[Read our 15th anniversary tribute to Guster’s Ganging Up On The Sun (2006) here.]
Ryan Miller is the lead singer and a multi-instrumentalist in the beloved alternative-pop band Guster, alongside Adam Gardner (vocals, multiple instruments), Luke Reynolds (vocals, multiple instruments), and Brian Rosenworcel (drums and percussion). Over a thirty-year career in music, Guster has released eight studio albums and built a relationship with a dedicated fanbase through their infectious melodies, positive vibes, and creative stagecraft.
This month, Guster is celebrating the 15th anniversary of their 2006 album Ganging Up On The Sun with a digital re-issue that includes outtakes and demos. Ganging Up On The Sun is a pivotal moment in Guster’s catalogue; after abandoning their original sound of acoustic guitars and hand drums after 1999’s Lost And Gone Forever and experimenting with a full-band sound on Keep It Together (2003), Ganging Up On The Sun is when this new version of Guster came into its own and led to one of the most dynamic albums of their career.
I talked with Miller recently to reexamine Ganging Up On The Sun, the songwriting and production process behind it, its place in the Guster canon, and the new material that the band has been working on.
Have you listened to Ganging Up On The Sun recently? How do you feel about it?
I haven’t. I don't know that it's been 15 years since I listened to the album. I kind of have to interface with some of these songs from time to time. When we do orchestra shows, I'm sure I listen to “Empire State” to learn stuff and I have to look at the lyrics, but I don't know. I don't think I ever really listen to records much past when we put them out.
We just finished our record, our new one, and I’ve been listening like nonstop. This is when I do all my listening. I listen to the mixes, listen after mastering for a vinyl press and then I probably don't really ever listen to the records ever again.
So, then what happens when you go out on tour and you try to play a song from years ago…is “Demons” still “Demons?”
There’s probably a rotation of fifty songs that we play pretty regularly. So, like “Demons,” or even some of these [from Ganging Up On The Sun] like “Lightning Rod” and “One Man Wrecking Machine” and “Captain” and “Ruby Falls” and “Hang On,” those are in our major rotation. Those get cycled through, so I can play those. I mean, shit, I played “Hang On” Saturday morning in a bathtub for a Congressman’s Zoom coffee fundraiser.
As you do.
Maybe more so than other records, [these songs] are kind of major components of our live sets. And I also just read on Wikipedia, which is interesting, that it was our most successful release. I didn't know that. I knew that “Satellite” was the biggest song that we had, so I guess that does make sense.
Do you think there’s a reason why these songs feature so heavily in the live sets?
This is always a hard conversation to have with a band, especially one that just finished their ninth record about “when were they in their prime?” and “when did they do their best work?” Because I think most artists would say that their most recent album is the best thing they've done. I mean, Neil Young would probably say that, Paul McCartney would probably say that, Paul Simon would probably say that. We all know that that's not true. Dylan had a couple of great late ‘90s records like Time Out Of Mind (1997) and Young’s Harvest Moon was in 1987. So, you can do that and I actually like some of Paul [Simon]’s most recent work.
I don’t know why a lot of these songs are in [the live set]. My instinct is we lean on that Lost And Gone Forever, Keep It Together, Ganging Up On The Sun era because a lot of people came to the band during that era.
This is setlist stuff that comes from Brian who's very aware of that stuff. It also comes from us as fans of bands. When I go see Van Morrison I don’t want to hear him talk about Facebook… let’s get into some Astral Weeks (1968). Let’s hear “Cyprus Avenue.” So, I think that's just part of it, not just playing the hits, but there’s a little bit of that.
When you hand yourself over to a different producer for each record, is that the driving force between the very different sounds on the records, or are these two things parallel to each other?
We write the songs before we pick the producer. When we made a record with Richard Swift [2015’s Evermotion], we kind of knew [those] songs, we knew how to play them. It's four of us playing music in a room, and that's what Swift does. Versus Leo Abrahams, who we went with on Look Alive [2019], who’s very molecular and very Ableton and very technical, and it was like we were constructing the songs as we went in. We were very synth-heavy and very interested in a cold-sounding record, and that was sort of his pitch when we talked to him. That’s why we picked him.
He said, “I’m really into cold and icy sounds and all of your albums are very warm and inviting.” We wrote one of those songs on the last record and he was like “it's just another Beatles pastiche!” And that’s something I think we would have fully embraced on an earlier record, but coming from him it was such an indictment.
So, the songs are written and we pick a producer who’s going to elevate that batch of songs. Just now, we finished this record with Josh Kaufmann who’s more organic, very analog, almost the opposite of Leo in a way. We picked songs [knowing] what kind of record we wanted to make and we picked a producer to fit with that.
So, it starts with the songwriting.
I think so. We don’t really think about producers while we’re writing songs either. I don't think it's as high-minded as that. I think we’re just trying to write the best songs we can and the way the songs are written will dictate it.
But then when you get in with the producer, there is that trust. Richard Swift has a way he likes to make records and if you fight that you're going to get brown.
And why would you get Richard Swift if you don’t want to do it his way?
Exactly. And this all started with Lost And Gone Forever, working with Steve Lillywhite. I mean, Lillywhite’s a little bit more of a chameleon although he does obviously have big pop sensibilities. But giving ourselves over to Lillywhite was amazing.
We didn’t have that superlative producer experience on Keep It Together because we really didn’t know what we were doing. Brian stopped playing percussion, we were all playing bass and drums for the first time. Ganging Up On The Sun was kind of like, “let’s not bring anyone else into this while we’re starting this 2.0 version of the band.” Probably helped us get our sea legs so that we were able to try other new things.
So, this is the first time that you’re self-producing and you were still working on this new set-up and I guess that informs what you were able to do? I don’t know if “Manifest Destiny” could have come together on Keep It Together because it’s just so…weird?
“Manifest Destiny” was written on the piano. I understand completely now Brian’s decision after Lost And Gone Forever to not play percussion anymore. He wanted a backbeat. And we were like “What the fuck? This is why people like our band, what’s going to happen to our sound? It’s such a huge part of how we identified sonically and also a reason for people to see us play.”
But now, a record or two after [Ganging Up On The Sun], around Easy Wonderful [2010], I felt the same way about acoustic guitars. “Oh my God, I’m just not inspired. I pick up an acoustic guitar and I just start writing the same things.”
So, I think Ganging Up On The Sun might have been a time when we were starting to play with, say, “if we write a song on piano, we’re not going to sound like what we sounded like before.” I think some of the instrumentation was driven, mostly, I think, by the songwriting process. Pick up a new instrument and you’ll write a different song or find a different feel. “Manifest Destiny” is a great example of that. “Empire State” written over that bassline with Brian just clicking.
What about “Ruby Falls?” That’s the one where I’m like “how did this end up on a Guster album?” What's going on?
We always kind of want to ape somebody. There’s usually some kind of reference point when we’re writing. Even on this [new album] we had one called “Sylvan Esso.” This is just to have a feel for a sound or a universe. “Ruby Falls” was our attempt, in a way, at some Pink Floyd, epic, meandering thing, that’s quiet/loud/quiet, and then with this big, epic outro that was definitely empowered by having Joe in there.
None of us really solo. We’re not good improvisers, with the exception of Joe [Pisapia, who left in 2010] and Luke [Reynolds, who joined shortly thereafter] who basically fill the same role in the band, none of us are really players. We’re instrumentalists that can play songs, but we’re not ones that can necessarily jam. I mean, Brian can sit in as a percussionist. So, the idea that we could stretch out on a six- or seven-minute-long song on “Ruby Falls” was sort of… we should get a trumpet solo at the end, and just lay a bed and kind of get into that Nashville spirit of just letting someone take us to a place.
These are all stretch marks of us starting as a strummy acoustic band in a dorm room and trying to shed that every record and go in new directions. Not for any hatred of what we were, but just in the interest of keeping it interesting for ourselves and challenging ourselves. I think maybe that metaphor of picking up a piano to get you out of your usual zone is probably true for how we think about records. Let’s just keep trying shit. Let’s just keep trying out what’s interesting for us in this Venn diagram of three or four of us. There’s something that all four of us can get to, and that process is sometimes easy, it’s often not super easy, it’s sometimes really hard. It’s usually pretty good because we all have different fiefdoms and things that are really important to us.
Brian’s is feel, and mine is having a melody that’s always recognizable and Adam is an everyman who’s got a bigger picture thing and Luke has his things that he’s always concerned with. So, if we can check all those boxes, we’re usually in pretty good shape in terms of a song being durable. And by durable, I mean something that we can play fifteen years later or listen to a recording of and say “that’s a pretty good song. We did alright on that one.”
Do you have a favorite moment or song from this album?
I definitely have things I like. We barely play “New Underground” and “Beginning Of The End” feels a little bit goofy for us, but not really. “Come On” doesn’t really come off, we don’t play that very often.
But I think “Hang On” is a really solid song. I think it’s a good song start-to-finish. The lyrics are good, the sentiment’s good. The construction is good, the chords really change, it’s kind of interesting harmonically. I think the ones that we mentioned before, the ones that we play like “Satellite,” “Manifest Destiny,” maybe “One Man Wrecking Machine,” “Ruby Falls,” “Empire State,” “Hang On,” those are great songs.
We did a show with the Omaha Symphony that we put out, the symphonic record OMAGAH! (2020). But “Dear Valentine” with an orchestra is just unbelievable. It’s as good as anything that night. That song, we kind of nailed it on the record, but having it fleshed out with an orchestra, I’d put it in the top ten, which is crazy because we’re a hundred songs in and it’s not one we play very often.
And I think on “One Man Wrecking Machine,” I did a good job doing a story song with a character and a narrator go through a thing. There’s a lot of successes on this record.
And “Empire State.” I’m so proud of that song. It’s a beautiful song. A lot of songs on this record, more than not, are ones that I still stand behind, fifteen years later.
That’s pretty cool.
That is pretty cool. I’m starting to realize that.
So, I loved Look Alive. I thought it was brilliant and vivid. How do you move on from that?
I was playing Josh Kaufmann, our producer [on the new album], some of Look Alive the other day when we were in the studio and I was like “this shit sounds cool.” It’s a really interesting record. Total head song stoner record. I don’t know that it didn’t get its due, because what does that even mean, but I think the songwriting is really strong. I love Leo’s production and I thought we set out to do something kind of nutty and we did it. I was so proud of what we made and still am.
Josh was available and he’s also a musician too and he had been doing stuff remotely with Eric [D. Johnson, of Fruit Bats]. We figured if he could do stuff remotely that would be great because we were all freaked out about the virus and so it was sort of a logistical thing too. It wasn’t that we wrote these songs and we really wanted this Josh Kaufman sound, but once we figured that we could all drive and work remotely and break it up, we knew it was going to work.
But Kaufman is the opposite of Leo in a lot of ways. He’s not fussy about any of the stuff that Leo was fussy about. He’s all about emotion. Some of the records that I love of Josh’s the most are the Walter Martin records. They’re really amazing records and he’s such a great songwriter, but the records have this kind of shambolic shagginess about them. He kind of sings out of key, things don’t always line up on the grid, and they just all work. And that’s not totally the record we made with Josh, but Josh is all about the emotion. “Am I buying this? Is there emotion in this?”
Because he works with Josh Ritter and all the Craig Finn stuff, and he did all the Dead stuff and played on Taylor Swift…he’s an emotional guy. He’s always trying to find a way to connect. He was nailing me on some lyric stuff. There was a song we cut. It was just not working. He was like “the lyric is not happening” and we had to find the emotion in it and had to turn it around. That was not at all our process with Leo. Not that Leo didn’t care about lyrics, but it was much more about the technical, molecular, very constructed, Peter Gabriel sonic thing.
There’s none of that sonic exploration at all. I think the exploration comes in a more emotional… it’s not like [serious voice] “This is Guster’s most personal record.” It’s not that as much as that there’s a track that I think Adam said was my best vocal performance. And it’s out of tune and at one point my voice cracks. He was checking, “do you want that?” and I said “yeah, that’s what I felt there.” That’s what the lyric needed. This is a lot more of a vulnerable record in some ways, but it’s hard to know.
That’s a very long-winded way to answer your question of how we top Look Alive. I think we just tacked. We just went in a completely different direction. We’re not in that lane at all. The songwriting, I think, has remained very consistent over the years. Even the first record is about melody and there’s some arrangement stuff and stuff in the lyrics aren’t about typical boy/girl stuff or partying, they’re usually about existential things and stuff I’m struggling with or thinking about. That through line is intact, but the colors we paint with are very, very different this time.
And maybe, I don’t know, maybe it sounds like a throwback record. I don’t know. Brian’s said a few times “Our fans are going to love you, Josh, because you set Guster back,” but I don’t know if I have a handle on that. I know “Come Downstairs and Say Hello” means a lot to people, but I don’t know if they don’t listen to Look Alive and feel connected to some of that stuff too. Because some of our superfans, it’s their favorite record too. So, it’s hard to know.
Well, I’m excited about it. It sounds pretty great.
I’m excited. I think that more than half of these songs are total home runs. I’m so proud of them. Very curious to see how it’s all going to land.
I have one more question. What are your five favorite albums?
Of all time?
Mmhmm.
Oh, Jesus. Alright. Well. Astral Weeks is in the top five.
This is so hard. What’s Going On? (1971). That’s a great record. You know what else I’d put on here? Getz/Gilberto (1964), the one with Jobim. The one with “Girl From Ipanema” and “Corcovado.” I’ll put that in there. I’ll put Mind Bomb (1989) by The The in there and I’ll do The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968).
I think that’s it. I mean, how am I not putting a New Order record in here? I think I have to go with that. I’ll go with those for now.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited from the original transcript for length and clarity.
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