As we enter the early stages of 2024, one can’t help but feel a brimming excitement and anticipation for the musical adventures and discoveries that lie ahead, whether that be from a veteran or emerging performer.
For many musical groups, new chapters are steeped in a collective love for music history and a reverence for the past.
That includes supergroup The Salt Collective, or more succinctly Salt. The group is led by French guitarist and songwriter Stéphane Schück, drummer Benoit Lautridou and bass player Fred Quentin. The trio has had a long affinity with collaborations dating back to 2000 and following the band’s formation in 2016.
In 2022, the core members of SALT had a collection of instrumental songs. They decided to share these mostly finished songs with selected songwriters in hopes they would add lyrics and melodies. There was little instruction other than to add their own touch to the songs.
The resulting album LIFE, released this past October, features a smorgasbord of guest musicians: Matthew Caws (Nada Surf), Juliana Hatfield, Matthew Sweet, Peter Holsapple (The dB’s), Richard Lloyd (Television), Mitch Easter (Let’s Active, producer for early R.E.M. albums), Anton Barbeau, The dB’s rhythm section (Gene Holder & Will Rigby), Susan Cowsill, Pat Sansone (Wilco), and newcomer Faith Jones. The album was produced by The dB’s Chris Stamey in North Carolina.
For Caws, the involvement of such a wide variety of artists he’s familiar with and a sound that harkens back to ‘80s college radio made it easy to say “yes” to the project.
“The Salt record seems to have a grounding in that era, and that’s probably due to the taste of the original band members, Stéphane [Schück], Fred [Quentin] and Benoit Lautridou,” says Caws during a recent interview with Scummy Water Tower. “The process of being given a fully finished piece of music and writing to it is cool and unusual for me. I am usually the songwriter, so this was really fun.”
In a couple weeks, he will join a truncated version of the band which will embark on a brief east coast U.S. tour. The lineup also features Stéphane Schück, Fred Quentin, Mitch Easter, Chris Stamey, Gene Holder, Lynn Blakey (Tres Chicas) and Rob Ladd (The Connells). Opening the tour will be the reunited Sneakers, the short-lived band from the ‘70s featuring Mitch Easter and Chris Stamey.
Tour dates are as follows:
Jan. 17 – Cat’s Cradle; Carrboro, NC
Jan. 19 – 118 North; Wayne, PA
Jan. 20 – White Eagle Hall; Jersey City, NJ
Jan. 21 – Daryl’s House; Pawling, NY
Jan. 22 – City Winery, Boston, MA
Prior to the tour, Scummy Water Tower caught up with Caws to learn why he joined the project, his inspirations and songwriting approach to the two songs he appears on, what about music history and diving down the rabbit hole of a band’s influences excites him and what’s next for the band and Nada Surf.
The new album has been out for a little bit now. What do you think of the reception of the album and the band so far?
It’s been great. People who’ve heard it seem to really like it and I think it came out so well. It is not to say it was a surprise, but it’s a bit of a nice surprise how good it turned out.
Are there any songs that have especially taken on added meaning to you since they were initially recorded?
I’m only on two of them, but I think my favorite is “I Knew You So Well,” that’s one of Chris Stamey’s songs. It’s such a great hook. So that was the one I was most addicted to. But I went to Paris for our first show, and I ended up playing something on all the songs. I already love the record, but when you have to play along on something, you get to know it a little better and there’s not a dud on it. They’re all really, really good songs and each one has its own depth, so I really enjoyed learning them.
The band’s chemistry and formation revolve around several members of the band Salt, who in the last few years have been connecting with collaborators like yourself to add lyrics and melodies to their songs. Were you familiar with their music beforehand?
I wasn’t really familiar with their music beforehand, actually, when I was asked to participate. But I loved the tracks. What was nice was that they seemed both familiar and foreign to me. It was the kind of music that I really liked, but because I didn’t write it, there were some changes and some developments in the songs that were nice surprises that things I wouldn’t have been able to think of doing. And I feel like that’s the best part of a collaboration in a way is if you have some common ground, but also some unfamiliar ground.
But the people involved are all people that I first heard of in the early 80s or mid-80s. I hate to use terms, but I would say it’s music that I encountered on college radio, without putting it under a genre name. It was the music I heard there. And I had an older sister growing up and she had a subscription to Trouser Press magazine, and that’s where I read a lot of these names for the first time. And she listened to WNYU Radio a lot. And then I worked in a record store in Greenwich Village called Record Runner. I started working there in ‘85, and my boss was a guy called Michael Carlucci, and he was in a band called Winter Hours and they were part of this East Coast College Radio sort of underground and mid-ground guitar, pop rock music. There’s also the term power pop, but that’s one of those terms, it feels so at once too specific and diluted, depending on who you’re talking about. I’ll ignore that, I’m just acknowledging it. But college, radio and underground American rock and roll, so that band Winter Hours were part of that circuit and I roadied for them.
So, I guess I’m mentioning these places and these times, that publication and that radio station, as just areas where I heard of these people. And the Salt record seems to have a grounding in that era, and that’s probably due to the taste of the original band members, Stéphane [Schück], Fred [Quentin] and Benoit Lautridou.
This isn’t particularly interesting, but the process of being given a fully finished piece of music and writing to it is cool and unusual for me. I am usually the songwriter, so this was really fun. I really enjoyed it. Chris Stamey produced it, and he’s just clearly a really good producer. The suggestions that he gave me were very helpful, and I feel like he did a great job pulling the whole project together, pulling the whole record together.
How did you get connected with the members from Salt? What was their pitch to you about their project?
The pitch was probably centered around the people involved in addition to the Salt guys, the dB’s were involved and Mitch Easter, and then I think some of it was recorded at Mitch’s studio. So that right there made me say “yes” immediately because I’m a really big fan of the dB’s, have been for a very long time, and a really big fan of Let’s Active and of Mitch Easter’s production work. So that made me say “yes” right away. I mean, of course I might’ve said no if I didn’t like the songs, but I did. They were really well written and sounded great. So, it was an easy decision.
It sounds like the songwriting process usually started with their demos that they created.
Yeah, I wasn’t involved in that part, so I never got to hear their demos. I was only brought or asked to come on board to listen to finished tracks. I’d love to hear the demos. I’ll ask them if I can hear them. That would be super interesting.
It sounds like a lot of work was done over the web.
Yeah. That band The Postal Service gave that process a name or took their name from that process, which I think is great. But yeah, this was an internet provider album, a web service record. Well, actually, my part in it. I’m not sure if all the other tracks with singers other than Chris, for example…I don’t know how many of those were done in person, but I think this started during the pandemic, so I guess a lot of it was remote.
I imagine that was a pretty interesting way to work on music.
Yeah, it’s cool. I think it’s more and more common now, not only because of not just the internet and not just the pandemic, but I think for years because of home recording becoming so feasible. I’m looking at you in my studio right now, and my vocal mic is right here on this. You see these mic holders all over. I mean, every podcast in the world seems to have this exact setup. It always makes me think of working at McDonald’s or something, a flexible microphone. But yeah, I think just the feasibility of it has made this kind of recording so much more common, which is great. It’s also great because while the recording studio, while the real thing definitely heightens people’s commitment in a way and maybe encourages people to take a chance more on things. I think on the flip side, there’s so much to be said for the taxi meter not running.
It does not cost me a penny to sit here and doing a vocal in two hours will not cost more than doing a vocal in 10 minutes. So, I think working on a finished track, I just sang against what was already there. I learned the chords and would sit on the sofa for a little bit and strum it. But it was more about letting the real thing play and just wandering around the room, listening to it on repeat. And then if something would grab me or I’d find myself singing along, I could sit down and put it down.
Speaking of just letting things play, one of my favorite accidental ways to make music sometimes is to, well, this is actually more true. When I’d listen to a Walkman or a Discman and put a record on and just putter around the house or vacuum or whatever, sometimes the music would run out, the CD would end or the tape would end, and I wouldn’t notice that it had ended because I was thinking of something. So, the “music” was still playing. Something was still playing because something was still happening. And that was a nice bonus when I would realize that the tape or the CD had ended, and I was still singing. That meant I’d made something up and then I would run over to a tape recorder and put it down. Anyway, this process has something in common with what I just described, listening to somebody else’s music and coming up with something. But I guess that’s exactly what all the singers that are or were in bands where the music was made up by the group. If you were Morrissey, you would probably get a tape of a bunch of Johnny Marr compositions and see what happened. If you were Michael Stipe, same thing. Bono. A million singers who were handed music to make something up to.
What’s one of your favorite stories working on the album?
On “Another Bus Coming”, there’s a line where I say, “I’m not full of grace. I’m Charlie Brown. I often lose my place in Tinseltown.” And Chris Stamey suggested putting a low harmony under Charlie Brown because the line reminded him of The Coasters song “Charlie Brown,” where there’s a very low vocal. Anyway, that was a very nice producer’s touch. I don’t know if I have stories because I’m just sitting here alone doing it, so solitude doesn’t make for good stories. I guess that’s the other great thing about bands getting together is there would be some stories.
It sounds like you talked a bit to them over Zoom.
No, I didn’t to make these songs. I’m not sure that I did. But we’ve already gotten together and had band practice for a show that we did at Ferber Studios in Paris, and that was great. So, Chris was the music director and pulled us together and suggested which parts to play on all the songs I wasn’t on. So that was good. And we’re going to have another day of rehearsal in Chapel Hill the day before the first show of the American tour.
Where were some of the biggest surprises and challenges making this album?
Well, one surprise or one challenge was in the song “Asylum,” the first song on the record. There are a couple of instrumental breaks that are pretty out there and didn’t lend themselves, to me at least, to continuing to sing a melody. So, in the first instrumental break, I tell a story about a repair garage that I brought my car to once. It’s such a sort of meaningless little story, but it’s just something that stuck with me. Anyway, I’ll tell you the story in case it’s not clear on the record, but basically I was in this garage getting, I don’t know, maybe my tires rotated or something. And the head mechanic was also the guy taking payment. So, his desk was the checkout desk, and it was totally tidy, totally spotless, just a pen and a pad in the perfect place, and everything else sorted away. And I said, “how do you do that? And how do you keep it so clean, so tidy?” And he said, “well, I just tidy it up every day.” And what stuck with me was how simple the answer was, how obvious the answer was, and how in my case at least, I so often miss the obvious answer, the simple answer.
And that answer very often has to do with consistency. I have ADD, and I’ve heard a description that’s interesting, that splits people up into hunters and farmers. And farmers have to be good at doing everything on time and regularly. You have to till the field regularly. You have to sow the seeds at a certain time. You have to water or fertilize at a certain time. You have to harvest at a certain time, or the village will starve. It’s something you have to do. And a hunter needs to be able to be distracted because if he or she is chasing certain prey and other better prey appears on the horizon, the hunter has to be able to change plans and be distracted.
So, I’m definitely in the latter category, chasing things and being distracted and then chasing other things and maybe not finishing the first chase. And I’m not saying I would’ve become a full farmer. I’d like to be a hybrid ideally, no disrespect to other hunters, but this mechanic really did something for me by stating it so simply. Anyway, I’ve been trying to clean my desk a little bit every day since then, and that was probably 25 years ago. Well, there you go. I just went down a rabbit hole of that challenge.
Other challenges are just singing over changes that didn’t all feel instinctual to me, which is great. That’s a wonderful problem to have, but that’s it. No other real challenges, just a smooth, enjoyable musical adventure.
Was it challenging doing your parts by yourself?
No, I usually do that anyway. In Nada Surf, I write most of the song parts alone. And then together as a group, we spend a lot of time working out the arrangement. And sometimes I’ll write something on the spot, but mostly it’s a solitary endeavor, something that I do either right here or very early in the morning sometimes. And I think I did that a little bit for the Salt songs too, is when I really need to get something done. Sometimes I’ll wake up at 5:30 or something so that I have a couple of hours before my family gets up. And that’s one practical aspect.
But the even more advantageous aspect for me of getting up really early. I have a very powerful and merciless inner critic, and my inner critic will shoot almost anything down pretty quick. But what I discovered is so great about the really early morning is that as corny as this sounds, my inner critic is still asleep at that hour. And I think that’s because the day has not been wasted. None of the day has been wasted because the day hasn’t even started. So, there is no waste, there’s no guilt. And that I think allows me to be more free or at least get away without having to defend every idea against an inner critic.
Going back to your song “Asylum,” what was your inspiration for that song?
The beginning of it is actually about looking for magic mushrooms out in the wild, which I’ve never done. And I don’t do mushrooms. I have in the past, but I don’t do anything now. But I guess I was watching some documentaries about microdosing, and some people were talking about looking for magic mushrooms in the wild. And there’s something so beautiful about looking for something in nature to help. I mean, it’s just like herbal medicine or something. And the idea that these only appear at special times. Some are called liberty caps, I think, which is why that lyric is in there.
I’ll wait until the fall and the wetter ground, to see what I can find. The first line is pretty clearly about that, but that’s just the beginning. And a lot of times the departure idea of a song isn’t really what it’s about, or isn’t what it ends up being about, because so often songs, especially ones that don’t have a clear storyline, that are a little bit more impressionistic, can really move around and be about a bunch of things. So, while that was the inspiration for the first couple of lines, it’s more about finding peace and looking for peace and everything around that, giving peace to other people.
And there’s an inverse of the golden rule that I’m really fond of. So, if I get this right, the golden rule is to treat others as you wish to be treated. But the inverse that I find so useful is to treat yourself as you would want to treat others. And I try to be, except when I’m overexcited, I try to be peaceful around other people. I definitely try not to make a lot of noise. If I’m sharing a space with somebody, I try to be mindful of them. And I think sometimes I forget to give myself the same peace, whether that’s by cutting down on distractions and looking for some kind of peace and sticking with it when you find it. So, I found asylum on this hillside, all the importance of even just taking a walk every day, getting some natural light in your eyes.
I remember a friend telling me that he was on an antidepressant, and he wanted an increase in the dose, and he went to his psychologist or psychiatrist if there’s prescriptions involved, and said he wanted an increase in the dose. And the psychiatrist said, “tell you what, before I do that, that I want you to take two 15-minute walks every day without sunglasses.” And that did the trick. I think there’s something meditative about getting out and walking. It’s like it’s taking up room in your mind, what you’re seeing, what you’re smelling, what you’re hearing, wind in the trees. It’s taking up some room in your mind that is preventing, let’s say, circular thoughts or damaging thoughts from getting in. It’s a good thing to do, which I don’t quite do enough, but there is asylum there.
A lot of the world is so connected with technology that it’s good to get away from all that.
For sure. Absolutely.
I like how the hillside is kind of a metaphor for finding a place of peace.
Yeah. And that can be a place you go in your mind or it can be a physical place. Definitely. We all need it.
What’s it like being part of a project that had a pretty global reach with all the different collaborators?
It’s great. And it only just occurred to me while looking at the list of players on the tour. I think every single person except me on the American side, every single person except me is from North Carolina. My mother grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, and I went to Wilmington probably three times a year for the first 10 years of my life or something. I went there a lot. And also, in the mountains where my aunt had a condo. And then I lived in Paris when I was a kid. My parents are professors, so we took sabbatical years. You get a break every seven years. So, we lived in Paris in 1972 when I was five, and in 1979 when I was 12, and spent the whole year there. And Stéphane, the main man, lives just three blocks from where I spent the whole year when I was 12. So, I did feel connected in a way geographically and experientially to everyone on the project. So, while it was global, there was some homey feeling to it for me.
It’s amazing how small the world is in ways like that.
Definitely. Totally.
You’ll be joining the band in a few weeks on the east coast tour. How would you describe the touring version of the band? What about this version excites you the most?
Well, I’m just psyched about playing with everybody. The Salt guys are fantastic. And then Chris is somebody in our limited time that I’ve been learning so much from, and then it’ll be a total joy to share the stage. Also with Mitch Easter, who I’ve only met for a few minutes, but was a total delight. And Lynn Blakey is this fantastic singer, and she was in Paris for that first Salt gig. And then Rob Ladd from the Connells, I’ve never met, but I saw them in Wilmington and was a fan of theirs. I’ve never met Gene Holder. That’ll be really exciting. Just seems like a lot of talent and a lot of good taste on stage, so it’ll be exciting to be part of it.
Will the set mostly consist of the songs from the album, or do you think you’ll mix in some covers of your individual bands?
In Paris, we did the whole record plus a dB’s song and a Nada Surf song. So, I’m sure it’ll be something like that, like the Salt album and then a little handful of other things.
I imagine it’s nice to be able to draw from a variety of music.
Definitely. Yeah, it’s always great to combine bands and combine catalogs and see what happens. It’s fantastic.
The band Sneakers will be opening the shows. Mitch Easter and Chris Stamey are also part of that band. It must be exciting to have them open.
It’s great. They’re a legendary band, and it’s one of those names that you’d hear when you get interested in anything you get interested in the roots of it. It’s exciting. You just want more of it or to hear the origins. It’s like the other day I was listening to a great podcast called A History of Rock and Roll In 500 songs, and one of them was about “Rock Island Line” by Lonnie Donegan and the song that kicked off the skiffle craze in Britain. And there was a recording of The Quarrymen, and I’d never heard that. I didn’t know there was audio of The Quarrymen, which was John Lennon’s skiffle band. And the recording is from the day that he met Paul McCartney. So, I think people’s roots are so exciting. I’m interested in the roots of people. It could be a random autobiographical novel, someone’s talking about their childhood. I mean, you can be so quickly invested in it.
So, people’s previous bands I think are fascinating. It’s going to be a real thrill to have Sneakers play also.
Do you think you might do more beyond this tour?
I really don’t know. I’d be up for it, but we’ll see how it goes. Also, people have their other things going on. I’m going to have a Nada Surf record out soon, a new one. So, I’ll be touring for that. But we’ll do this and see how it goes and see what the future holds.
What can people expect from the new Nada Surf music?
I think like everything, to me it sounds exactly the same and totally different. So more of the same, but brand new. And it is also not more of the same. I don’t know. I am still under the illusion, or I choose to operate under the illusion that every song is its own world. So even though there are some ways in which you could draw similarities, I think they’re all brand new worlds to me. So, if you liked our worlds in the past, I hope you’ll like these too.
The cover of The Salt Collective’s album reminds me of many of the eighties and nineties covers that featured kids.
Yeah, it’s true. It does kind of remind me of that. Do you remember Guadalcanal Diary?
No, I don’t.
That’s a band from that era. There’s a record called 2X4, and it’s actually a kid swinging a 2” x 4” looking like he’s about to hit somebody. But it looks like it’s part of fun more than violence, but there’s a similar playful attitude. Interesting. Yeah, it’s a lovely record cover. I’ll need to ask. I don’t actually know where that is. I’ll have to ask Stéphane. I wonder if it’s in France.
It made me think of Nada Surf’s debut album.
Oh, yeah, right. That’s our bass player Daniel’s brother, Miguel, jumping his bike into the pool. I’ve been to that house, and we used to make a lot of jumps.
Why do you think it’s popular to have kids on album covers, like Nirvana’s Nevermind, U2’s Boy and Blind Melon’s self-titled album?
Well, I mean, music definitely lives on our free, playful, innocent, instinctual side.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. It was great to learn about this band and it sounds like it was really a fun, different thing for you to go through.
Definitely. Yeah, it was really enjoyable. It was refreshing and yeah, I feel all the richer for it.
Are there any collaborators that you made through this project that you’d want to work with in the future?
With more? Yeah, any and all of them, definitely everybody involved is somebody that would be fun to work with. So, we’ll see what the future holds.
You can follow The Salt Collective on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and Matthew Caws on Twitter and Instagram.
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
