Following a scholarly theme, Perennial’s Chad Jewett calls his band’s new release, Modernism, the follow-up class to last year’s ”A” is For Abstract: The Complete Art History. Chad and I have a deeper dive into the album in Big Takeover Issue 99 out later this year, but as I’ve been doing with all of my conversations for BigTakeover.com, I asked Chad about a song, artist, or album that takes him back to a specific place in his life. Here’s what he had to say.
CHAD: I want to talk about something that I haven’t talked about in terms of a big “song” moment and I think leads to what we’re exploring as a band nowadays.
This was seven, even maybe eight years ago. It was Chelsey, I, and a good friend of the band driving around. We had just been in Northampton, Massachusetts, this great college town right near where we grew up, and there’s this store there called Turn It Up. The thing they absolutely excel at is used CDs. They have an incredible selection, as good as typical music stores that just have regular brand-new CDs, but with that well-curated used CD collection.
I had picked up the deluxe CD of My Generation by The Who, their very first album. Perennial had already existed, but at that point the ’60s influences were more occasional and incidental in our music. We’re driving, and I put in the CD, because there’s nothing more fun than buying used CDs and listening to them on the way home. So we’re driving around, listening to the stuff we bought.
While I had obviously known about The Who doing the noisy stuff — smashing guitars, smashing drum kits, all that — I’d always thought about it in the context of their big stadium ’70s rock iteration. But this was their very first record, where there aren’t even really distortion pedals yet, there isn’t that big, heavy sound. Instead they’re just clearly playing as hard as possible, because they want to sound aggressive, but the technology isn’t there yet.
On that very first song, “Out in the Street,” there’s a guitar solo, and halfway through it there’s that classic selector switch feedback, where it sounds like a Doppler beeping sound, like what Fugazi does. But this is a rhythm and blues record from 1964, when it was recorded. And I just had this epiphany of, “Oh, there was already this subculture of artists trying to figure out how to turn this stuff into punk music. There’s this communication between those sounds.”
And all the energy and attitude that went into the best mid-‘60s stuff has so much to do with the stuff I was learning in high school and trying to make now, realizing there was something we could be making out of our own contemporary post-hardcore, post-punk context, and the ’60s stuff we always loved and grew up on, but that could really be at the heart of what we were doing. It was all just suddenly hearing that feedback in what’s otherwise a pretty clean-sounding pop song, you know? That was a big moment. That was when Perennial sort of pivoted and figured out some cool stuff we could be trying.
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Perennial’s Modernism is out now on Ernest Jenning Record Co.
