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.
They keep winning the battle of the bands, but will they win the war? Fresh from a storming set at High Voltage festival in London, Music-News.com meets guitarist Nick Saxby, a founder member of British metallers Primitai, to find out their secret weapon
Primitai confess to being a laid-back band, taking each new experience as it comes. But after a few years of playing it cool and recording their debut album, Through the Gates of Hell, the five-piece got their act together. In 2009, they ultimately beat 20,000 – yes, 20,000 – groups of all genres to claim Surface Unsigned battle of the bands. So what gave them the edge?
“The thing that made us different was that we were a rock band: we had a vocalist as opposed to a screamer, because we like classic metal,” says guitarist Nick Saxby, pictured. “If you have an incredibly energetic set and you have a screaming frontman, that immediately alienates so many people. We sang and spoke to the crowd, and that's what gave us such a brilliant reaction.
“We try to connect with everyone in the audience. Our songs are really catchy, they're real fun, and they're real heavy at the same time. The pop lot liked the catchy part of it, the metal lot liked all the metal half. So that's what wiggled us all the way through.”
And winning this coveted competition, which saw them play their final set at the O2 in London, was not only a victory for them, but one for their genre.
“The only bit that was disappointing was all the metal bands were ranked in the bottom half, so [the competition] was favoured towards those bands that were much poppier and mainstream,” says Saxby. “It always felt like you're on a bit of an uphill struggle, but it gave us that extra oomph: 'no, you're not going to get rid of us, we'll keep going'.”
Determination and hard work is paying off for the five-piece – completed by Guy Miller on vocals, Srdjan Bilic on second lead guitar, Jamie Lordcastle on bass and drummer Chris Chilcott – and key to their late success was finally bagging someone to properly front the band. “All the real kick-offs have come since Srdjan and Guy joined,” says Saxby. “[Guy] was the missing element we needed to make it into a circle. We always wanted that frontman running around. It's always good to have that extra nutcase bouncing off the walls and that's exactly what Guy is.
“One of the prizes we won from Surface was a wireless microphone – and the wet dreams he's been having over that ever since, because he can go anywhere. He can go the length of a club and people respond so well to that. It was nothing we prompted him into. He's been in bands since he was 14, so he's well-rehearsed at what he does and he loves it. The energy we all create, it gives us a figurehead for that.”
With the line-up sorted and £10,000 of winnings in the bank, Primitai headed to the studio to make album number two, The Line of Fire.
“We didn't know what we were going for when we started with two new members,” says Saxby. “The first six months they were in the band we were just practising for Surface Unsigned and I was writing stuff in between. When we got to the studio, we thought: 'let's experiment'. A lot of the lyrics weren't done until they came out of Guy's mouth while he was singing them. I was working at the time and I was texting lyrics to Jamie to try out with what they were doing. It was a nice, laid-back, easy thing to do and we're all happy as fuck with it.”
The eight-track result is heavy and packed with riffs but carries the appeal that flattened the competition in 2009. They’re avoiding a niche sub-genre and flying the flag for British metal. Saxby says: “You don't want to cross that line too far. You like writing your catchy stuff and the heavy stuff at the same time, but you don't want to sell out.
“What I don't want when we do an album is for people to go: 'that's a single, that's a single, that's a single', and then those three singles come out one after another. We always try real hard to make all the tracks as good as each other; of course some tracks come out better than others because some songs just are.”
Touring as support for White Wizzard and Firewind has helped to tighten their set, and with High Voltage festival under their belts, plus Hard Rock Hell in December, the band are “gagging” to properly get out on the road again – and record album number three later in the year.
But first there's another prize to claim. Primitai recently whipped yet more rivals in a second battle of the bands, which honours them with a set at Bloodstock Open Air festival in August. A band this relaxed – and clearly talented – obviously don't feel any pressure then?
“By the time we got to the final [of Surface Unsigned], it was a bit like, if we win, amazing, if we don't, it's been a fucking incredible ride, so we just enjoyed it,” says Saxby. “It was just fun to do the last one, but running up to that, we were playing with bands that ended up in the final, so that added the pressure.
“The one we probably most enjoyed was the semi-final because we hired a confetti cannon at the end of our set. We went out all guns blazing: you will not forget Primitai! That was the one where we felt the most pressure as we knew we were ending with a bang.
"If you're involved in this year's Surface Unsigned, that's the only advice we can give: just make sure when everyone leaves they remember your set."
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