The Collected Cracker
David Lowery talks about his longtime band’s career-spanning retrospective
If you pull up any 1990s alternative rock playlist on Spotify or other music streaming service, there’s an excellent chance that at least one Cracker song will be in it.
That’s because the band’s hits from that decade — such as “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now),” “Low,” and “Euro-Trash Girl” — have become cultural touchstones, instantly conjuring up nostalgia for any music fan who lived through that era.
Now a new generation is discovering the band’s work, as frontman David Lowery is finding out firsthand. Besides continuing his music career, he also earned his doctorate and now teaches music business courses at the University of Georgia. “I have students all the time who [say], ‘Oh my God, you’re my mom’s favorite band — that’s how I know your entire catalog!’” he says during a recent video call from his office in Athens, Ga.
But other students don’t realize he’s had a successful career as a musician until they’re in his class, which prompts him to check out his work. But when they look up Cracker, Lowery says, it’s frustrating for him to know that they are being directed to the same handful of hits, instead of exposing them to songs from all nine of the band’s studio albums.
To help rectify this situation, Alternative History: A Cracker Retrospective will be released on November 22 (via the Cooking Vinyl record label). It will be available as a 3-vinyl set, on CD and on all streaming platforms.
“I was just looking for some way of fighting the algorithm, basically, and then this cool idea came up: just put out a new retrospective and include some of the later stuff,” Lowery says.
But as Lowery and his bandmates were deciding on the track listing, they encountered an obstacle: “We realized it was going to be pretty expensive to license a lot of these tracks,” he says. “It led us to some interesting choices, because certain tracks were not really obtainable, so we were like, ‘Well, what song is like that?’ And we started digging around, seeing, ‘What tracks do we own?’ That constraint led us to [say], ‘What we could do is make an alternate history of the band using these alternate takes, rerecorded takes, demos, b-sides, and stuff like that.’ It just felt like it might be a better introduction to the band.”
VIDEO: Cracker “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)”
Longtime fans will likely love this collection of songs, too, because there are so many rarities included on it. “I think about half the tracks would qualify as rare, unreleased, or out of print,” Lowery says.
To gather these songs, Lowery spent considerable time combing through his archive of tapes, DATs, and files. He was sometimes surprised by what he found. For instance, he found a demo of “Merry Christmas Emily” that he had forgotten the band had recorded — and he realized he liked the musical approach on it better than the final version of this song that appeared on Cracker’s 2002 album Forever.
“I listened to it and I thought, ‘This is actually better for the lyrics,’ so we rerecorded it in that style [for this retrospective],” Lowery says. “I felt it’s a better telling of the story, just because it’s more melancholy. The narrator is unreliable, and because now it’s in a minor key, and slower and sadder, he seems more like a loser — and he seems a little more aware of being a loser.”
Lowery is also especially pleased to include a different take on the track “Almond Grove,” which originally appeared on Cracker’s last studio album, 2014’s Berkeley to Bakersfield. “I had rerecorded that because I was unhappy with the version that we had on the record,” Lowery says. “I just did it for my own sake, really — I just wanted a better version of this song.”
Listening to all of these songs, it becomes evident just how diverse Cracker’s music could be, drawing on rock, country, and punk. This was, Lowery says, a continuation of the approach he took with his first commercially successful band, Camper Van Beethoven, who began releasing albums in the mid-1980s.
“Camper Van Beethoven [would] take a little of this and a little of that, different styles of music, and blend it together,” Lowery says. “We were taking the same approach with Cracker, but we really kind of limited it more to stuff that we thought that we authentically could play. Like country rock, blues rock, real Southern rock. But it was still a little of this and a little of that, but it evolved into more than that. Like, there’s a little bit of more punk in it, [and] almost like a psychedelic element. A little more string section stuff in it. But ultimately, it’s kind of roots based.”
Lowery’s distinctive lyrics, which often tend to paint vivid stories about down-on-their-luck people, provide a kind of continuity across these diverse musical genres. He says he learned to write this way when he took a creative writing class in college.
VIDEO: Cracker “Eurotrash Girl”
“I was kind of drummed out of it for not wanting to write the way everybody else was writing — I didn’t do very well in the class,” he says, “but I remember this creative writing professor told me at some point, ‘What you need to do is invent the characters in your mind and then just let them talk.’ I completely started using that method with Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker through the— just get a real clear picture of the characters, and then allow them to speak through you. And that seems to work.”
Lowery points out that his lyrical style shifted for his solo career (for which he’s released five albums so far). In this capacity, he tends to write more autobiographical material. He admits that it is likely that he will continue focusing on his solo career because it is far easier, both logistically and financially, to make solo albums compared to doing them with Cracker. Still, he doesn’t totally discount the idea that there might be another album from that band one day.
Even if there’s never another new Cracker record, though, Lowery is (mostly) satisfied with that band’s legacy: “Sometimes I feel like we haven’t really exactly gotten our due,” he says, “but maybe we will, still.”
Alternative History: A Cracker Retrospective should go a long way toward making that happen.
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