"It's nice that you would have a masterpiece, I guess, but that's not how I work. I write songs and we throw them together, we practice them and we go do them. And that's it and we go on to the next thing. For instance, I have my first post-GBV solo album ready -- it's a double album -- so I always have an album finished before the other one comes out. To me, it's about having fun and entertaining yourself and others if you can, not about whether this album is as good as that one. They're all different."
Or not. "Half Songs of the Decomposed" is not a startling departure from recent albums, a typically eclectic mix of the four P's of rock (pop, punk, prog and psychedelic) that are as essential to Pollard the musician as the three R's were to Pollard the teacher. There are the gorgeous melodies of "A Second Spurt of Growth," "Window of My World" and "Girls of Wild Strawberries"; the energized outings "Sing for Your Meat" and a Whoish "Gonna Never Have to Die"; and prog-rockers like "Everybody Thinks I'm a Raincloud (When I'm Not Looking)" and "(S)mothering and Coaching." Pollard's penchant for brevity remains intact, with more than half the songs clocking in under three minutes.
"I'm doing this to get back to ground zero and challenge myself," says Robert Pollard, left, of Guided by Voices' end.
(Jeremy Balderson)
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Pollard had previously said that when he made a record he was totally satisfied with as befitting a finale, it would be just that. "After I listened to ['Half Smile'], it had kind of a sad, melancholy but uplifting feel to it, and it felt like a fitting wrap-up and at that point I made the decision."
But, he adds, there were a couple of other factors in the timing of the split.
"I'd been going through this huge box of unmarked cassettes that I have," he explains. "I should be more organized, but the way that I write, I write fragments of songs, song ideas and tunes to the point of exhaustion, and then I'll go back and listen to what I have and immediately discard things that I don't want to use or things that I don't think fit, and then work on the songs that I do want to use.
"That process has left this huge box of cassettes with song ideas, so I've been going through the box and burning them to CDs so I can be more organized. And I've found so many really good songs and song ideas that in my opinion now should have been on record."
The box contains tapes dating back to 1978, songs that Pollard says "were more personal to me and didn't feel like they were particular GBV-lineup-type songs." Twenty-six of them were recorded with producer Todd Tobias for release early next year. You can also expect what will be Pollard's first-ever solo tour: He's only ever done one show with his name on the marquee, "way before anyone cared, in Columbus with [former GBV member] Greg Demos and New Creatures, which backed me up. I'm going to still tour, until I feel it's ridiculous up there. And for each album that I do, I can round up different people each time."
Obviously, there's no quit yet in Pollard, who jokes that "people are being very nice to me, like I'm going away!"
He notes his late bloom, admitting that "had we started and gotten some exposure earlier, like in my early twenties, I don't know if I'd be ready to hang it up yet. I'm going to be 47 years old, my hair is gray -- to me it makes a little more sense to go under my own name. It seems a little bit more mature decision; there's more integrity in doing that."
Pollard also seems eager to challenge himself in the studio, much the way he did after "Forever Since Breakfast," which was recorded in a professional studio "with unsympathetic engineers and in-house producers who had no idea what I wanted, and I had no idea what I wanted. I was completely unhappy with it, but since we were financing it ourselves and no one was listening but us, I said, 'I'm going to put whatever I want on the record, I don't care how it's recorded or what it sounds like, as long as I like it.' "
What evolved on subsequent albums were live jams, instrumentals, songlets and song snippets, as well as fully realized, coherent tracks.
"That became our signature," Pollard notes. "But I did it simply because I knew no one was listening but myself, and I wanted to make records that made me happy. Luckily for us, we fit into this movement at the time they were calling lo-fi. Some people were saying we were the kings, the pioneers of lo-fi, and at the time I didn't know what they were talking about. But then I guess it was true because 'Devil Between My Toes,' which was 1987, preceded Sebadoh's [1989 album] 'The Freed Man,' which many people considered the first album of that movement."
It took a while -- though not long -- for GB to find its V, says Pollard, an avowed student of rock history.
"When we first started, I thought we sounded too much like other bands," he explains. "It got to the point where I listened to so much music from the last 30 to 40 years, and so many different genres, that they all became a part of what I do. We kind of threw them in a pot and mixed them together until we had our own distinct sound. There's so much that's gone into it that we do have an original sound, where you can almost always tell, 'That's by Guided By Voices.' It has been the most difficult thing to do."
