This interview initially took place at a FLOOD-sponsored Q&A at Sid the Cat Auditorium on February 11. Tune into FLOOD FM all week (March 24 – 27) at 10 a.m., 1 p.m., 5 p.m., and 10 p.m. PT to hear the full conversation.
“We already said we’re not going to get political tonight!” quips Butch Vig, sitting onstage with Silversun Pickups frontman Brian Aubert at Pasadena’s Sid the Cat Auditorium, where FLOOD is hosting a live Q&A to celebrate SSPU’s new Vig-produced seventh album, Tenterhooks. The event is also a benefit for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, and the not-so-subtle block lettering “ABOLISH ICE” graces the venue’s outdoor marquee, which was clearly repurposed from the elementary school the building once belonged to. So, Vig and Aubert, of course, break that promise with very little prompting. “This is crazy, historical shit,” says Aubert, reflecting on how the aptly titled Tenterhooks, a record he describes as “punchy” and “impatient,” was recorded during an age of practically unprecedented tumult. “This is the stuff in the movies. If you’re one of those people that goes, ‘Whoa, if I was around back then with Indiana Jones, I would also fucking punch the Nazi!’—OK, well, now’s that time. That’s literally happening right now.”
Aubert stresses that no specific politicians are referenced on Tenterhooks (“Oh, I’m not going to put them in any of these songs!”), nor are any of its 10 tracks overtly topical. But as Vig points out, “The world’s so discombobulated now…obviously, it starts to filter in the music we’re making. I think anybody who makes art can’t help having the world filter in.” And so, the veteran LA alt-rockers couldn’t help but make their darkest, rawest, and most aggressive album yet.
“The idea of the record was we kind of wanted it to be a pain sponge for us—just put it all in this thing,” Aubert explains. “At one point, we called it a Dybbuk box, something that you can transfer all your heaviness into. ‘Dybbuk Box’ was the working title! We just wanted it to be this object where we were going to throw all of this [angst]. We’re very lucky people. We have the luxury of being able to put it somewhere.”
That nerviness, unease, and urgency can be heard in the oceanic guitar swells of woozy album-opener “New Wave”; in the galloping, grungy stop-starts of “The Wreckage” (a track bristling with so much tension, it inspired a brilliant release-week event at a local rage room, where Hazmat-suited, baseball-wielding superfans smashed various inanimate objects, including old warped SSPU CDs); in the creeping menace of “Thorns and All”; in the Low-like lullaby “Witness Mark”; and even in the album’s biggest outlier, the chiming, charming dream-pop bop “Au Revoir Reservoir” featuring bassist Nikki Monninger on winsome lead vocals. Convening in Vig’s Silver Lake home studio (“It’s basically a bedroom downstairs,” the producer says humbly) to create “a feeling of the four of us in a room,” for Aubert, Monninger, drummer Christopher Guanlao, and keyboardist Joe Lester, many of these ideas came fast and furious.
“The idea of the record was we kind of wanted it to be a pain sponge for us... We just wanted it to be this object where we were going to throw all of this [angst].” — Brian Aubert
“There weren’t even voice memos!” Vig gasps. “Brian would start a song on either electric guitar or acoustic guitar or keyboard, and the band—all of us—would have to sort of scramble. Within an hour or so, we would have a song-sketch. He would go in and sing a scratch vocal, even if he didn’t have the lyrics done, just so we had a template. Nikki would already be writing down notes of what the chord changes were—you should see her cheat sheets, they’re fucking crazy! It was just like go, go, go, and we recorded pretty fast. I think we probably spent maybe two days on a song.
“For me, as a producer,” Vig elaborates, “I don’t really like to bug the artist too much and specifically ask them, ‘What is the song about?’ But I know this record was quite personal for [Aubert], in terms of how I hear those lyrics. And so, for some of the songs, from a production standpoint, I felt like they needed to have some immediacy and some intimacy.”
“I played the record for Dave Grohl last week and he said, ‘That is the most bitchin’ drum-and-bass group I’ve heard in a fucking long time.’ Fuck yeah, it is!” — Butch Vig
That immediacy and intimacy could only stem from a deep and abiding friendship (what Aubert chucklingly describes as “a family experience, but without the shit that family does”) like the one shared by the band and Vig. It’s a rare bond that’s endured for over a decade, ever since Aubert and Vig officially cute-met, in quintessential Los Angeles style, in line at Hugo’s Tacos in 2015. The two clicked so quickly that they decided right then and there to collaborate with Vig’s multi-platinum band, Garbage, on a single for Record Store Day. “I panicked, because we didn’t have a song!” Vig reveals. “I wrote ‘The Chemicals’ that afternoon or that evening. Shirley [Manson] sang the low part, and Brian sang the high part: ‘Wait, that’s a dude!’ So that’s how our collaboration started.”
The producer went on to record SSPU’s Widow’s Weeds in 2019 (“I remember I immediately told the band, ‘We should work with Butch—let’s not even give him a choice,’” Aubert laughs in recollection. “‘We’re just going to go and make him do it!’”), followed by Physical Thrills in 2022. And now, with Tenterhooks, Silversun Pickups are the band that Vig has worked with the most, aside from Garbage themselves (he’s also famously produced alt-rock legends like Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, Green Day, and Against Me!). And he’s seemingly almost prouder of their latest joint effort than the actual Pickups are, giddily revealing midway through their live Q&A, much to Aubert’s shock and awe: “I played the record for Dave Grohl last week and he said, ‘That is the most bitchin’ drum-and-bass group I’ve heard in a fucking long time.’ Fuck yeah, it is! It’s one of the most bitchin’ bass-and-drum records I’ve ever recorded.”
“I think what really blew us away when we first started working with Butch, and continuously does so, is that he’s somebody who’s had a lot of success in his life making records and profound, huge things for people,” Aubert marvels. “And the one thing that you think of is the possibility that he’s going to be somebody who goes, ‘Oh, I know how to do this. I’ve figured it out. We’re going to put your band into this situation, and then we’ll just do what I know how to do.’ And that’s not what Butch is like. Butch is constantly searching, constantly excited. He wants to get lost. He wants to get confused. That wanderlust, or whatever it is that’s been kicking in him from the beginning, is still there. And for me, that makes it so easy to be creative. It just flows out of me. He’s able to catch all the craziness that happens. It’s real quick, and in a way that I’ve never experienced before.”
“The cool thing for me as a producer is it’s so exciting to be doing something so quick,” Vig says enthusiastically of his Tenterhooks experience. “You’re figuring out all these parts on the fly, and then before you know it, the song is sort of transformed into something. And at the end you go, ‘Holy shit! This is really cool!’ I mean, trust me, I’ve labored over many [other artists’] records, many mixes. I’ve spent a lot of time. But when it happens really fast, it’s just so exhilarating.”
“Butch is constantly searching, constantly excited. He wants to get lost. He wants to get confused. That wanderlust, or whatever it is that’s been kicking in him from the beginning, is still there.” — Brian Aubert
Vig even gets a bit emotional when discussing his favorite Tenterhooks track, “Long Gone,” a windswept Spaghetti Western (Vig calls it “a country death violent film song”) that boasts lovely string accompaniment by longtime SSPU comrade Tanya Haden. “Sometimes I listen to it and it makes me cry,” he confesses. “I’m not kidding. I’m a softy for songs like that. Once we started recording that song, I felt like I had to take what [Aubert was] singing and push out some of the bittersweet sadness, to exaggerate that even more. So what did I do? What’s the saddest instrument you can record? A cello! The lyrics are completely the opposite, and I love songs like that, because it just makes your brain sort of explode and try to figure out what it is.”
There’s clearly a lot of love in the room on the evening of the Q&A; Vig and Aubert’s rapport onstage at Sid the Cat could be described as wholesome or even downright adorable. A true buddy act, if they’re not talking politics or trading compliments, they’re trading in-jokes and veering off on tangents of what Vig cheekily calls “gossip and slander”—whether it’s a rundown of the band’s favorite studio snacks and a warning not to eat food-coma-inducing Philly cheesesteaks right before a recording session, a debate about when the ’90s died (Aubert says 1995, but amusingly corrects himself once it’s pointed out that Garbage’s debut album came out that year), Aubert’s recollection of revisiting the Silver Lake liquor store that inspired his band’s name only to be chastised by the owner for not mentioning the store in a Rolling Stone interview seven years earlier, or a look back at that “bizarre” night when SSPU were nominated for Best New Artist at the 2010 GRAMMY Awards. (Aubert’s core GRAMMY memories include answering “Paul Reubens” when a red-carpet reporter asked him to name his celebrity crush, Kathy Griffin sitting nearby and “trying to fuck with everybody,” rooting for fellow maverick indie-rock nominee MGMT, and spotting Russell Brand, who was in attendance with then-wife Katy Perry, and immediately thinking, “I don’t like that guy”).
And all the while, the other supportive SSPU members sit in the auditorium’s front rows, beaming and sometimes spiritedly joining the conversation from their school-assembly folding chairs. But Aubert had to depend on their support, as well as Vig’s, in an unexpected and unfortunate way while making Tenterhooks—when he lost hearing in one ear due to a serious, “oozing” infection that landed him in the hospital and ultimately required several blood transfusions. (“I could taste [blood] in the back of my teeth, in my molars. And it wasn’t my blood!” Aubert cackles morbidly). While Aubert’s hearing thankfully wasn’t permanently damaged, it was impaired for about half of the Tenterhooks sessions, which was the main “thing that really bummed me out,” he admits. “We really listen to different versions constantly when we’re building [an album],” Aubert explains. “You spend so much time with your album at that moment—it’s not been cemented yet, so there’s still a little wanderlust in you. It’s still a playful experience. But I couldn’t do that at all with this one. I couldn't hear it. One ear was trying to do it, and the other was just, like, leaking—like this underwater [sensation]. It was really bizarre.”
“If Brian said, ‘I need to turn the guitars up,’ I said, ‘No. I’m not going to turn the guitars up,’” Vig recalls. “I knew that he couldn’t hear them properly.”
“But hey, we’ve been a band for a long time,” Aubert shrugs. “And part of being in a band is I could look over at Nikki and Joe and Christopher and Butch. I would just rely on these people who I trust with everything to go, ‘Yeah, it’s good.’ And then we’d move on. I think that’s just a benefit of having a foundation. The four of us have been together since 2002, so there’s a lot of trust. And that’s one of those moments when I’m really glad we had that.”
“This is our band, and there’s a comfort in knowing that this is what it’s going to sound like when the four of us get together. And it just is.” — Brian Aubert
Much like Vig’s own Garbage, who’ve maintained the same lineup for 33 years, Silversun Pickups are a rare rock group that’s impressively managed to keep it together. “We were friends beforehand. We didn’t put ads in Recycler!” Aubert laughs. And as Tenterhooks, their fourth release on their own New Machine Recordings, coincides with the 20th anniversary of their full-length debut Carnavas, none of that is lost on Aubert and his grateful bandmates. “Sometimes people think if they get rid of people, things will be better. But I think people aren’t fireable,” he asserts. “This is our band, and there’s a comfort in knowing that this is what it’s going to sound like when the four of us get together. And it just is.”
That’s not to say that SSPU haven’t evolved over the past two decades. In fact, Aubert, now a married, 49-year-old father of a rapidly growing 11-year-old boy, says a major recurring theme of Tenterhooks is change—not just in the country or world or political climate, but “also just my age and certain things that are happening in my life. I could tell there was a moment things were changing. If you have the luxury of living longer, everything that seems stable is not necessarily stable. Some things are falling down, some are rising. I was just very aware that newness was coming, and so I was lamenting a little bit of the moment I was in, knowing it was going to change. Partly for me, [the album] is a little anticipation of what’s the new thing. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s just new.”
“With every artist, it’s a different sort of chemistry, but we just have so much fun working together.” — Butch Vig
And that attitude is likely one reason why SSPU’s signature dream-rock sound has aged so well and outlasted so many trends, which can’t necessarily be said for some of their hipster Silver Lake peers from the aughts. “We’re extremely lucky, because we didn’t live and die by anything. We’re not even in those lists for ‘indie sleaze,’” Aubert laughs. “When we first started playing in Los Angeles, we would open for the coolest shit that was happening, and at first that was sort of like [bands wearing] cowboy hats. And then a year later that would be gone, and those same guys would get together and they’d have weird little keyboards and baseball hats and stuff, and we would open. A year later, that band fizzled, and then they all had ’80s hairdos and Gang of Four keytars and things like that—and we would open! And that has literally been how we’ve been until now. We’re really happy that we don’t think we’ll ever be on one of those…remember those commercials where it’d be like, ‘Is that Freedom Rock, man? Turn it up!’ Well, we’ll never be included in any [nostalgic flashback] lists. And that’s OK.”
“We’re extremely lucky, because we didn’t live and die by anything. We’re not even in those lists for ‘indie sleaze.’” — Brian Aubert
One thing that’s not likely to change in SSPU’s future is their prolific partnership with Vig, who’s practically an honorary fifth Pickup at this point. “Here’s what I’ve learned,” the producer fondly sums up, reflecting on his tenure with the band. “Making music is a joy. It’s really fun. You can have tension, you could be putting a lot of darkness in the room, but you learn you can do it with joy. Even if it’s the darkest song you can imagine, there’s still something in the process that’s sort of exhilarating—unlike some other records I’ve made, which became extremely tedious! With every artist, it’s a different sort of chemistry, but we just have so much fun working together.”
And Aubert adds with an admiring grin, as the Sid the Cat audience looks on grinning just as broadly: “I can’t imagine not making records with Butch.” FL
