All Ages
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Built to Spill headlines Foam Brewers’ 10th Anniversary celebration at Higher Ground. Join us for a special one-night event marking ten years of music, beer, and community. Featured Foam beers available all night.
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Since its inception in 1992, Built to Spill founder Doug Martsch intended his beloved band to be a collaborative project, an ever-evolving group of incredible musicians making music and playing live together. “I wanted to switch the lineup for many reasons. Each time we finish a record I want the next one to sound totally different. It’s fun to play with people who bring in new styles and ideas,” says Martsch. “And it’s nice to be in a band with people who aren’t sick of me yet.”
Following several albums and EPs on Pacific Northwest independent labels, including the unmistakably canonical indie rock classic, There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, released on Sub Pop offshoot Up Records in 1994, Martsch signed with Warner Brothers from 1995 to 2016. He and his rotating cast of cohorts recorded six more, inarguably great albums during that time – Perfect From Now On, Keep It Like a Secret, Ancient Melodies of the Future, You In Reverse, Untethered Moon, There Is No Enemy. There was also a live album, and a solo record, Now You Know. While the band’s impeccable recorded catalog is the entry point, Built to Spill live is an essential FORCE of its own: heavy, psychedelic, melodic and visceral tunes blaring from amps that sound as if they’re powered by Mack trucks.
Now in 2022, Built to Spill returns with When the Wind Forgets Your Name, Martsch’s unbelievably great new album (and also his eighth full-length)… with a fresh new label. “I’m psyched: I’ve wanted to be on Sub Pop since I was a teenager. And I think I’m the first fifty year-old they’ve ever signed.” (The rumors are true, we love quinquagenarians…)
When the Wind Forgets Your Name continues expanding the Built to Spill universe in new and exciting ways. In 2018 the Brazilian tour manager Isabela Georgetti brought Martsch together with Brazilian lo-fi punk artist and producer Le Almeida, and his long-time collaborator, João Casaes, both of the psychedelic jazz rock band, Oruã. On discovering their music Martsch fell in love with it right away. So when he needed a new backing band for shows in Brazil, he asked them to join. “We rehearsed at their studio in downtown Rio de Janeiro and I loved everything about it. They had old crappy gear. The walls were covered with xeroxed fliers. They smoked tons of weed,” Martsch says.
The Brazil dates went so well Martsch, Almeida, and Casaes made the decision to continue playing together throughout 2019, touring the US and Europe. During soundchecks they learned new songs Martsch had written, and when the touring ended, they recorded the bass and drum tracks at his rehearsal space in Boise. After Almeida and Casaes flew home, Martsch began overdubbing guitars and vocals by himself.
Martsch, Almeida, and Casaes had planned to mix the album together later in 2020 somewhere in Brazil or the US, but the pandemic kept them from reuniting in person. “We were able to send the tracks back and forth though, so we were still able to collaborate on the mixing process.”
What emerged is When the Wind Forgets Your Name, a complex and cohesive blend of the artists’ distinct musical ideas. Alongside Built to Spill’s poetic lyrics and themes, the experimentation and attention to detail produces an album full of unique, vivid, and timeless sounds.
The spare, power trio guitar riff in “Gonna Lose” is an anxiety-fueled joyride in song (“What could be more disorienting than being on acid in a dream?”). “Spiderweb” and “Never Alright” are classic-sounding, guitar-driven odes to REM and Dinosaur Jr (“No one can ever help no one not get their heart broken”). If there is such a thing as a Built to Spill sound, “Rocksteady” is maybe the band’s furthest departure from it yet with its reggae and dub-inspired instrumentation.
The album also contains bittersweet songs like the lo-fi ‘60s-style anthem “Fool’s Gold,” with its mellotron strings, and bluesy, wailing guitars (“Fool’s gold made me rich for a little while”), and “Understood,” a song about misunderstanding, which also takes inspiration from Evel Knievel’s failed stunt in Martsch’s hometown when he was a child. (“The deaf hear, the blind see. Just different things than you and me.”)
Martsch was also able to champion his love of comics by recruiting Alex Graham to illustrate the cover of When the Wind Forgets Your Name. “Alex published Dog Biscuits (Fantagraphics Books) online during the pandemic and it really spoke to me. I was thrilled when she agreed to paint the album cover.” What evolved was even better than he had imagined, with Graham also drawing a fifty panel comic strip for the gatefold. “I just asked for a painting and a comic. She created it all completely on her own.”
Almeida and Casaes have returned to their duties in Oruã, and Martsch has begun playing with yet another Built to Spill lineup that features Prism Bitch’s Teresa Esguerra on drums and Blood Lemon’s Melanie Radford on bass. Built to Spill and Oruã are currently touring and have a string of shows planned together in September.
Martsch concludes, “Making When the Wind Forgets Your Name was such a great experience. I had an incredible time traveling and recording with Almeida and Casaes. I also learned so much about Brazilian culture and music while creating it. My Portuguese was terrible when I first met Almeida and Casaes, but by the end of the year it was even worse.” (He also learned that when Billy Idol sings “Eyes Without a Face” it sounds like “Help the Fish” in Portuguese.)
It may have taken us 30 years of obvious fandom and courtship, but on September 9, 2022, Sub Pop Records is unabashedly proud to finally release an excellent new album from Built to Spill: When the Wind Forgets Your Name. Sometimes persistence pays off.
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Since 2023, Vermont songwriter Lily Seabird’s life has been in perpetual motion, spending nearly half of that time on the road performing her own music and as a touring bassist with Greg Freeman, Lutalo, and Liz Cooper. While she thrives in transit, back home she is anchored by “Trash Mountain,” a pink house surrounded by other artists and creatives situated on a decommissioned landfill site at the back of Burlington’s Old North End. Here, Seabird has found belonging, friendship, and inspiration. It’s a place that hosts artists, puts on shows, and has been passed along in her friend group for the better part of the decade. It’s a symbol of transition and stability: something always evolving and growing but never losing its soul. It’s only fitting that Seabird named her new album Trash Mountain, as it also contains its namesake’s qualities. Over nine delicate but sturdy tracks of intimate folk rock, she pares her songwriting down to its most resonant essentials. It’s an album of unwelcome exits and uncertain futures, but there’s resiliency and hope at its core. It is Seabird’s most confident and immediate effort to date.
Where Seabird’s previous records—2024’s Alas, and 2021’s Beside Myself—were written over the course of a year, Trash Mountain practically poured out of Seabird: three months of songwriting in spring 2024, followed by four days of tracking with Kevin Copeland (Hannah Frances, Lightning Bug, Allegra Krieger) in his Southern Vermont studio in the summer. The condensed timeline allowed her to be present and process how differently her life looks now compared to a few years ago. She’s coped with transforming relationships and grief, as well as music’s awkward shift from a no-pressure, casual thing to do with friends to a career. Though working in environmental politics and community organizing brought her to Vermont from Pennsylvania, her disillusionment with systemic change led her to become a full-time musician. It’s a transition that requires deep self-reflection. “Songwriting is meditation for me, “she says. “It’s the way I work through things and make sense of the world. Being on tour so much I’ve been writing more just to understand what’s happening around me.”
Lead single “Trash Mountain (1pm)” came about the day Seabird returned to Burlington after a month on tour, which included 15 shows in a week at SXSW. “Coming home is not always easy for me,” she laughs. “Sometimes I feel like I am a way better version of myself when I’m in the chaos on the road. When I get home, I tend to spiral.” Written on a walk outside her house, she channeled being overwhelmed into a perceptive look at coming down. Over woozy slide guitar and harmonica, Seabird muses, “How are we supposed to remember things / When everything is coming and going?” She doesn’t let herself succumb to her anxieties, finding peace and gratitude for being “on the edge of town / where when I’m home I rest my head.”
While the grief that enveloped her last effort Alas,, which dealt with her best friend’s suicide, still lingers, it’s settled into healing and reflection on Trash Mountain. On “It was like you were coming to wake us back up,” Seabird vividly paints a brief moment of seeing a person outside her house who bears an uncanny resemblance to her dearly deceased. Rather than mourning, she finds comfort and healing in the vision. “In the past, I used to come to songwriting when I was in crisis,” admits Seabird. “Only recently have I come to songwriting when I am feeling other things beyond emergency and disruption.”
The album’s arrangements are markedly sparse and intentional, a shift from the layered Alas, and Beside Myself, allowing Seabird’s writing to soar and stand starkly centered. Only three songs feature her longtime touring band in guitarist Freeman, bassist Nina Cates (Robber Robber), and drummer Zack James (Dari Bay, Robber Robber). On the stunning “How far away,” she’s backed only by a piano played by Sam Atallah which makes for elegiac catharsis. “I’ve finally accepted that I’m a singer-songwriter,” she says with a shrug. “Not everything has to be some big rock song.” Seabird cites Elliott Smith, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen as influences on Trash Mountain, and much like the latter, her evocative, emotionally potent lyrics find her looking for cracks in the darkness where light comes in, sometimes literally. Take the album’s other title track, “Trash Mountain (1am),” where she sings of a nocturnal stroll: “We walk these streets we’ve come to know / memories live on in them after the snow / is all melted and gone / garbage covers the ground / and you pull a flower from the weeds and you spin me around.” Sometimes all you need is a loved one to show you how to find beauty in the mess.
Trash Mountain boasts a profound grace and openness. On the buoyant “Sweepstake,” she cherishes memories with dear friends and optimistically looks towards the future, singing, “Where are we going is a question I save for halfway / Tonight the kingdom and tomorrow the milky way.” The song captures the carefree feelings of making art with your best friends, nostalgically mining the boundless creativity and possibility of her early music life in Vermont. Life can change in an instant, but Seabird knows that there’s power in grasping onto the purest moments of connection.
Seabird’s best friend would often joke that “the world is trash,” a welcome dose of dark humor as the sentiment rings more true with each passing year. It’s with this resilient spirit that Trash Mountain finds its optimistic, life-affirming center. It’s an album that understands and accepts that highs and lows are inescapable and that the only way through is with small acts of kindness and other people. It’s a tribute to home, chosen families, and taking life as it comes. “I don’t have hope for the oppressive systems that abandon us, but I do have hope in people,” says Seabird. “Sure, the world is really messed up, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make something beautiful out of the garbage. We might as well make something beautiful out of what we have got.”
