Switchfoot - Cover Story
"What is true happiness?" asks Switchfoot frontman Jon Foreman. "Is it a comfortable four-door sedan with tinted windows? Does it mean I have 2.3 children and a beautiful wife and live in a great neighborhood? Everyone has their own version of what happiness means, but many of the things we're going for, and I include myself in this, are absurd. There's this moment in scripture, in Ecclesiastes, where it says, 'Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.' That's the place where our new record starts."
The San Diego alt-rock band's new record, Nothing is Sound, once again finds Foreman questioning everything, as he did on the band's two and a half-million selling breakout album, The Beautiful Letdown
"That's pretty much where our music naturally goes," he says. "I ask myself questions and sing about it. A lot of these songs are like an oyster. A bit of sand gets in and it's abrasive and troublesome. The oyster starts working on it and a few years later you open it up and there's pearl in there. That's what I do in my songs--chew on the more abrasive parts of my life."
Switchfoot's non-stop touring schedule--they performed 400 shows over the last two years--gave Foreman plenty of time to gnaw. In fact, Nothing is Sound was recorded on the road. The band was so busy that they didn't have time to take a break to make a record. So they set up their instruments and recording equipment in the dressing room every night and would lay down tracks in between interviews and sound check.
"That was one advantage we had on this record," says Foreman.
"We'd been playing some of the songs, like `Daisy' and `Politicians,' off and on for a while. We got to road test them, check the tires, and switch things up before we ever pressed the 'record' button. The audiences determined which songs were selected and how they turned out. The trickiest part is trying to capture what we do live and bottle it up into the 1's and 0's on a CD. It helped to play these songs live, feel that energy, and say, 'Okay, this is what we have to match.'"
Switchfoot did go into a proper studio to cut drums and other parts. They produced the album themselves with the aid of producer John Fields, whom Foreman praises as "quick and passionate about music. That's a great combination."
Foreman describes the group's unorthodox approach to recording as a blend of professional with "bro-fessional, combining the skillfully engineered sounds you get from a proper studio with the more raw noise that you get from my garage," he says. "Both are necessary in making a record. You want it to be honest and raw, but it has to be also listenable."
It's Switchfoot's raw honesty that has continued to inspire the group's hordes of loyal fans, and Nothing is Sound does not disappoint in that area. It retains Foreman's signature thoughtful, questioning lyrics and bathes them in huge hooks and crashing guitars.
The album's centerpiece is "Happy is a Yuppie Word" that takes its title from a 1991 interview Bob Dylan gave to Rolling Stone in which Dylan was asked, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, if he was happy. Dylan replied, "Those are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It's not happiness or unhappiness, it's blessed or unblessed."
"For me, `Happy is a Yuppie Word' is the heart of the record pumping blood out to the limbs and mouth," Foreman says. "It's that existential urban/suburban moment of thinking, 'Wow, all this happiness that I've been trying to achieve is really just the yuppie version.'"
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