When last the world heard from Omaha neo-folk quartet The Good Life, it was 2007 and Tim Kasher had just written a screenplay called Help Wanted Nights. The band’s fourth LP was to serve as an accompaniment to the finished film, and Kasher had even fled the bosom of the Midwest for Los Angeles in an attempt to legitimize the effort. The album of the same name bore little variation musically from the heart-wrenching miasma found on 2004’s Album of the Year, in what were essentially epically sad acoustic ballads and the occasional melodic upswing over Kasher’s invariably bleak breakup lyrics.
A lot can change in eight years. Help Wanted Nights the film was never shot. Kasher released two solo albums and two more Cursive albums. Bassist Stefanie Drootin-Senseney married and had two children, while multi-instrumentalist Ryan Fox moved to Portland and started a cassette tape label, and drummer Roger Lewis continued projects with Conduits and Oquoa. The plan was never to take a hiatus for this long, according to Kasher.
“We never really declared that we were done or anything,” Kasher says from his home in Chicago. “I kept waiting for a window that seemed appropriate to do a Good Life record again, and then I eventually realized that you pretty much have to open the window yourself and make it happen.”
What would eventually become The Good Life’s fifth full-length, Everybody’s Coming Down, started with a phone call from Kasher to Drootin-Senseney. Kasher had already decided to begin writing the frameworks of songs to ensure he was on the right path, but admits he didn’t feel like it was a 100 percent guarantee that anything would happen with The Good Life again anytime soon.
“I had to pose it as a question: Is this something you want to do?” explains Kasher. “I didn’t want to presume that everybody was excited about that, or that that’s how they wanted to spend their 2015 and 2016.”
Once everyone was, in fact, on board, they realized pretty quickly that their creative evolutions over the previous eight years were going to produce a pretty sharp turn from the likes of Help Wanted Nights or Album of the Year. From the instant the dreamy vignette intro of “7 in the Morning” gives way to the grunge-y squall of Fox’s fussy, fuzzy guitar on “Everybody,” it’s immediately evident we’re not dealing with the same Good Life whose metamorphoses began even before Album of the Year, when Blackout and their debut Novena on a Nocturn exposed the bowels of the Nebraskan electro-punk revolution alongside the likes of Omaha brethren The Faint.
The Good Life have emerged from their eight-year cocoon a rowdier, more straightforward (though expectedly quirky, defiantly experimental) rock ‘n’ roll band.
“Even before we had any demos, we talked about [Everybody’s Coming Down] as an electric guitar record, or a rock record,” Fox says. “There’s no acoustic guitar on the record, which I think is a first for us. It’s in contrast to Album of the Year especially. We talked about ‘What would the Album of the Year Good Life think of the new Good Life?’ I think they’d be a little bit scared of us. Like, who are these old weirdos trying to make a rock record?”