Jason Lytle set up a new plan when he decided to re-record the songs from Grandaddy’s
The Sophtware Slump. Twenty years ago he made this ageless record while red-eyed and running around a sweltering slipshod home studio in his boxers using some gear he planned to return to Best Buy as soon as he was done. For this new, piano-centric
The Sophtware Slump, Lytle traveled around Los Angeles, sourcing studios and pianos like a master chef selects foods from a farmer’s market. He identified three instruments and three studios that would suffice. Everything was in place. As with many best-laid plans, his were scuttled. In this case by a pandemic.
So two decades after making a DIY masterpiece, Lytle found himself recording those songs again, sweating in his apartment again, trying to create a controlled environment while surrounded by chaos. “Because of the pandemic, all of the sudden, I was looking at a real deadline to make the damn thing,” he says. “Here we go, just like the old days. If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself. Not that much has changed.”
Yet many things have changed since Grandaddy issued
The Sophtware Slump in May 2000. Back then, Grandaddy felt on the cusp of something: A band of underdogs pushing to reach for the sky from their modest existence in Modesto, Calif., a place like many other American towns and cities filled with those nurtured by its stasis and those seeking escape by any means. For Grandaddy – the rockers being Burtch, Dryden, Fairchild, Garcia, Lytle --escape came in the form of these songs envisioned by Lytle, a magpie drawn to some shiny objects, but also others with less luster, like a seemingly antiquated keyboard.
'Under the Western Freeway,' released in 1997, served as a trailhead with songs about solitude and communication as well as the eeriness of a meritocracy.
The Sophtware Slump was a wide-angle progression with basement symphonics making for songs that somehow split the difference between meticulous and scruffy. But lyrically and thematically Lytle also took a big step with
The Sophtware Slump, hinting at some of the cultural tangles the rest of us wouldn’t identify until years later. In an age of unprecedented connectivity, his songs spoke to significant solitude. As technology arced ever upward, he saw built-in obsolescence, as though he popped the lid off of next year’s model and found its expiration date.
Released: February 2021
Cat: DGB2195
Label: Dangerbird Records
