I first discovered Built to Spill about a year and a half ago, when I was flipping through a stack of records at a local store. I saw their record There's Nothing Wrong With Love, with its ominous cloud and off-white background, and flipped past it. The reason I remember this moment so clearly is because the store was playing “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” a Neil Young song which I have fond memories of. Going home with an Elliott Smith record, I turned to the internet to figure out who this strange band was that reminded me of Neil Young. The first song I listened to from that album was “Big Dipper” and almost immediately after listening I decided it was my new favorite song. Then it was “Car,” then it was “Dystopian Dream Girl,” and then I just decided that the whole album was incredible. 

Built to Spill was formed in 1992 in Boise, Idaho, an understated epicenter of music. In the last thirty years the band has released ten studio albums. I think saying a Built to Spill record is bad is like saying a Velvet Underground album is bad, neither band can really make objectively bad music. Their 1993 debut, Ultimate Alternative Wavers, is a pretty divisive album among Built to Spill fans. My own feeling is that it's a totally good record with cool guitar riffs and clever melodies. They followed that release with 1994’s There's Nothing Wrong With Love, which is one of my favorite albums of all time. I remember a specific long plane ride where it was the only thing downloaded on my iPod and I kept listening to the album on repeat for almost twelve hours and I didn’t get tired of it. You always find something new to love and to find interesting about that record — whether it be melodically, lyrically, or instrumentally. Their 1994 release was when the band started to gain real attention from people outside of their circle. One album later, in 1995, Built to Spill signed a three-album deal with Warner Bros., and two years later they released 1997’s Perfect From Now On. The songs on this album were significantly longer than they had been in the past and included more laid back, stoner-ish long guitar parts and instrumentals. I really love this album for so many reasons, but most of all for the way it makes you feel like real people with real feelings are actually making the music, which is a quality that so much music these days seems to lack. The songs feel like they were written with intent and feeling, and they are sung that way and performed that way as well. 

Built to Spill is one of the few great bands from the 90s that still produce legitimately good music that connects to a new generation of listeners in language they can hear. Their 2015 album, Untethered Moon, is a great example of this. The album cover features one cat and one dog/rabbit, the cat seems to be staring intensely into the distance, and the dog/rabbit is absolutely screaming its head off. The text is in big block galaxy letters written across the cats. This of course pokes fun at the unexplainable cat-galaxy phenomenon that was happening at the time. The music itself seems not to take itself too seriously, without losing its Built to Spill-ness. In the second track, “Living Zoo,” Doug Marstch mentions tigers and makes a growling sound effect with his guitar. This album embodies what Built to Spill is. Despite the ever-changing line-up, they’re a group of people who love music.

Doug Martsch, founder of Built to Spill, is the only lasting member since its creation in 1992. While Built to Spill is definitely a nineties band at the core of its sound, I truly believe that Built to Spill could have been formed at any time period and it would have been just as great. The reason why is Doug. No matter the lineup, he always had been the rock of the band — a huge powerhouse of creativity and musicality. All of which is to explain why I felt the absolute need, when offered the chance by my old Brooklyn baby-sitter Cynthia, who happens to be friends with Built to Spill’s road manager, to get on a plane to meet Doug Martsch in Nashville.

I met the band inside of the venue during sound check. They were in the middle of playing their song “Reasons,” a personal favorite of mine. I stood in the back, staring in awe the whole time. When they were done, we said hi, and walked outside to the tour bus, which was filled with When the Wind Forgets Your Name merchandise and comfortable benches, where members of the opening bands were lounging in the middle of the afternoon. 

At that moment, when I got to see the comfortable messes where everybody slept, the whole band — but especially Doug — felt so human to me. I could suddenly picture him as somebody with a life and relationships apart from his music. I don't want to say that all of my anxiety melted away when I went inside the bus, because it didn't. But a lot of it did.

There’s one last thing I want to say here. I think we all do this thing with artists where we put them on this pedestal and raise them so high up that they don't seem like people to us anymore. You don't really realize you're doing it until you're forced not to, by being brought face-to-face with someone’s human-ness and ordinariness. The interview itself went really well, he was such a nice person and very easy to talk to.

Susannah Samuels: So how did you come up with the name Built to Spill and why did you choose it? 

Doug Martsch: Well, back when I was first starting the band, my wife at the time, she and I would play a game where we would each take turns writing a word and just try to make some sort of story or poetry or some weird thing. We just had a couple pages of that and we just looked through it to see if there was a name in there and we found that someone had written “built” and the other person had written “to” and the other person had written “spill” and we thought it was funny, and that's how we came up with it. 

Susannah: Did you go through any other names? 

Doug: No, not really. I had one other thing that I did, like some four-track stuff by myself. I called it “Insect Theater” but I liked “Built to Spill'' better. Although, maybe last year I ran into some guy, some drunk guy who told me that he gave me the name, that he came up with it and that at our first practice he gave us the name. But I still don't believe him. 

Susannah: I mean, maybe he did.

Doug: Maybe. I don't have that good of a memory.

Susannah: On tour so far, first how’s it been, and also, what have been your favorite songs and least favorite songs to play? 

Doug: It's been good so far. We’ve been out a couple weeks, there's a couple of new songs we’ve been working on — well, not new songs, but new to us as old songs that we still have to learn. We know about 45 songs, maybe, from all the records. We are actually working on a new one, it's almost ready to go. My favorite one is when we play a Heartless Bastards song called “The Mountain” and Mel [Radford], our bass player, sings on it, and that's my favorite. I love her singing.

Susannah: That's awesome. So what is your process for writing a song? 

Doug: Well, different songs are written differently. Sometimes they’re me sitting around with the guitar strumming to come up with some chords and a little melody just made up on the spot, and sometimes it's from the band, whoever's in the band just jamming, everyone playing and slowly someone comes up with a chord progression and we start jamming out together. Then I'll have bits and pieces and try sticking them together, one could be a verse, one could be a chorus. 

Sometimes you have to change the tempo, or the time signature or the key to make it fit. Sometimes you strum out some chords, or have an idea of something you’re messing around with and you play it for a while, and then you try a verse or a chorus or something. Sometimes that's how they come about. 

Susannah: How about your lyrics? 

Doug: I'll come up with melodies and maybe a line or two at a time, a couple words. Lyrics are one of the last things. Sometimes it takes me years to come up with lyrics for a song. 

Susannah: So my first introduction to Built to Spill was on There's Nothing Wrong With Love. And I was wondering, does “Dystopian Dream Girl” talk about solipsism, as in the philosophy? 

Doug: I don't know what that is.

Susannah: It's a philosophy that says that you're the only thing that exists and everything around you is not real and just in your head. 

Doug: Those lyrics actually are written by a friend of mine, James Christianson. He was a good friend of mine, he wrote some lyrics here and there. There are things he had that I took from him. He wrote that whole chorus and after-chorus part, everything from you know “without me there’s nothing…” to, you know, “I'll let you keep on living…” The song title is his too. 

He also wrote a handful of other things I don't know if you know. Our first record has the song “Nowhere Nothin’ Fuck up” the lyrics “In America / every puddle, gasoline rainbow” — that's his. He's really great. 

Susannah: Is he a musician? 

Doug: He’s not a musician. He’s a writer but he never pursued it at all. He never was published, never even tried to do anything. Just loves doing it.

Susannah: I was looking through the track notes for Keep It Like A Secret and I realized that on the track “Broken Chairs” you have Sam Coomes on keyboard? I was wondering about your relationship with him too. 

Doug: Yeah, he's in a band called Quasi that we played with when we were younger. He was also in a band [called Heatmiser] with Elliott Smith, so I knew him from those things. I didn't really know him that well, but we played together and I was a huge fan. I asked him to play on that just ‘cause, he must have just been in town, in Seattle or something. I can't remember how it all worked out. And since then he's put things on a few different records.

The biggest thing he did was “Strange.” He played the keyboard on that, I just had the chord progression, and he was the main instrumental on that song. Then we had him produce our record Untethered Moon a few years ago, just ‘cause I’d heard the latest Quasi record. [Their album] Mole City was out at the time, and I loved it so much. And I just liked being around him. I liked his energy and everything about him. Then I found out that Janet [Price] had actually produced the record, but I didn't really find that out until after we made the record. 

Susannah: We saw Quasi a couple weeks ago. 

Doug: Oh cool! How was it? 

Susannah: It was great, they were awesome. 

Doug: Yeah they're amazing, were there people at the show?

Susannah: Yeah, it was pretty packed.

Doug: Good, they don't do well in Boise. I think they do well everywhere else, but I always have this impression of people not caring about them as much as they should. I think it might just be Boise. 

Susannah: Yeah, I mean there was one superfan in the front just jumping and dancing. It was cool to see. 

Doug: I love that. I saw them at Treefort a year ago, and they were so good, powerful. 

Susannah: You have a Daniel Johnston cover album too, and I know you played a couple shows with him. What was it like interacting with him? Did that experience inspire you to make the album?

Doug: So we had a big list of songs that they said he would perform, maybe a hundred songs, and I narrowed it down to thirty or so that we learned. And we rehearsed without him, for maybe a month, you know, off and on. We’d do the songs, we’d play them ourselves, and I would sing them and a friend of mine was listening to us rehearse. She was like, “I'd like to have a copy of just you guys doing the songs,” with me singing them. So we had the idea to do an album, but never really got around to recording that. 

Then we played with him, and we never really had any rehearsals, just a sound check with him. He kind of looked through this notebook I had made of all the songs in alphabetical order. He got a hold of it, and just held on to it. Then I showed him the setlist I made, and he was like, “No, let’s just do them in this order.” And I was like, “That's just alphabetical order, I have kind of a better order in mind.” But he replied “No, no I'm just gonna play it like this.”

So really, interacting with him was not you know… He was not very easy to interact with. He's kind of in his own world. But he was nice enough, and I was honored to do it and it was a great experience. 

Then, maybe like a year later we were playing some shows and had a few days off so we were gonna work on some demos of new songs at Jim Roth’s place, one of our old guitar players. We got there and I was like I don't really feel like working on those new songs, I was kind of burned out on them. So I was like, “Let's do some Daniel Johnston songs.” So I recorded them and gave them to some friends to keep or just to have. It was cool and I liked how it was turning out, so I decided just to release it on a small label. 

Susannah: Wow, that's an awesome story. I mean the cover of “Bloody Rainbow” is really awesome.

Doug: Aww, thanks. 

Susannah: During COVID you mixed all of When the Wind Forgets Your Name by yourself. How was that experience of making music? 

Doug: It was alright. I planned to do it at home on a computer anyway, pretty much by myself. So I was prepared for it, which is good. And I don't know, I was a little nervous because I'm not an engineer. I don't really know much about trouble-shooting if the computer stops working or the program freezes. So there were some scares and things that were difficult and doing it alone was a little bit of a drag. It wasn't the greatest experience of making a record but it felt good to get through it. I'm pretty comfortable with the way it came out.

Susannah: The record was great. So who are your biggest influences? I know Neil Young is a big one, but who else?

Doug: Well, a lot of things, but I think it’s the things I liked when I was a teenager. David Bowie was a big one. The Smiths, R.E.M. — the first couple R.E.M. records were pretty cool to me when I was young, and you know later on some punk stuff, some SST things, Dinosaur Jr., The Meat Puppets. Butthole Surfers were a pretty big band for me. We called it post-punk back then. Hüsker Dü, The Pixies… they were a big deal for me. 

All these bands that took sort of a punk rock approach, they weren't necessarily some of the greatest musicians, they didn't have a big budget, their records didn't sound like commercial music, but it wasn't hardcore punk rock. They weren't just yelling about how they felt. The songs were put together in a cool way. 

Dinosaur [Jr.] epitomized that for me. When I discovered them it was really a game-changer. To take punk rock and classic rock and kind of blend them together. 

Susannah: They’re a great band. 

Doug: I'm glad you like them. 

Susannah: I know you're famously meticulous for choosing your opening acts, what goes into that process?

Doug: Just mostly my friends’ bands and bands that I want to see play every night, y'know? And there's a lot of them out there these days. There's a lot of good bands. That's kind of it. People that I like and music that I like. There's a lot of good Boise bands.

Susannah: Cool. So you've been making music for a long time, what inspires you to keep on doing it?

Doug: I don't know, I think there's really nothing else I know how to do. I like playing and touring and stuff. I like the lifestyle and it's fun to play every night and have people there right there reacting to it. It's really nice. I don't know if I'm that inspired, I haven't written a song in a while, so it kind of comes and goes. 

Writing and stuff, sometimes you'll strum on the guitar for a year and not come up with anything. Sometimes stuff just kind of starts pouring out. I think I have to do that. I have to be creative in that way just to feel like I have any value in this world. 

Susannah: I've always wondered this about musicians: At a show, how do you tell what the crowd needs or wants?

Doug: I don't. I mean, I just do my thing and hope they respond well to it. I just do what I do naturally. Part of what I do naturally might be things that I've learned from other people. Like, if they do some cool things on guitar I'll try to as well.

Susannah: I feel like the sounds in your albums are different every time. It's like Built to Spill, but always a new version. What has been the driving force in that progression?

Doug: That just has to do with the studio you're in. Anytime you make records, that batch of songs has a sound — the room you're in, the timing the engineer chose to use, that kind of stuff. I feel like if you take a song from one of these records and put it on a different record, it would sound more like that record. You know what I mean? 

Susannah: Like in comparison? 

Doug: Yeah, exactly. Like if you took a Nothing Wrong With Love song and you put it on Keep It Like A Secret it would sound like a Keep It Like A Secret song ‘cause it would have been recorded at the same time as that batch of stuff. That's the main reason why. To some degree you have control over that, the producer does. But some of it is kind of arbitrary, like if you try to make things sound as they do in your head, or make it sound like a certain other record. When I've tried to do that in the past, even with a good producer, it's hard to create something too deliberate. You have to go with what's there, with what just happens to be coming out of your amps. 

That's a good question though, because I think of every song of ours as a totally different thing. They don't really go together on records or anything. They just happen to be produced at that time so they end up on that record, not because there's a theme or anything like that. 

Susannah: Do you like it that way? 

Doug: Yeah, I do. And like I said, I let go more and more the older I get, where I didn’t trust them to manipulate things as much when I was younger. Now it’s more like, “Well, this is what it's sounding like, so maybe my original vision doesn't really matter so much. I'll just take it in this direction.”

Susannah: That's really cool. I think that's it. 

After conducting the interview, meeting the rest of Built to Spill and the members of the opening bands (Disco Doom and Oura), and eating some fried chicken, we walked back to the venue for the concert. The crowd was full of musicians and flannel, and I took my place among them at the front. Disco Doom started promptly at eight; they played a really cool drums-heavy set. In their last song, somebody from Oura came up and started playing slide guitar with a kazoo. Oura also played a great set with a lot of awesome guitar parts and bass lines. 

The air was thick with anticipation by the time Built to Spill came on. Most people had been standing through both sets and were anxious to see the band, but all of that went away when they started playing “On The Way.” By the time they got to the first “maltesian riot” verse a crazy big smile, one that would last for the rest of the night, pasted itself onto my face. Something about the combination of meeting and talking to all of the people who were on stage (and it just being Built to Spill) made this one of the best concerts I've ever been to.

The crowd had great energy, the band was so tight, and everybody including myself was just in awe. There was one point in the show when people kept yelling song requests and the band was clearly not going to take them, so somebody started yelling things like “stick to the setlist” and “remember to hydrate.” During the last song they played, “Carry The Zero,” I ended up sandwiched between two people who were clearly intoxicated, but so into it. We ended up all singing along and bumping into each other. To be surrounded by so many other people who all have a passion for music, and for that music to be right in front of all of us, was the most liberating, happy-making experience I've ever had. It almost felt like we were helping to create the music that was being played on stage.