Widow's Weeds

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While recording their fifth full-length album and first in four year, <i>Widow’s Weeds</i>, Silversun Pickups went through some life changes that guided their songwriting decision. “It’s a window into a time and place of what happened in our live,” frontman Brian Aubert shares with Apple Music. “As we grow older, I think there’s a lot of things that are wonderful. But there’s also a lot of seismic shifts that make you pause, because they just land in your lap. I’m getting used to feeling a little bit vulnerable.” Musically, songs like “It Doesn’t Matter Why” and “Straw Man” mark a back-to-basics approach for Silversun Pickup. Using strings and fuzzed-out guitar, the band wanted to distance themselves from the sleek electronic layering of 2015’s <i>Better Nature</i> and bring back the album-oriented rock of their first two album, <i>Carnavas</i> and <i>Swoon</i>. “The things I was less interested in before I started falling in love with them again, like being able to express myself with guitar playing and guitar solo,” says Aubert. “One of the elements that made sense to us was having organic strings come back, which we hadn’t done for a couple of record. I knew that with our last two album, especially <i>Before Nature</i>, we really didn’t want known sounds or organic sound.” A vital instructor throughout the process was Butch Vig, the prominent American songwriter and record producer responsible for helming essential ’90s rock albums like Nirvana’s <i>Nevermind</i> and the Smashing Pumpkins’ <i>Siamese Dream</i>. Aubert and Vig met during the recording of Garbage’s “The Chemicals” (Vig produces and plays drums for the band)—a stand-alone single where he took on co-vocal duties with singer-songwriter Shirley Manson. He explains how Vig has a unique way of recognizing what he calls “happy accidents”: “With the title track, I was self-consciously playing this acoustic guitar in Butch’s house. I didn’t even realize I was playing it. It must’ve been muscle memory. Butch was talking to everyone and he stops the conversation. He looks at me and say, ‘What is that?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. It’s a thing I’ve had for a long time.’ And he goe, ‘Tonight you’re gonna work on that, because that has to go on the album.’ That song is a great example of why Butch is so great, because anything odd or strange or out of the box, he’s on board and helps you push it through.” .

via Apple Music

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