Interview with Matthew Caws from Nada Surf

There’s a case to be made that Nada Surf can be the most consistent band to come out of the ‘90s. The alternative rock act from New York City has put out eight albums since their inception in 1992 with their most recent being You Know Who You Are, which was released this past March. While a lot of bands from their era have either broken up, fizzled out or have become cookie cutter impressions of themselves, Nada Surf has always put out quality songs that stay in your head and give your senses a boost. It’s what makes their music timeless. If you haven’t dived into their music, you’ll get your chance in person this Friday on September 16 when they play The Met in Pawtucket.

Ahead of the show I had a chance to talk with frontman Matthew Caws about growing up being fluent in French, Ric Ocasek’s role in the beginnings of Nada Surf, an orchestral collaboration that just got recently announced, writing for Guitar World magazine and what he plans on doing for Halloween.

Rob Duguay: You spent some of your childhood in France and Belgium, and attended the Lycee Francais de New York in high school. How old were you when you started speaking fluent French, and have you ever thought about doing an entire album in French?

Matthew Caws: When I was five years old my family took a sabbatical for a year. Both my parents were professors and they would get a year off every seven years so we lived in Paris during one of those years off and that’s when I started speaking it. I’ve written one song in French, maybe two. It’s hard, I speak the language but it’s pretty picky. You’re not really encouraged to kind of make up your own approach to it.

In English people are really free, but in French you have to get every pronunciation just right and if you’re gonna mess with it you gotta be really babbling. It’s not so easy and it doesn’t rest on vowels as much and that’s why in France a lot of bands will consistently sing in English because it can be kind of hard to do it in French. I know I probably should try because I have yet to really go for it and make a bigger effort, so one day maybe I’ll get the nerve up to do it.

RD: Nada Surf got their debut album, High/Low, produced by The Cars’ Ric Ocasek in a pretty unique way. It was back in 1996 after a random conversation that you had with Ric after a show that Nada Surf played at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn. You gave him a tape, you didn’t think he would get back to you and then Ric contacted you saying that he wanted to produce the band’s debut album. Did you ever expect that to be the launching point for the band and how much of a shock was it for you when Ric gave you that call? MC: I definitely didn’t expect for that to happen so I didn’t expect the band’s career to get launched that way, but I will say that after he called me I had a feeling that it would help kick off something. It was very encouraging, so when it did happen I probably did think that it was the start of something really exciting. I was very much in shock, I couldn’t believe it. This was the first time that somebody I really admired as a musician had given me such positive feedback. The only other time was when we were playing a street fair and we played with Richie Havens, by playing with, I mean that we played the street fair and he played later on.

He saw our show and I can’t remember exactly what he said but it was something very nice along the lines that we really have something or something like that. It was really encouraging, but maybe he was just being polite — Richie was a very friendly guy. Ric didn’t have to call, but he did and he invited me over his house and he was incredibly supportive so that was a big shock, for sure.

RD: One track off of High/Low that is familiar to the casual fan of Nada Surf is “Popular.” The song still gets played on the radio every once in a while and nearly everyone who grew up in the ‘90s can recognize it by the first guitar strum. Twenty years after that song came out and hit the Top 40 charts, what’s your opinion of it? Are you indifferent or do you wish that people who know that song would dive into Nada Surf’s other material?

MC: I feel good about it and I do wish that people who only know that song would dive into the rest but that’s okay. I don’t feel cheated or anything because if we didn’t have that one then a lot of people wouldn’t have heard us at all. It’s the only one of our songs that really got into the mainstream and that’s a blessing, of course, because I’m sure we’ve caught a lot of fans that way. There are people who’ve first heard that song and then they heard more so they decided to delve into more of our material. More people like that would be good too, but I guess I can’t complain and we definitely got lucky that one time.

I really like it still and I’m grateful that I had such an adventurous spirit for a few minutes, which is really out of character for me. Not that I’m an overly cautious person, but that song is really wild and I’m not usually that theatrical in my approach to things. The way it happened was I have this book that I bought at a Salvation Army on high school etiquette and I thought it was so funny. At the time I was listening to a lot of Sonic Youth and I was playing around with those chords at the beginning of the song trying to cop a little bit of their chord style, which I’m sure I didn’t do successfully. So I was playing around with a 4-track and I had this little hook and I thought I would write a chorus from the standpoint of somebody who really believed everything in this book and someone who approached life like that in a very competitive way.

The parts of the song where I do all that talking were initially empty, so what we would do during a few shows at the time was bring the book on stage and ask out of the audience, which were people we knew, if anyone would want to come on stage and read out of this book during the verses of the song. That’s what we did with a couple friends of ours, they would get up on stage and read portions of the book and it was funny. It was a little performance art moment and that was the essence of the song; what I wanted was for it to be was me talking on one side and a friend of mine named Catherine who would be on the other side and we’d be conversing vocally. Bryce Goggin — who’s a really great producer who was producing our demos at the time — I played him the song so he could mix it. He turned my friend Catherine, who starts of the song by saying “I got Penny,” off and then he turned me up in the middle and I was like, “Oh no, I’m not supposed to be on yet,” and he kept his finger on the level and wouldn’t put it down. Then he said, “Your voice is in the middle and it’s really loud. You hear that?” and I said, “Yeah and I don’t want to hear that,” and he was like, “Nope, that’s a pop song.” I give him credit for transforming the song into what it came to be.

RD: That’s an interesting story and it’s also pretty hilarious that someone decided to write a book about high school etiquette in the first place. You’ve done some cool collaborations over the past few years, notably being part of Kevin Devine’s Devinyl Splits series that came out last year and forming the project Minor Alps with Blake Babies’ Juliana Hatfield back in 2013. Another collaboration that recently got announced is Peaceful Ghosts, which is a live album that Nada Surf did with the FM4 Radio Symphony Orchestra in Vienna and the Babelsburg Film Orchestra in Berlin that’ll be out on October 28. It’s not the first time a rock band performed with a symphony, so what made you and the band want to do it?

MC: We were asked. We’ve done a lot of shows with this radio station in Vienna called FM4 and they’ve sponsored shows that we’ve played and we’ve played a couple of their birthday parties. They have national radio there and they’re really good. A lot of people listen to them, it’s freeform and they play what they want. They pick one band a year to put together with the Radio Symphony to do a performance. They asked us and it was in the middle of finishing up You Know Who You Are, so I didn’t really have the time to sort it out but I couldn’t say no because it was a cool opportunity.

It turned out that the year before they did it with Calexico, and Calexico are friends of ours. Their trumpet player Martin Wenk has toured with us and he’s played parts on a lot of our records. I asked Martin if he wanted to produce it, choose a composer and pick the songs and he did, and he did a good job and it was really exciting. We’ve had small, orchestral touches on our records before with a little bit of string instruments here and there. While it’s never been something that I was dying to do because of the idea of combining a rock band and an orchestra kind of sounds like a mess.

It would be too loud or bombastic or something that would be way to complicated. Martin chose a composer who really did a great job of making it work, writing parts that weren’t too obvious and using a lot of our quieter songs. There are some rock moments, but a lot of it is pretty chilled out, which is nice because it’s not like an arms race. It was really great and it was just amazing. I’m really glad we did it and I’m glad they asked us.

RD: You’ve also written for Guitar World magazine where you interviewed Oasis and Mick Jones from The Clash, among others. From your time writing for them, who would you say was the most enjoyable interview you had?

MC: My favorite was Noel Gallagher from Oasis. I didn’t really know him very well at the time but I interviewed him a couple days before (What’s The Story) Morning Glory came out. Before I talked to him I read some of his interviews and he seemed like a really kind of obnoxious person. In fact he was one of the nicest people I ever met. He’s very smart and really funny. It was a really great interview because we had this long conversation and he was being himself. He was a super rad dude that I loved hanging out with, and when I turned on the tape recorder he started to say some very “colorful” things and he was just making great press, that’s kind of what it was. Interviewing Mick Jones was incredible because he was holding my guitar, I was asking about particular songs and he would play those for me.

RD: Oh wow.

MC: I know, it was ridiculous. It was for a column called Prime Cuts where you asked somebody about particular songs from their catalog and he didn’t have a guitar for the photo shoot so he asked me to bring mine and he was holding it during the interview and when I asked him about a song he started playing that song so that was a pretty big thrill. I also interviewed Radiohead a few days before OK Computer came out with all five of them in a room and that was amazing. They were so kind and laid back, I left that interview like a lot of people would really wishing I was in that band. That was a great job and I really enjoyed it.

RD: Halloween is coming up next month. Are you doing anything special? Are you dressing up? Is Nada Surf playing anywhere that night?

MC: I don’t know, I gotta look at the schedule and see where we are. My hair is turning grey so I probably should dress up as Andy Warhol at some point, maybe this will be the year. Or Bill Cunningham who was the photographer for The New York Times who passed away last year. I was Luke Skywalker a while ago, what about you?

RD: I don’t really know either. I have a friend who collects costumes and she usually lets me borrow one. Last year I was Sylvester The Cat, the year before that I was a slice of pizza and the year before that I was Mr. Peanut. I’ll be at a party somewhere having candy but I don’t know what I’m doing yet.

MC: Yeah, same here.

Buy tickets to 95.5 WBRU Presents: Nada Surf at The Met w/ Amber Arcades, Field Drums & Forest Fires here: etix.com/ticket/p/2802769/nada-surf-pawtucket-the-met?cobrand=themetri; Nada Surf’s Website: nadasurf.com