"Ira Elliot! How you doin', buddy? Amanda Schurr calling."
"Ah, Ms. Schurr."
"This is kind of weird. After years of knowing each other, now, finally, we're having a professional kind of conversation. Me, writer, you, rock god."
"This is fantastic," he says, laughing. "I think it's pretty funny."
The last time I saw Ira Elliot, drummer for New York alt-pop band Nada Surf, was in mid-April, in the kitchen of his apartment in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was about 4 a.m. on a Monday, and he'd just gotten back from a gig in Philly; I was waiting for a cab out of the city. Nada Surf had performed for several thousand enthusiastic fans at New York's Terminal 5 a couple of nights prior, and when they headed to D.C. the following day, I stayed back to play house with Elliot's fiancée, Jen, my former roommate in Sarasota.
A month or so later, he's back home, chatting on the phone from a bedroom-turned-musician's headquarters, stuffed with muffled drum kit, assorted Beatles memorabilia, a futon, stacks of CDs, DVDs and vinyl, a laptop, and his latest toy, a new bass. He has a few weeks' break between road jaunts for
Lucky, the trio's fifth studio album.
Elliot, singer/guitarist Matthew Caws and bassist Daniel Lorca have been promoting the CD, released in February, since late last year. It's a polished pop record, one that finds the guys settled and somewhat content — in life, in love and in careers that have taken them from overnight MTV success to label throwaways and [almost] back again, thanks to recent appearances on Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno and the soundtrack to the cult TV series Heroes.
I mention to Elliot that I've observed their enviable level of success — solid record sales (even if they don't always chart), packed houses and the occasional TV/film appearance, but not so ubiquitous a presence that they can't walk down the street unrecognized. The group's steady-as-she-goes fame and this current upswing aren't lost on Elliot, who at 45 is the oldest member of a band that formed 15 years ago in New York. (A former member of The Fuzztones, he joined Nada Surf in 1995.)
"We've noticed that we're moving up to another level of sized rooms, and we have to deal with the fact that we're about to get even a little bit bigger," he says, adding that the crowds are getting younger, too. "That's kind of new and exciting, that we haven't hit the wall yet, that we're still growing it, which at this point in the game seems really spectacular."
Most know Nada Surf as the grunge-lite, vaguely Weezer-esque alt trio that waxed ironic about high school in the makeshift Gen X theme song, "Popular," off their 1996 debut High/Low. But label suits didn't know what to do with their less commercial follow-up, 1998's underrated Proximity Effect. After some corporate back-and-forth, and after the band refused to tweak it any further, Elektra ultimately dropped them. Nada Surf then faded into obscurity, except in Europe, where they've enjoyed a devoted fan base.
Fast-forward a few years to 2003 and Let Go, a universally acclaimed album released on Seattle's Barsuk imprint. A minor gem of indie power-pop, the disc, featuring the single "Inside of Love," put Nada Surf back on the map. The Weight is a Gift (2005) added to the momentum. The band coproduced the disc with Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla, who also recorded some tracks on Lucky. In addition, the sessions included guest musicians Ben Gibbard (of DCFC, The Postal Service), Joe McGinty (The Psychedelic Furs), Ed Harcourt, and John Roderick (The Long Winters). Using outside players signals a shift from what Elliot calls the self-contained "garage band" method of old. The approach is one that they're taking on the road, with studio cellist Phillip Peterson and the surprise musician or two joining them onstage.
After all this time together, Elliot explains, fleshing out Nada Surf's sound with strings, organ and the occasional Bavarian horn is creatively fulfilling. But it also helps make life manageable for three such distinct characters. "There are moments where we wanna strangle each other," he concedes. "So I think it's good to have other people around to kind of keep us honest and try to keep us grounded in reality, so it's not just our own little world. It's working on a lot of levels."
When Jen and I accompanied Nada Surf on a self-proclaimed "groupie tour" down the U.S. west coast in 2005, she started wondering: If each bandmate had a T-shirt with just one word on it to represent his personality, what would those words be?
She came up with these: Caws, ever the sensitive frontman, would be "cuddle;" Lorca, the charismatic, ready-for-a-party rock star, "shag;" and Elliot, the wiry smart-ass, "fuck." To this day, I still can't think of a more apt way to describe them, both on stage and off.
Caws remains the calmer one. If he made solo albums, Elliot says, "They'd be pretty quiet affairs. Daniel and I are always trying to keep the rock quotient up a little bit. If Daniel was making these records, we'd sound like Queens of the Stone Age or Blonde Redhead, but so then we end up falling somewhere in between. It's [Daniel's and my] impetus to keep the rock on the table."
Still, the anthemic muscle of Let Go and Weight is missing from Lucky, an immediately accessible, thoughtful set of songs about mortality ("See These Bones"), new love ("I Like What You Say," "Are You Lightning?"), Bush-administration politics ("The Fox") and rhythm itself ("Beautiful Beat"). In many respects, it's Nada Surf's most mature work.
"Yeah, I think there was some sort of consistency, and maybe it simply has to do with the fact that the guy who recorded it also mixed it [John Goodmanson, who's worked with Harvey Danger and Sleater Kinney]; it could be something technical like that," Elliot acknowledges. "When you get into the studio, it's all about the moment of impact. … It's not about you anymore. It puts a new focus on your abilities as a player to some degree, and we're not virtuoso musicians. I mean, we're pretty good at what we do individually, but when you get under microphones it puts a different kind of spotlight on you.
"I think over the years we've become a lot more comfortable, and we've realized that you don't have to do that much to make it work. As a matter of fact, the less you do, and the simpler you make it — it really has to do with what you feel, when the tape starts rolling."
Elliot says it's always a struggle to avoid what he calls the "red light fever" of the recording process but believes Nada Surf has learned to deal with that pressure. "I think we made that realization around Let Go," he says. "It was why [the album] was called that, partially, because we realized that the more we relaxed into it, and the less we worried about it, the better it got."
It's a truism that the longer a band stays together, the more it becomes a business relationship between the members. Which is not to say that the three guys in Nada Surf aren't buds. It's just that they maintain a personal autonomy that's as necessary to the friendship as it is to the music.
For instance, after last month's New York show, instead of taking the tour bus to D.C. early the following morning, each member elected to catch the same train — separately.
"It's very hard to make plans for us, because we're sort of adults," Elliot says. "We're not going to follow anyone's rules, so we all have our own particular agenda, which drives our managers and booking agents and touring managers absolutely over the edge, because we do miss flights and show up late for things. It's nothing major, but," he laughs, "you know, we're difficult."
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2008.
