Nada Surf

Tickets available at http://www.wonderballroom.com/event/1071675-nada-surf-portland/

Having recorded five albums in ten years and toured extensively in support of all of them, Nada Surf — singer/guitarist Matthew Caws, bassist Daniel Lorca, drummer Ira Elliot and guitarist Doug Gillard (now official fourth member, more on that later) — opted to follow 2012’s cracking The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy with a brief but well-earned hiatus.

So in January 2015, when Caws informed Nada Surf’s vociferous Facebook following that a new record was just about done, the news was greeted with explosive enthusiasm. The music was in the can, he announced, and all that remained was to finish up a few lyrics and sing a few vocals; something he planned to do on off-days off during an upcoming solo acoustic tour. Caws even included a photo of the recording set-up he was bringing in the car.

“I was so eager to have an album done that I believed in it as it was,” Caws recalls. “But the great thing about being ‘finished’ is that you can take a breath and evaluate, because the pressure to ‘do it’ is gone. The more I listened and thought about it, the more I realized that I might want to keep working. Also, I’d sent the tracks to my friend Josh, who runs Barsuk Records, the label we’ve been on since 2002, and he said ‘It’s great,’ but followed that with a pregnant pause. I got the message. I didn’t take that as a critique as much as a belief that I could do better. It was very freeing,” Caws continues. “There were already a bunch of songs in the can that we all liked, so I could think more expansively about what the album could be.”