Adrift Again
In which I return to The Sophtware Slump, in the first part of a possible Grandaddy series.
I’ve been enjoying the new Grandaddy songs released in recent weeks ahead of a new album by the Californian band scheduled for February. First there was ‘Watercooler’ on 25 October, followed by ‘Cabin in My Mind’ on 1 December. Other fans of the band seem to have been pleased to hear about new Grandaddy material too; comments have been appearing online about the classic sound of the new tracks, which are reminiscent of the music the band was releasing in the early 2000s.
There’s no shortage of nostalgia on display, which seems only right for a band whose work was saturated in tones of memory, nostalgia, loss and regret.
Grandaddy is a band that’s rarely far from my mind, even without these welcome reminders. I’ve been a fan since the late 1990s (circa Under the Western Freeway), when Jason Lytle’s crew appeared on my radar due mostly, I guess, to overlapping interests in Americana, US indie music, Neil Young-inspired songs, synth music, country and doubtless a few other things beside.
Then came 2000’s The Sophtware Slump, an album that raised the bar for many listeners. It’s been much lauded in the music press and by fans of the band for more than two decades now, as discourse has shifted from situating it among other popular machine-influenced conceptual works of the time—Radiohead’s OK Computer from 1997, the Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots from 2002—to recognising the longstanding appeal of bandleader Jason Lytle’s songwriting craft.
It’s an album I’ve regularly returned to over the last 23 years and have often considered writing about. More than a decade ago, I pitched it (unsuccessfully) as a contender for the 33 1/3 book series. Later I considered it as the topic for a podcast. Now I’m thinking about it as a possible series of written posts.
When I was working on that first pitch, it was just past the album’s tenth anniversary and a deluxe edition had appeared. My starting point (reproduced below with only a few changes) was that version of the album. In 2020 there was a twentieth anniversary edition, which also included a voice-and-piano rerecording of the whole album by Lytle.
During this time, Lytle and his band have also been the focus of various podcasts and media projects. The Sophtware Slump featured on an episode of Dan Nordheim’s Life of the Record, with Lytle providing contextual information about the making of the album and some of the influences feeding into its songs (Radiohead, Kiss and Elliott Smith among others). Will Amos’s It’s Simple, It’s Dumb, It’s the Podcast (which adapts its title from the opening track of The Sophtware Slump) is a show devoted to the work of Lytle and his collaborators that launched in 2021 as a continuation of Amos’s Twitter project ‘Jason Lytle Songs - Ranked’.
‘Adrift again’ are the first sung words on The Sophtware Slump and, for me, each new edition has felt like an invitation to drift to those places that only this music takes me, as has any news emanating from the Lytle/Grandaddy camp. This year has seen extensive activity around the twentieth anniversary of Sumday, the excellent successor to The Sophtware Slump, and that has had me returning to other Grandaddy albums and Lytle solo releases. Even Lytle’s recent appearance on Amoeba Music’s ‘What’s in My Bag’ feature had me wanting to crack open my dormant Grandaddy notes. So, while I don’t see the Songs and Objects project as especially beholden to topicality, I’ve been inspired by the new and upcoming releases to share some of my thoughts on an album that has long been one of my favourites.
Adrift again …
In a parallel sonic world, half familiar, half strange, fully uncanny, a quick succession of garbled sounds—birdsong, wind, interference—twitter and buzz and blow themselves into existence. An obscured human voice counts to eight, a comforting synthetic keyboard tone sounds and another voice—this one familiar, soothing, welcome—sings words we were half expecting:
Adrift again 2000 man…
The voice proceeds with the opening verse of the familiar song, accompanied by a series of bleeps, whirs and layered voices coming on like mutant sci-fi Beach Boys surfing the atmosphere of a nearby planet, a planet we know and yet don’t really know. Another spoken voice—‘Ok, here we go’—counts into what must be some kind of take-off or re-entry process, some change in state that’s about to be delivered.
But the music stops, buzzing into oblivion, taken over by static, then silence, bringing to a close a less than two-minute snapshot of what might have been.
So runs ‘Discarded Pilot Intro’, an outtake from the recording of ‘He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot’, the epic opening track of Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump. It’s not how the album really opened, just a glimpse of a possibility.
It may seem counterintuitive to start here, with a recording that didn’t see official release until it was included on a bonus disc of the deluxe edition of Grandaddy’s most critically lauded album in 2011. Yet The Sophtware Slump is an album all about discarded objects, missed opportunities, over- or under-ambitious plans, forgotten or unrealised dreams and futures that didn’t happen. By coming into public consciousness as a result of the repackaging of the album, the discarded opening allowed the band’s audience to consider The Sophtware Slump’s legacy and the ways we had come to know, live with and love the album, had come to expect it to sound this way and not that way, to have it fixed in its millennial amber.
To be asked to hear the album differently was to be asked what made it special in the first place.
We might also have been drawn to consider, as often with such ‘deluxe’ reissues, whether the new form in which the work was being presented had made its former incarnation obsolete, a process that would have been especially ironic given the core themes of Jason Lytle’s songwriting. In ‘I’m on Standby’, a song from the band’s subsequent album Sumday, Lytle would present a human-machine relationship built on just such notions, as both humans and their technologies get ‘powered down for redesign’. Have the various redesigns of Grandaddy’s most lauded album led to a ‘power down’ of the original?
The paradox is that, the reissue policies of record companies aside, it is primarily the continued power of the original work that allows such reconsideration and redesign. We can take the reissues of The Sophtware Slump as a sign of the original album’s continued relevance while recognising that anything we say about it is increasingly mediated through the distorting lens of memory. Again, this seems entirely appropriate, for The Sophtware Slump is a magisterial exercise in looking back at looking forward, a technoblended dream vision of what it means to remember, lament and elegise, to set oneself adrift in the balmy haze of nostalgia.
But if the album suggests a link with the past with its series of elegies, it is equally forward-focussed. An obsession with space travel, robots and other technologies mark it as a work of science fiction, one that considers the past, present and future in utopian and dystopian terms. Connecting to what the artist and cultural theorist Svetlana Boym referred to in a 2002 book as ‘the future of nostalgia’ and to literary theorist Frederic Jameson’s ‘archeologies of the future’, The Sophtware Slump allows us to consider the routes not taken in the past and the ruins yet to be uncovered. Like most work concerned with temporal displacement, however, it’s very much a work of the present, one that presents memory and imagination as activities and ways of being that take place, and take hold of people, in the here and now.
The Sophtware Slump’s preoccupation with temporality, nature, ecology and technostalgia fitted in 2000, and still resonates now, with a range of millennial concerns. These issues are played out on the album, as in the cultural milieu that gave rise to it, as tensions between the past, present and future, between nature and technology, humans and machines, digital and analogue, control and chaos, organic and inorganic life, home and the faraway. Musically, they are present in the album’s mixing of rock and electronica, skatepunk and Americana, hi-fi and lo-fi. From the perspective of audio formats, the album recognises the end of a phonographic era dominated by apparently obsolete objects: records, cassettes, CDs and the machines that played them.
At the same time, it’s important to note that this obsolescence might be peculiar to Westernized, postindustrial societies. Grandaddy’s album was a portrait of a Wasted West; with its interest in cowboy iconography, its desert-bleached outlook and end-of the-road bewilderment, the group provided a perfect soundtrack to a dystopic twenty-first century Western, highlighting the ways in which frontier-finding always leaves a trail of destruction.
The Sophtware Slump presents technology as an ongoing process, a culture of improvement that follows a logic it can rarely adhere to. The society depicted in the album is a society spinning out of control, its disequilibrium signalled by haywire synthesizers, haunted computers, death-driven robots and a schizophonic shuttling between noise and serenity.
Other sounds on the album—the haunted, cracked falsetto of bandleader and principle songwriter Jason Lytle, the sweet descants of Lytle’s supporting cast, the soft weeping of the piano that seeps through the cracks in the electrical storm—register an ongoing tension between awe, resignation and deep weariness. One of Lytle’s key skills has been an ability to present collective, global concerns (e.g. excessive consumption and its role in ecological disaster) as personal narratives, weaving the public into the private.
Lytle’s millennial song suite was his and his band’s most fully realized vision, substantially moving forward from their breakthrough album, Under the Western Freeway. Where Freeway had been a work still rooted in the band’s earlier skatepunk sound (albeit showcasing a rootsier strand that had seen Grandaddy labelled with the then-fashionable ‘Americana’ tag), The Sophtware Slump was both a logical progression from Freeway’s cowpunk soundscape and a work that could not have been imagined prior to its release.
Pitching their tent in territory first made audible by influential precursors and ambitious peers, Grandaddy signalled at once a sense of belonging and a desire to travel to some faraway place, to set the controls for the heart of a different sun. They took the cleverness of Pavement and mixed it with their own form of erudition, less self-consciously arty but retaining the sense of teasing resolutions that Pavement were known for. From Neil Young, Lytle borrowed the attachment of high lonesome yearning to a posthuman landscape—equal parts Laurel Canyon, Silicon Valley and Mojave Desert. The album connects to Young’s concept albums (especially Trans), to his mini space operas and to the ‘chrome heart shining in the sun’ of his country lament ‘Long May You Run’. There’s a connection, too, with Beck (a Lytle favourite), not least in the interaction of high gloss and lo-fi glitch, a textural interdependency whereby one becomes aware of roughness as lack of smoothness and vice versa, or to analogue as a recognition of what is missing from digital.
These acts, and others that Grandaddy connect to, showcase technostalgia and sonic drift. Drift here refers to a gliding quality in music that suggests moving away from a fixed centre, gliding to new possibilities, sliding off shiny surfaces. It is this sense of drift that anticipates the ‘chillwave’ scene of the following decade, wherein sci-fi scapes and lost auras jostle for recognition among banks of endlessly arpeggiating synths and slow-glide guitars. Albums such as Emeralds’ Does It Look Like I’m Here? and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Returnal (both from 2010) re-figure cultural and structural logics traversed by The Sophtware Slump a decade before, even as they seem to emerge from quite different musical scenes.
The sense of being in a fable or dream, something that connects Grandaddy to most of these artists, is established from the opening moments of The Sophtware Slump and doesn’t fade until long after the final track has drifted away. ‘He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot’ (the undiscarded version) opens with birdsong and what sounds like a banjo (actually a harpsichord setting on a Casio keyboard), the same kind of clunky, hissy, slightly-off country style essayed at the time by peers such as Beck, Mercury Rev, Lambchop or Wilco. Even the vocal fits a certain kind of alt.country style, rooted in the high lonesome melancholy of Neil Young. But there is a sense, as the singer mouths the drift-based lyric, that something else is afoot.
This premonition is fuelled by the ‘control booth’ voice that intones ‘Are you ready?’ just after the one-minute mark and is then strengthened as the soundscape suddenly shifts to reveal the slick synth-cruise of the song’s next section. The sudden application of high gloss after a build-up of static encourages listeners to question what has gone before: was that really birdsong or clever tape manipulation? Where does the natural end and the technological begin? Who is speaking and singing? What are the tonal and textural centres of this music? Where are we, as listeners, supposed to position ourselves?
From here the band take off and keep taking off. Even as the opening lyrics are repeating, the music is shifting. Cleanly strummed acoustic guitar makes the intro seem dirtier than it really was, silk-smooth synths add propulsion, double-tracked vocals and other phased sonics lend a sense of intergalactic psychedelia, and the first of many mutinously misfiring synth arpeggios threatens to ground the proceedings. But even though the song slows down again, it never quite returns to Earth, moving instead into the infinitely drawn-out slo-mo of space drift, gliding through silence, awe, and resignation, at one with the utter sadness of the universe.
OK, here we go. Again.