Guster Keep Going
Beloved American alt-rock outfit embrace middle age on new album Ooh La La
Calling from his Vermont home, Guster singer/guitarist/bassist/pianist Ryan Miller is in a reflective mood as he explains the inspiration behind the beloved alt-rock band’s latest album, Ooh La La, which was just released in May via Ocho Mule Records.
“Being a middle-aged dude, being a dad of teenagers, having our parents grow old, and just having all the experience of just being an artist in their fifties, brings a certain amount of experience and questions and wisdom to the whole thing,” Miller says. “I think there’s a lot of me maybe processing that lyrically on this. We tend to lean on the existential lyrics for the most part, and this is no exception. This record, I think, has a real emotional core and a heart and that might be what people want or need, hopefully.”
It’s been five years since Guster’s last album, 2019’s Look Alive, and Miller is excited to have another LP out there again.
“It feels nice to be talking about new music again,” Miller says. “We’ve been sitting on some of these songs for a while, so it feels nice to have them out, and I’m excited to play them and have them be part of the musical conversation that we have when we tour. Some songs, I’ve been playing for thirty years, so it’ll be nice to have some fresh energy in there.”
This desire to keep exploring new musical territory is, Miller says, a crucial reason why Guster have remained together (with an unusally stable lineup) for more than thirty years now. “I think we’re still only interested in being a band because we can continue to play and release new music that feels relevant,” he says. “We’re not interested in becoming a purely nostalgic act. There’s a lot that we still have to say as artists, as writers, as performers.”
Miller realized that he had the desire to become a professional musician when he was growing up in Texas – “I had the 18 year old’s dreams of seeing the Scorpions and wanting to be onstage,” he says with a laugh – but his career really got off the ground when he went to Tufts University in Boston. That’s where he met his future bandmates Adam Gardner (vocals/guitars) and Brian Rosenworcel (drums) when they were all attending a freshmen orientation session.
“I think we got really lucky that the dudes that I met that first day of college were all really good men, and that we were committed in the same way: we wanted the same thing out of the band, and there was some alchemy about what we each brought to the thing,” Miller says.
His bandmates were also on board with the deep lyricism that Miller wanted to explore as a budding songwriter. “Sometimes the really sunny songs would have a really negative undertone – a really kind of sour, pessimistic thing learned from watching Morrissey and The Smiths sing these sunny melodies about his girlfriend in a coma or getting hit by a truck – and I felt like I was like that about our music, because it kind of gave the pop songs some ballast; it just gave it some weight,” Miller says. “I like music that touches me emotionally, and talking about this stuff, that’s my therapy. It’s how I process the world. So it makes sense, in a way, that I would write this way.”
This candid approach resonated with Boston music fans, who quickly embraced Guster as a favorite local band. Miller and his bandmates were still enrolled at Tufts when they independently recorded and released their debut album, Parachute, in 1994. By the time they graduated, they were able to support themselves full-time with the band.
By their third album, Lost and Gone Forever (1999), Guster were signed to a major label and working with the star producer Steve Lillywhite. They began routinely hitting the alternative music charts in the U.S. and elsewhere with numerous singles, achieving especially significant success with “Amsterdam,” “Careful,” “One Man Wrecking Machine,” and “Satellite.” Now, with Ooh La La’s release, they’re continuing this tradition: their first single from it, “Keep Going,” made the Top 20 on the U.S. Adult Alternative Airplay chart.
VIDEO: Guster “Keep Going”
“There was never like a 30 year plan,” Miller says of Guster’s impressive trajectory. “It was just sort of like, ‘Well, let’s make a record, and let’s go tour it, and let’s see what happens.’ Every record, and every tour, we take it for what it is – and then hopefully it leads us somewhere next. So far, it’s been working.”
This means, of course, that Guster now have several songs that audiences will always want to hear at every show. While some artists complain that this can become tedious for them, Miller has no such qualms. “The trick is about what it’s doing to the room, and watching people,” he says. “The obligatory songs you play because people have a relationship with that song and they want to hear it. It’s not really about me playing “Demons” for night number two thousand and going, ‘I fucking love this melody!’ It’s allowing people entry into the song, and then having that experience, because every night is different when you play that song. Every show, the energy is different. That part is still really fun.”
This tight bond between the band and their fans is at the heart of Guster’s continuing success, as Miller makes clear with his parting message: “I just want to emphasize how much humility and gratitude there is around the relationship that we have with our fans, and the community that our fans have built,” he says. “It’s just crazy to think that people would want to see us a hundred times, or get a tattoo of our lyrics on their back, and have this tied in with their identity in a way that some other bands are tied into my identity. There’s just a lot of gratitude around that, and we don’t take it for granted.”
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