it was quite straight-forward. I wrote this initial bit about how I felt about the current World Cup team and the qualifying game. It was more introspective.
“When it starts off with, ‘The days are dark and long…’, it’s just my general feeling about football. I’ve been going to see my own team quite a lot recently. It’s my little anthem for how I feel about football and following Scotland for the last 50 years, just the ups and downs. It’s quite a heartfelt thing. When I was eight or nine, the Scottish team meant so much to me, it the thing I was most invested in. There’s a line in there about how I used to memorise the whole squad before ‘78 and 82.”
Tell us about lyric: “This is Scotland, where everyone knows you start with nothing… where you can join an army for peace”…
“My wife made the video for it and she said, ‘I’m not sure I like that line about everyone starting with nothing’. Our first game is against Haiti and they really have nothing. Their country is pretty poor and they’re going through hard times. It was almost a throwaway line and I’m not sure what I meant by it, but in a footballing sense every game starts with nothing. Even if it’s against Brazil, you’ve always got a chance!
“The army refers to The Tartan Army, which has really been quite a remarkable institution for the past 30 years. We changed from drunken buffoons that used to wreck things to this excellent supporting brigade.”
It’s not your standard football sing-along. Can you see it being sung in the terraces?
“I’m not sure, I didn’t cynically design it for that. Many people have said to me in the past, ‘None of your songs have a chorus, you need to write one’. ‘This is Scotland’ is a chorus! They things need to happen organically. I’m sure the fans will still be singing ‘Yes sir, I can boogie’ for years to come.”
What do you actually think of Scotland’s chances right now?
“With the last Euros, they maybe got stage fright or didn’t have that tournament experience. I think Andy Robertson [captain] will be telling them, ‘We really need to produce our best stuff’. If they do and we see them actually playing football, then I don’t really care about the results that much. I just want to see Scotland exceeding our expectations of them. That Denmark game was so crazy that everything after just feels like a bonus.”
If miracles do happen and Scotland make it to the final, how will you celebrate? A free gig in Glasgow?
“Of course, yes! Free everything. If we even got close, I think the whole country would shut down for a year and the GDP would drop. We’d go into a massive recession but no one would care.
“We were playing a gig in Mexico City and I told the crowd, ‘It’s you and us, Mexico and Scotland in the final’. Mexico have never really got close either. I told them it would be five goals a piece, even after everyone takes a penalty and we have to share the trophy. I would settle for that.”
You released two albums in quick succession with 2022’s ‘A Bit of Previous’, 2023’s ‘Late Developers’ and then your debut novel Nobody’s Empire in 2024. You’ve been busy! Is there any progress on new material?
“We went through a period where we recorded a lot and we said, ‘Let’s not record for a while and give ourselves a couple of cycles off’. We’re doing these 30th anniversary shows so we’re just going to lean on the back catalogue and cruise for a while. We’re doing a year on and a year off so everyone can focus on different things.
We’re not looking at new Belles stuff for a while. I’m meant to be developing Nobody’s Empire into a film, so that’s my next task. It’s a long way off from being made but I’m going to write the script for that.”
Scotland’s first World Cup tournament match is against Haiti on Sunday June 14, before they go on to play Morocco on Friday June 19 and Brazil on Wednesday June 24.
The band’s ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ anniversary tour continues throughout the summer, performing the iconic albums in full during across the UK, Europe, North America, Mexico, Australia, Singapore and Japan. Visit here for tickets and more information.
