I wasn’t overly impressed with the band’s debut, High/Low, which yielded their hit song “Popular” in 1996. It reminded me of Weezer, and I’m just not a fan of that band. After their second LP, The Proximity Effect, didn’t sell well, the band was dropped from their label, Elektra Records.
One day, maybe in 2001, our office manager Monica Belkie (back when we had an office and an office manager) popped into my office and very excitedly said to me, “Matthew Caws from Nada Surf is on the phone and he wants to talk to somebody about Tape Op!” Monica was a Nada Surf (and Weezer) fan, and this was when I had just started working with Larry on Tape Op. I remember that Matthew seemed nice and he explained that they were in the early stages of self-producing their next record after being dropped from their label. As I recall, he was asking about advertising. I think the record was a ways off, so we left it at that, and I mostly forgot about the call.
A few years later, their LP Let Go came out, and remembering the phone call, I gave it a listen. To this day, it remains one of my favorite albums. It’s a career highlight for the band, and a testament of how artists can make great records while not being part of the fickle mainstream music industry, and are making the music they really want to make instead .
Over the years, a number of people we’ve talked to in Tape Op have been a part of the Nada Surf story.
There’s an excellent interview with Caws here that details the making of Let Go:
At one point Matthew was an intern at Steve Rosenthal’s (Tape Op #66) The Magic Shop and he relates the beginnings of the record (from the lifeoftherecord.com interview above): “We did it at a studio called The Magic Shop in New York, where I was an intern in the early ‘90s for a couple of years, just making coffee, cleaning up, and resetting the board and stuff. And my boss there, a lovely guy called Steve Rosenthal, gave us a couple of free days ‘cause he knew we were, you know, maybe getting a little somewhere and also having this down period where we just gotten dropped and we were trying to do things ourselves. And so he threw me a, a nice bone, a couple of free days and we did ‘Blizzard of ‘77,’ ‘Happy Kid,’ and ‘Neither Heaven Nor Space.’ ”
I’m guessing this must have been around the time I got the call from Matthew. The band later went on to finish the album with Chris Fudurich, Louie Lino, Juan Garcia, Bryce Goggin (#40), and Chris Walla (#19, #111). The band then continued to work with Walla and Lino for their next LP, The Weight is a Gift, and then in 2008 they worked with John Goodmanson (#35) for their Lucky LP, another one of my favorites from their catalog. Lino and Goodmanson have remained a steady presence for the band as they also worked on the band’s excellent 2021 LP, Never Not Together, with John taking on the mixing duties for that album. Ian Loughton has also been onboard as producer for Never Not Together along with their soon-to-be-released (9-13-24) album, Moon Mirror. Louie Lino also worked on Moon Mirror, and Goodmanson mixed most of the new album along with Chris Shaw (#83) on a few songs.
Recently Nada Surf have released two new singles and videos from the forthcoming Moon Mirror LP, and it’s nice to see them still making great music together. The Mark Pellington-directed “New Propeller” is a beautiful track and video, and feels like the kind of song that we should all be listening to right now. In my opinion, Matthew Caws has matured into one of the finest songwriters of his generation, and it’s nice to see him and the band still making new music while many of their peers are mostly doing reunion and anniversary tours. Let Go may still be their finest work, but only by a small margin compared to Never Not Together, made 20 years later. Based on these two new tracks, Moon Mirror will be another very solid entry in the bands catalog.
-JB
