When I moved to Arizona in 2001, one of the first records I bought was The New Year’s Newness Ends, and it’s funny how music can wholly represent your state of mind or being at a very specific time in your life. Seeing that it was on Touch and Go Records (the requisite Chicago label for anything loud and rockin’ throughout the 80s-90s/beyond), I’ll admit to having certain preconceptions of what it was going to be- and one by one, it managed to knock all of those expectations down. There were certainly songs that rocked on it (such as the trio of “The Block That Doesn’t Exist,” “Carne Levare,” and “Newness Ends), but overall, I was wowed by the simplicity and quietness of the songs, in addition to the skilled/deliberate arrangements by siblings Matt and Bubba Kadane, formerly of the Texas-based Bedhead.
I picked the Kadanes’ brains about The New Year’s recent album Snow, Bedhead, political songwriting, the music business, and history repeating itself (even in the 9 years since their last record).
Primarily, I was wondering about the general conceptual ideas behind Snow. Lyrically, it seems to have some political undertones, but I may have been reading too much into it. A few of the songs contain a sense of alienation, loneliness, and/or uncertainty, though. I’m thinking particularly about album highlight “Recent History,” which appears to concern a kind of strained relationship, either literally or figuratively.
Matt: I think in “Recent History” the relationships can be political or personal. “The Party’s Over” is maybe the more political song, but as much as it may seem to be about the current nightmare that is Trump, it was written four years before he got elected and inspired by the nightmare that was then Sarah Palin. One of the disadvantages of taking so long to make a record is that it’s impossible to be timely. Unless history keeps farcically repeating itself.
How does the songwriting process typically work with the band? Are ideas shared ahead of time, before rehearsing the material?
Matt: Ideas are always shared ahead of time.
Now that the New Year is a quartet (since the last record), did anything change with the band’s approach to crafting the songs? Without another guitarist, did it put more emphasis on crafting or honing the guitar parts between Matt and Bubba?
Matt: When we started making this record we decided not to worry about what we couldn’t pull off live. I think you’re right that the record may on the whole have fewer guitar parts, but that’s just how the songs came out.
I noticed that this album was split between production/recording by the Kadanes, Matthew Barnhart, and Steve Albini (who has recorded all of The New Year albums and Bedhead’s Transaction De Novo). How was that decided, in terms of what songs were going to be recorded where? Albini’s been a longtime collaborator, and I suppose there’s a nice shorthand of working with him.
Bubba: There was no master plan to use multiple recording locations. We attempted to get the bulk of the album recorded at Electrical Audio with Albini but we weren’t as prepared as we thought with the arrangements of some of the songs. We left there with basic tracks for about three songs and ended up re-recording the others later, along with newer songs, in sporadic sessions over the years with Matthew Barnhart and then recording random parts ourselves. The process was very different for each song, so there was no single recording method for the album as a whole.
Above: One of the few available pictures of Bedhead. Serious headphone listening is going on.
Transaction De Novo, Bedhead’s final album, has its 20th anniversary this year. Are there any specific memories of making that? What did you all want to accomplish with the New Year that was perhaps lacking or unresolved in the previous band?
Matt: I don’t know if I think about music in terms of aims or objectives. If there’s any coherence in our records, it’s either accidental or a result of a persistent state of mind. We never come up with a record title or concept and then try to write songs around it. The songs get written, or the written songs get chosen, and then we try to think of a title that makes the pieces fit together. Memories about Transaction…I remember being panic-stricken when we heard how cavernous the main room in Albini’s new studio sounded—this was studio B in Electrical Audio, and not studio A, where we’ve recorded since. But we found a way to deal with it. The songs either have a ton of naturally occurring reverb or none at all. I also remember having a lot of fun, especially in the second session of recording, which was mainly for overdubs. At the beginning of our relationship with Steve, he and Bubba and I would argue fiercely, and that was always followed by a day of nonstop laughing.
Since Bedhead (and even since the first New Year album), the model for recording and releasing has changed drastically. There is less demand for physical records, and more emphasis on streaming or download platforms. Are you feeling that since the release of your last record (2008’s self-titled)? For Snow, was there a sense that not as many pressings/copies were needed?
Bubba: Everyone is definitely selling fewer physical and download copies of albums, even at the highest levels, so yeah, you just don’t press as many copies or expect as many sales as you would have ten or twenty years ago. Vinyl has been a little more consistent and we actually underestimated what we needed on that and sold out of the first pressing quicker than we thought we would, so it’s hard to figure out sometimes. The biggest downside in all of this is that recording and production costs have steadily risen over the same period, so it’s really hard to recoup the initial costs with fewer copies being sold. We spent a lot of money on the recording, went all out on packaging, videos, etc, so even though the album has done better than we expected, we are still in the red. Streaming does nothing to help or offset any of that, of course.
All of The New Year’s albums had been released on Touch and Go until Snow. My understanding is that the label won’t continue to put out new releases, but is still technically functional. What was the motivation for switching to Undertow?
Bubba: Touch and Go is basically a back catalog label. They still put out the occasional box set or special edition, and they are still keeping all of our LPs in print, so they are still functioning for sure, but they don’t have the machinery anymore for everything that it takes to put out a new album. We talked with a few other labels, but nothing worked out, so we decided to do a self-release through Undertow because Bob Andrews is an old friend of ours and we liked working with them on the Overseas album that Matt and I put out with David Bazan and Will Johnson a few years ago. We are also working with some great labels in Europe (Grand Hotel van Cleef) and Taiwan (High Note) to get the album out in those territories.
A song like “The Beast” reminded me of “18” off of The End Is Near. They both take their time to stretch out, and have such beautifully constructed guitar parts. I’m wondering how long it takes for songs like that to come together- sort of like Bedhead’s “Lepidoptera,” there’s not a wrong note in them.
Matt: Thanks. Those songs are labored over. In all three cases, it took years for them to come together. Not years of nonstop work. But years for us to figure out what we thought needed to happen in the songs and to come up with the right notes.
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