Scott McCaughey’s Young Fresh Fellows were on a break from their 40th anniversary tour for their very first album, The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, when they had a spare afternoon in Chicago. McCaughey has always made excellent use of his time, shuttling between bands including the Minus Five, the Baseball Project, Filthy Friends and the touring ensembles for R.E.M. and Alejandro Escovedo, among others, and this occasion was no different. He brought the whole band — plus a bunch of a-list collaborators — into Jeff Tweedy’s Loft Studio, and knocked out a companion piece to the tour-only, acoustic Loft album. However, this one, unlike its predecessor, is a full-band, Beatles-esque piece of psychedelia, in line with The Young Fresh Fellows customary rock-psych giddy surreality but shaded with a knowledge of time and age and mortality. “Death will become us,” sings McCaughey on the song of the same name, “and we become death.” He should know because he had a close brush with the reaper when he had a stroke while on tour with the Minus Five in November 2017.
Not that these are mournful songs, not a bit of it. “I’m a Prison” is a giddy, glorious, guitar-driven, punk rock onslaught, even if it does consider the uneasy residence of the spirit in the body. “Destination” may be about the, er, ultimate destination, but it concedes nothing to existential despair as a visiting Neko Case holds sway over razory guitar riffs and exuberant piano slides.
Indeed, there’s a swaggering bravado to these tracks, which feature, variously John Stirratt, Morgan Fisher of Mott the Hoople, Jonathan Segel of Camper van Beethoven, Jenny Conlee of the Decemberists, Mark Greenberg of Eleventh Dream Day and Peter Buck on a very 1960s psychedelic 12-string guitar. I had to look up the word, gasconade (it means “to boast”), to decode the best cut’s lyrics. “Three Gasconading Saints,” with its swells of organ and rowdy drum fills, conjures the fuck-it-all-let’s-do-it energies of a gang of grey hairs playing what they love for as long as they can—just try and stop them.
The original 11 tracks are packaged with some incidental music: the piano-and-horns whimsical “Overture,” a lush, string throbbing “Entr’acte” and the swoony, very Beatles-ish “Exit Music/The Theme.” “The future astounds, the future confounds, I will abuse it, conduct, accuse it in the dark, the exit music,” McCaughey confides in this last one. Let’s hope his personal exit music is a good way off yet.
For near 13 years of studying I finally had my first minus. I did enjoy it. And I am being sarcastic right now.
Who likes to have a minus score in their paper, huh? No one. (Except for those freaks who really wanted to have one. And I am not one of them.)
Urgh. I hate this teacher. And I hate myself. I had been warned for not copying or even try to give answers to your classmates. But what did I do instead? I did not follow my teacher's advice. And one tip: Not all professors/instructors are the same with your high school teachers. Some are good, most of them terror!
And what did I learn from this very, very valuable experience? DO NOT COPY. DON'T TRY TO CHEAT. DO NOT CONFORM. STUDY HARD. DO YOUR BEST. KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PAPER AND EARS ON THE TEACHER. SMILE OR YOU'LL GET WRINKLES.
From my first sketchbook. Sometimes I tore out ads and pieces of design that I liked. The Camel brand was torn out often. And still I didn't think they targeted people my age. I loved the packages of Kamel Reds. I loved that they spelled it with a K. I wanted to smoke them, but I didn't like the way they tasted, so I stuck to my Special Lights. The Reds were incredible pieces of design. I still think so. 1997.
