Beautiful Beat: Nada Surf Rides On

Can I tell you about the nerdiest thing I did recently?” Matthew Caws asks, leaning in, voice conspiratorial. We’re squirreled away in the back of a café in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, eating sandwiches and trading dorky anecdotes. I nod vigorously, and he continues: “I’ve moved a few times in the last few years, and because of circumstance, I culled my records down to a hundred or something. And I was flipping through them trying to browse, but now that we’re all so spoiled by iTunes and CDs, record spines seem really hard to read.” He pauses. “This is so ultimately nerdy, but they’re hard to read because the color fields keep switching—if the color fields were the same, it would be easier to read the type. So I thought: I’ll put them in color order! It was the most exciting hour of my life. It looks like a sand sculpture. I think I have a picture of it in my phone,” he says, rifling through his pockets.

Caws flashes a photo of his color-coded shelves, and I fuss accordingly. It’s awfully pretty, charted and inviting like a Buddhist mandala. “I don’t want to sound like a fuddy-duddy or a stereo-store guy, but after all the iPod and MP3 action, when you’re at someone’s house and they put on a Zeppelin LP, it’s a flippin’ revelation,” Caws grins. “I hadn’t had a working record player in a couple years, and I just got one and put it in my kitchen, and now I listen obsessively—I’d forgotten what a physical experience it is.” He shakes his head. “Records used to move me—not just intellectually, like ‘that’s a good song, or those are good words or that’s an interesting chord progression,’ but move me, physically.”

Caws—vocalist and guitarist for Nada Surf—is a charming conversationalist, just as happy to chat about restaurants with fireplaces or his work as a reporter for Guitar World as he is to dissect his band’s fifth record, Lucky. The son of two academics—his father teaches philosophy; his mother, comparative literature—Caws’ Manhattan-based childhood was hardly provincial. He attended high school at Le Lyceé Français, a famed bilingual institution on the Upper East Side, where he first met Nada Surf bassist Daniel Lorca. (Fellow graduates include The Strokes’ Nikolai Fraiture, former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and romance novelist Danielle Steel).

Caws frequently joined his parents on sabbatical in Provence, camping out in the backyard of their farmhouse. “There was no running water, one lightbulb,” Caws recalls, laughing. “It was one room on top of another room, built into a hill by two brothers who argued and didn’t want to live together, so there were no stairs. You walked around the hill and you were upstairs, and you walked down the hill and you were downstairs,” he continues. “There was no room in the house for my sister and I so we slept in tents, outside, on little army cots, in flimsy sleeping bags.”

Music was omnipresent, and Caws began playing guitar around his 11th birthday. “My mom is from Wilmington, N.C., and my aunt had a place in the mountains. She played folk guitar—fingerpicking—and she was a Bob Dylan and Joan Baez fan. We’d sit around and sing ‘On Top of Old Smokey’ or ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ There was a guitar lying around, and I asked her about it one day and she said, ‘Would you like me to show you something?’ and I said ‘I’d love that.’ And she showed me one chord, E. And I took it into the other room and played it for an hour. At the time, I was really into the Ramones, and it was the perfect thing, because even though I didn’t know how the Ramones’ songs went, I intuited that it was just bang, bang, bang. So I just took that one chord and played it for an hour, moving it up one fret, moving it over, playing around with it. I was so thrilled, so excited,” Caws sighs. “Eventually I did the thing where you take lessons from the weird guy in the mothball-smelling apartment down the street, and he teaches you ‘Stairway to Heaven,’” Caws continues. “Then I was recruited to ease tensions at my parents’ dinner parties. Academics don’t always get along. Sometimes there would be loggerhead situations where no one would be speaking all of a sudden, and it was ‘Matthew, could you come out and play something?’ and I would stand there and butcher ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”

Survivors of near-death experiences often claim they see a glowing white light immediately before (or after) their hearts sputter out. But for a band staring down a major record deal—like Nada Surf did in 1995—the last thing glimpsed before scrawling away all hopes and dreams wasn’t a rapturous glow. It was Ric Ocasek’s gnarly mug.

In the early 1990s, Caws, Lorca and drummer Ira Elliot were like any other band with a self-consciously quirky name: playing pensive, guitar-driven pop songs in dim-and-sticky New York clubs, wearing T-shirts and jeans and Chuck Taylors, trying to think up new ways to make their rent. But shortly after Ocasek—the former Cars frontman-turned-producer, now an official A&R rep for Elektra Records—popped up at one of their gigs, Nada Surf was offered a major-label deal, with Ocasek signed on to man the boards for their debut LP.