Built To Spill

As his band’s first album in five years looms large on the indie-gone-major horizon, Doug Martsch, lead singer and guitarist of Built To Spill, dares you to comprehend his intentions. “There is no way that a human being is going to understand another human being,” he says from his home in Idaho, regarding the inevitable cultural noise that clogs the air between artists and their audiences.

But wait. This is somebody’s husband and father talking; can he really be that hopeless about the walls between people? “I have no idea about this stuff,” he admits, laughing. “I’m probably totally wrong.”

Many of the lyrics Martsch and his wife patched together out of sometimes-random, meter-fitting phrases for the new album deal with embracing the possibility that every gesture, ideology or utterance is freighted with inaccuracies. “Most of us are wrong, most of us agree / Must have been the wrong message we received,” he sings during “Wherever You Go,” one of You In Reverse’s twin six-minute centerpieces. The other, “Conventional Wisdom,” is a screed against truthiness and the manipulation of what gets to be considered normative: Lines such as “They don’t know they’re wrong, but you know they could never concede that” build to the chorus’ “Some things you can’t explain.” Which is of course a cliché, and a surrender and a bankable koan.

Something smells like Fox News dispirit. The album’s title could work as a pun reaction to Bush’s election, since the letters in the word y-o-u, when reversed, form the query, You? Oh, why? Martsch acknowledges that portions of the new tracks are, to him, “about the administration, Republicans, right-wingers, people who spend all their time trying to deceive people. I’m definitely fired up about politics.”

So Built To Spill isn’t wholly unstrategic. “I wouldn’t say that we don’t have an agenda, because in a way we do. It’s such a weird vague thing, but our agenda is to make music,” he says. Sounds and arrangements offer Martsch a more comfortable context in which to absorb himself. But he doesn’t indulge in conscious self-encryption. “To me music can be about anything. The lyrics might mean something very specific to me, but I wouldn’t expect anyone else to get it. That’s not the point. Music itself gives the words meaning. I listened to David Bowie a ton when I was growing up, and he’s mostly just singing nonsense, but it made sense to me. I found some meaning in it.”

Martsch may distrust the concrete authority of language and its abusers, but one word that his music has helped rescue from marketplace propagandists is “epic.” His 13 years of guitartistry—17 if you count his stretch in Treepeople—definitely qualify Built To Spill for maximum rotation within the painfully imaginary Classic Indie Rock radio format. His solos and grandiose mode of tune architecture suggest a modern and exponentially less Confederate Lynryd Skynyrd; an unironic cover of “Freebird” was even a staple on the last tour.

The band’s major-label debut, 1997’s Perfect From Now On, solidified Built To Spill’s reputation as a troupe of post-punk noodlers. “In a way, I wanted to make sure that we didn’t have a hit. I did not want to ride the grunge wave or whatever was going on. I don’t try to make anything commercial or not commercial or anything like that, but all the songs were coming out long, and instead of deciding to shorten them I was like, ‘No I’m going to leave them all weird and let the record be that.’”

The songs’ expansive essences may have been arrived at organically, but their execution was hardly spontaneous, making the album seem a tad micromanaged to some. Insecurity had birthed perfectionism. “I think that a reason why a lot of those things were so complex was because I was kind of unsure of myself,” says Martsch. “I would get bored with a song or I would think the performances weren’t that good, so I’d find myself adding overdubs to cover up things I didn’t like.”

In synch with the new album’s preoccupation with the risks of liberty, Martsch decided to forego the heavy-handed, zillion-track approach. “The idea of keeping it sparse was definitely a departure. I think a lot of times the old overdubs were extraneous. I don’t regret them at all, but this time I was able to really say ‘F— it. I’m just going to stop. I’m just going to leave it alone. If it’s boring, it’s boring. If it’s good, it’s good. I don’t need to try to force it into being interesting.’”

I witnessed someone finding the new Built To Spill very interesting, and he definitely harvested his own meaning from the lyrics. I was playing the first single, “Goin’ Against Your Mind,” a paranoid, defiant and ultimately optimistic nine-minute romp containing what Martsch calls “the only verse that means anything.” Without a conservative or liberal slant, a guy across the Internet café was railing, scattershot, against “the coming one-world government,” naming all the international agencies and corporations that were implicated. Bless his heart, he sounded almost schizophrenic; some Huge Conspiracy was afoot and he was over-decoding the blurry specifics. (I thought of the new album’s lyric, “Nobody can even tell what the hell they’re even saying.”) As the gentleman ambled away from his party, citing Time Warner as an engineering force behind our dark future, he saw the Warner Brothers logo on my copy of You In Reverse. He stopped and listened as Doug Martsch sang:

If you’re not sure who not to believe,
who has better reasons to deceive?
They’re really good at it.
That’s all they do.
Goin’ against your mind (15x)

Suddenly, Built To Spill was a key component of this fellow’s dystopic vision, and by his lights, they were reveling in it. I tell Martsch about this response, and he says, “This guy’s not going to shoot me, is he?”

Built To Spill’s album of buoyant tunes that casually reference assimilation, destruction and injustice was looking back at Martsch, darkly. That grim soapboxer I met had inscrutably fathomed the lyrics however he needed to. “Our brains just compartmentalize things and organize things in a certain way,” Martsch says, relinquishing a nugget of his authorial dominion. “The listener is most of the battle.”