![]() That was the stuff that appealed to me - Butthole Surfers and Dinosaur Jr. But it still had a punk rock kind of “do it yourself” feel. They had melodies, and it was more musical. But I did like the SST stuff, where they took punk rock and also had some pop and classic rock sensibilities. They were a hardcore band, but most hardcore I didn’t care much for. There was a couple things I liked - State Of Confusion, a Boise band, I loved more than anything. The hardcore scene, I didn’t really care much about the music. There was a hardcore scene, bands touring, and people putting on shows. When I was a teenager, punk rock was starting to happen. She’s talking about how crazy her friends and she are, and how wild they are and how they call themselves the ultimate alternative wavers. This girl wrote to a friend of hers and she made up that term in the title. From the get-go I was going to be needing to play with some different people.Ī friend of mine found a letter in an alley in Portland, and we printed the letter inside the record. That’s part of the reason why the rotating lineup concept was part of the band. My idea was that I would make this record and then call the project Built to Spill, and then when I moved to wherever we moved to, I could maybe find some people there and still call it Built to Spill. She was planning on going to graduate school somewhere else, like Montana or Colorado. At the time that I made the record, I was living in Caldwell, Idaho while my girlfriend at the time was finishing college. I didn’t know where I was going to be in a year. We didn’t have any engineering skills, but we engineered it ourselves. It was really exciting to experiment and record ourselves. Then I left that band, and we just messed around at a friend’s studio. It was originally a bunch of songs that I had written to take Treepeople in a different direction. ![]() Ahead of the album’s release, I asked Martsch to look back at the other Built To Spill records to chart his path to the latest LP. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree - the new Built To Spill record out Friday, When The Wind Forgets Your Name, sounds like, well, classic Built To Spill, with the rustic melodies and wigged-out solos that fans have come to love. “But I think that’s just the way that artists have a so fully different interpretation of what they’re doing. “To my mind, nothing sounds like classic Built to Spill,” he says. Not that Martsch agrees with that assessment. Playing with different people has kept the project fresh, he says, though the band’s jammy, shambling guitar pop sound has remained remarkably distinctive and influential no matter the constantly changing lineups. By design, Martsch - who started Built To Spill in 1992 after exiting his former band, the pioneering Idaho group Treepeople - has been the only constant in that time. As their peers have navigated various break-ups, reunions, and other miscellaneous peaks and valleys, Built To Spill have chugged steadily along, putting out consistently strong albums and touring regularly. While the 52-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist might experience the occasional letdown over, say, not having his own McDonald’s meal, he does feel satisfaction regarding Built To Spill enduring as one of the great legacy indie bands of the ’90s. “I’m looking at my Apple newsfeed and see something about us, and then, aw! Always disappointed.” “Even I get fooled,” he says during a recent Zoom call. And - like so many other middle-aged guys who like indie rock - he also enjoys making his own Built To Spill/BTS jokes. ![]() Before I write anything else about Doug Martsch, I want to state for the record that, yes, he is aware of the meme conflating his band, the long-running indie-rock institution Built To Spill, with the mega-successful K-pop group BTS.
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