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Picking up where Let Go left off, The Weight is a Gift answers questions of lust and deception, greed and love, joy and regret and the rites of passage you weren’t quite ready to pass through. Produced primarily by DCFC rock wizard Chris Walla (who also plays on the album) and the band itself, The Weight is a Gift chips away the grit and pretense clogging up much of today’s rock agenda, leaving only pop in its purist form – the stuff goose bumps are made of. “As it seems to every time I'm home for a long time, life really moved in and I ceased being in a band 24 hours a day,” explains Matthew. “And before you know it, we're in the studio in Seattle with Chris at The Hall of Justice, and I’m writing new songs, which would be great if I'd finished the old ones.” Nada Surf recorded what they’d already arranged, and then fell into writing on the spot. Fast-forward a few months later when band headed back out west to work with Chris – this time at John Vanderslice’s San Francisco studio, Tiny Telephone. “We worked by the seat of our pants again,” says Matthew. “But this time, I think we were more ready. I had a lot going on at home, and could only keep it together if we were working. I wasn't the only one, and we got completely immersed in the process.” Several months passed during which the boys set the record aside, led their lives and listened to only mainstream hip-hop. They finished things up once and for all this past spring in various NYC apartments, basements and living rooms. Harmonies stack up knee-deep as the boys channel their inner Moody Blues in swelling epics like “Do It Again,” “All Is A Game” and the best pop song you’ll hear all year – “Imaginary Friends.” The album’s soft, fuzzy and undeniable centerpiece, “Always Love,” issues a twinkling conviction while “What Is Your Secret” pilots the arrival of a brutal truth. Throughout, even within the more soft-spoken moments on The Weight is a Gift (“Comes a Time” and the eerily beautiful “Your Legs Grow”), it is Caws’ profoundly emotive and angelic voice that makes this album not just something to hear, but something you feel in your gut. It plays out like the best bedtime story: One that riles you up, spooks you a bit, makes you think, then eases your mind. And when you go to sleep, you might know a little something you didn’t when you woke up that day NADA SURF on different songs from their new CD “The Weight Is A Gift” 1.) What is the song “Blankest Year” about? Matthew: “Blankest Year” is a song that we wrote while we were recording. We wrote it one night and recorded it the next morning. The first line is “Oh, fuck it, I’m gonna have a party”. It’s not about pure hedonism. It’s about choosing to celebrate because you can just do that. You can say, things are hard but fuck it, I’m gonna have a party, you know. It is a very, very positive song about difficult things but taken positively. 2.) What is the song “Always Love” about? Matthew: “Always Love” is not necessarily about love in the man and woman sense or man and man, woman and woman, it’s about choosing to not be angry if you can. If there’s something happening that could make you very, very angry, it’s about the way anger can poison you. Many people say that you should let your emotions out, you know, you can’t bottle things up. And that’s true but there’s a fine line because if you really indulge in anger and hate, even if you have good reason, it will hurt you in the end. It’s like, I mean this is gross to say that on the radio, but you know, when you get sick, it burns your throat. It’s some nasty stuff. Daniel: We are gonna make a video for “Always Love”. It’s based on Star Wars but Lucas films didn’t give us the permission to use Darth Vader and all that stuff. It’s about going to the dark side. Ira: Yeah, it’s all about the dark side. 3.) What is the song “Imaginary Friends” about? Matthew: “Imaginary Friends” is if you can, is there an expression in German for imaginary friends? Do you know what they are? Imaginary friends are when, it’s usually children have this “person” who always sits next to them in the car or in some families you have to put an extra chair at the dinner table for the imaginary friend. It’s about wanting to have them all come help you. It’s like a cry for help and if you want help from so many people that even the imaginary friends, like we’re talking everybody, we need everybody right now, so it’s a call. 4.) What is the song “Armies Walk” about? Matthew: “Armies Walk” is about your interior armies. I got the idea from a Leonard Cohen interview that was published in a book called “Songwriters On Songwriting”. In it he’s talking about struggling to finish a song and crawling around his motel room in his underwear trying to sum in all his armies. I was completely struck by this in thinking that in your cells, red blood cells and white blood cells but also ideas and memories, there’s this population inside you and if you really want to get something done you have to look at the whole thing, I need to rearrange everything, I need all the armies and the armies must walk. There’s something happening and the armies need to all be woken up and all put their boots on and start walking. So that’s what that’s about. 5.) What is the song “Your Legs Grow” about? Matthew: “Your Legs Grow”, it’s a strange metaphor but it’s about being able to cope with any situation. Because you really can in the end, cope with so many things, you know. You might not think you’re up to it but when you think of what people go through in war times or at the most extreme situations or if you just think, I could never be without this person, my god if we break up it’s over for me, I won’t be able to live without this person. But you can. So the image that I had in mind was if you’re swept out to sea, it’s cold, it’s freezing but your legs grow. You grow into the situation, when you have to, you do. We’re capable of really incredible strength and reinvention. It’s just an image and that’s the way a lot of songs are. If you have an image in your head and you chase it down and try to illustrate it, that’s what it is, I think, a lot of time in songwriting. I’m rambling on, maybe that’s too much about one song but I just want to say, part of “Your Legs Grow” comes, there’s a line that says: “There’s A Light That Rises From The Bottom Of The Lake”. I was swimming in a lake in the middle of the night and I hadn’t been swimming at night for so long because of jaws. Since I was thirteen and I saw that I stopped swimming in the ocean at night which I used to do in North Carolina. But so I’m in this lake and there’s a truck parked at the side of the lake. I don’t know it’s there. The owner gets in, turns it on and turns on the lights. And the beams, high beams like hunting beams are hitting the opposite side of the lake. He backs up and as he goes up the bank his lights dip down onto the water and what I see is this enormous like forty foot white thing in the water shooting towards me, incredibly fast. My heart almost stopped, it absolutely killed me. I was laughing and joking and almost drowning a minute later. Yeah, like a fifty foot white shark made of light about to move me down. I was fucking terrified, very exciting, I don’t recommend it. 6.) What is the song “What Is Your Secret” about? Matthew: “What Is Your Secret” is a song that’s like, you know there’s some things you can say in songs that you can’t say in real life because they’re either too upsetting or too confrontational. But since songs have no names and no pictures they can be about anyone. “What Is Your Secret” is asking a particular person. It’s like calling out. Do you have an expression like “calling out”? Calling out someone is saying: what is your deal? And by the way I have a feeling about what your deal is and you’re not being honest about it. So that’s what it is, it is about miss representation. I luckily haven’t had this experience often at all but maybe you have, I don’t know if you’ve ever met someone who pretended to be someone they weren’t. That can cause a lot of damage. So it’s asking that person what their secret is. 7.) What is the song “Do It Again” about? Ira: “Do It Again”? Sex! Matthew: In one line, absolutely, that’s true. NADA SURF » Lucky « |
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