91.ONE, WNXP Presents: Superchunk with Reigning Sound

Like every record Superchunk has made over the last thirty-some  years, Wild Loneliness is unskippably excellent and infectious.  It’s a blend of stripped-down and lush, electric and acoustic,  highs and lows, and I love it all. On Wild Loneliness I hear  echoes of Come Pick Me Up, Here’s to Shutting Up, and Majesty  Shredding. After the (ahem, completely justi  able) anger of  What a Time to Be Alive, this new record is less about what we’ve  lost in these harrowing times and more about what we have to  be thankful for. (I know something about gratitude. I’ve been a  huge Superchunk fan since the 1990s, around the same time I    rst found my way to poetry, so the fact that I’m writing these  words feels like a minor miracle.) 

 

On Wild Loneliness, it feels like the band is refocusing on  possibility, and possibility is built into the songs themselves,  in the sweet surprises tucked inside them. I say all the time  that what makes a good poem—the “secret ingredient”—is  surprise. Perhaps the same is true of songs. Like when the sax  comes in on the title track, played by Wye Oak’s Andy Stack,  adding a completely new texture to the song. Or when Owen  Pallett’s strings come in on “  is Night.” But my favorite  surprise on Wild Loneliness is when the harmonies of Norman  Blake and Raymond McGinley of Teenage Fanclub kick in  on “Endless Summer.” It’s as perfect a pop song as you’ll ever  hear—sweet, bright,   at-out gorgeous—and yet it grapples  with the depressing reality of climate change: “Is this the year  the leaves don’t lose their color / and hummingbirds, they  don’t come back to hover / I don’t mean to be a giant bummer  but / I’m not ready / for an endless summer, no / I’m not ready  for an endless summer.” I love how the music acts as a kind of  counterweight to the lyrics.

 

Because of COVID, Mac, Laura, Jim, and Jon each recorded  separately, but a silver lining is that this method made other  long-distance contributions possible, from R.E.M.’s Mike  Mills, Sharon Van Etten, Franklin Bruno, and Tracyanne  Campbell of Camera Obscura, among others. Some of the  songs for the record were written before the pandemic hit, but  others, like “Wild Loneliness,” were written from and about  isolation.

I’ve been thinking of songs as memory machines. Every time  we play a record, we remember when we heard it before, and  where we were, and who we were. Music crystallizes memories  so well: listening to “Detroit Has a Skyline,” suddenly I’m  shout-singing along with it at a show in Detroit twenty years  ago; listening to “Over  ows,” I’m transported back to whisper

singing a slowed-down version of it to my young son, that year  it was his most-requested lullaby.

Wild Loneliness is becoming part of my life, part of my  memories, too. And it will be part of yours. I can picture  people in 20, 50, or 100 years listening to this record and  marveling at what these artists created together—beauty,  possibility, surprise—during this alarming (and alarmingly  isolated) time. But why wait? Let’s marvel now.