Young Fresh Fellows: Live, Love, ‘Loft’
Scott McCaughey talks about the supergroup’s bold new LP
Young Fresh Fellows is the epitome of a power pop supergroup.
Their lineup has wavered over the years, and yet, over the course of the past four-plus decades, Young Fresh Fellows continues to define the indie rock ethos. Many of the band members band have taken on side gigs over the course of their career, but the core of the group — Scott McCaughey, Kurt Bloch, John Ferrin and Jim Sandster — continue to keep the band young, fresh and in fine fellowship. It’s a legacy begun with the band’s classic debut, 1984’s The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, and continuing through their latest opus, Loft, another fine example of their craft and creativity.
That’s no small feat. For much of the ’90s, the band went on hiatus, releasing no new material between 1997’s A Tribute To Music and Because We Hate You, a joint effort with McCaughey’s other band, the Minus 5, in 2001. A lull of eight years transpired before their next album, I Think This Is, appeared in 2009.
For the record, Loft represents Young Fresh Fellows’ first offering in six years. It’s not that the various members haven’t been busy. McCaughey himself is a prodigious player. In addition to the Fellows and the Minus 5, he plays with the sometimes band The Baseball Project and was also an adjunct member of R.E.M. In addition, he still performs as a solo artist under the aegis of Scott the Hoople.
That said, McCaughey’s enthusiasm for his day job is obvious.
“Our goal is to make great records and then have a whole lot of fun when we play live, and then we try to make it really fun for everybody,” McCaughey insists. “The heart of the band is, for me, all about writing great songs and and then taking them out on the road and playing in front of people and having a really good time doing it. It’s that simple.”
Still, given that explanation, one has to wonder why there’s always been such a lapse between releases.
“I don’t want to say the Fellows are a hobby because they’re not, and it’s always there for us,” McCaughey maintains. “But we’ve all gone off into doing other things. We never really thought about the Fellows as a career, or at least I never really thought of it that way. It was just about having fun with friends. But rock and roll goes beyond being a hobby. Rock ‘n’ roll is a lifestyle, and that being said, we would take other opportunities to do other music with other people, and eventually that became more of a thing. I wouldn’t say it was a hindrance to the Young Fresh Fellows, because in a way, it allowed the Fellows to keep going, simply because we didn’t have to rely on the Fellows to be our source of sustenance. So we kind of do it whenever we can, whenever it makes sense, whenever there’s a reason, or even when there’s not a reason at all.”
That said, the perseverance and passion have always given reason to reconvene the band whenever the time does seem right.
“We come together and do things, but we’ve had things happen such as when [founding member] Chuck [Carroll] first quit the group in 1988,” McCaughey recalls. “We thought, well, that’s the end of the band, because we were such a tight-knit unit. And then we thought, let’s just go record some music, just the three of us and see what it’s like, because we didn’t want it to end. So we did that and we had fun. And Kurt Bloch was right there waiting for us. Well maybe he wasn’t waiting for us, but he was a good friend of ours, and we knew he would be great. And even though his band, the Fastbacks, were really busy, we still managed to get him. So 35 years later, he’s still the new guy in the group, and that changed everything for us. He was so different than Chuck, but he gave us a whole new life. And then a couple years ago, [founding member] Tad [Hutchinson] said he was going to retire, and it was almost even more impossible to see the Young Fresh Fellows without Tad, because he was such a vital part of the band, the very spirit of the Young Fresh Fellows. Yet at the same time, he said, ‘I think you should get a young, energetic drummer to take my place.’ ‘You can still play.’ I said. ‘It didn’t sound like a good idea, except for the fact that we happened to have the perfect guy who we became friends with and who we knew would be perfect if Tad retired. So we thought let’s see what John Perrin has to say about it. And of course, he jumped at it, even though he’s busy doing other things with other bands too.”
Nevertheless, one has to wonder how the various members manage to balance their obligations to the Fellows given their extracurricular activities. |
“It’s all about our scheduling, because it gets crazy when we actually do try to do stuff,” McCaughey insists. “We have a very limited amount of time when we can actually come together and do things. So, so that’s a long way of explaining that. I always say that we’ve never broke up, because there’s no point in breaking up. People always assumed we had broken up, because they noted that we stopped in 1989 or whatever, or stopped in 1994 or whatever, but we never did stop. So that’s why I said, why would we break up? There’s no point in that. We do things when we want to. That’s the reason we don’t have to break up, you know. Plus, I have to say that when after 40-something years, when Tad decided to retire, I thought maybe that was the time we won’t have to announce we’re breaking up or anything like that, because nobody would really care. Well, a few people would, but there’s no point in even doing that and anyway, we’re still going so, so I think the band would just be fine even if they kept going without me.”
That comment, of course, seems somewhat curious, especially given the fact that McCaughey has been a staple from early on.
“If I dropped dead, or something like that, it would be kind of weird for them to do the band without me,” he muses.”They probably would find somebody who they could recruit, but it wouldn’t be the same. Still, maybe it’d still be fun. Someone else could get up there and sing my songs with the rest of the band. And that’d be cool. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here because we’re still here, and we’ve got a new record!”
For all the seeming inconsistency as far as their trajectory might be concerned, the Young Fresh Fellows have never faltered when it comes to creating fresh, energetic and rousing rock and roll melodies of an enticing variety. Naturally, McCaughey readily agrees.
“I’m really proud of our output and our many records,” he says. “And I’m really proud of our live shows. I feel like there was a period back when we were doing a 100-plus shows a year or something, which we didn’t do often, but which we did for a good five or six years, where we were pretty untouchable. We didn’t even have a set list or anything. We could go out there and just play whatever we wanted and just give a really fucking hell of a rock and roll show. It was always different every time, totally different, and I was really, really proud of that. Now we’re sort of a different band because we don’t play often enough, so we have to plan a little bit and and rehearse a little bit and stuff like that. But I still think we put on a really, really good show. I feel like, is there another band I would rather see than us? I’m not sure there is.”
Still, with all the different interests involved, one is naturally curious as to what the impetus is to consistently regroup. “I write a lot of songs, but now it’s somewhat determined by when somebody’s available and which band is gonna make a record,” McCaughey explains. “There’s certain songs that I know will be Young Fresh Fellow songs, although some that can go both ways. Then there’s those that I’ll just hang on to forever, or at least until the Fellows make a record. A lot of it does depend on timing.
Despite having a new album to promote, there are other plans for the immediate future. “We’re gonna play some shows on the West Coast when this record comes out in April, and we’re also gonna go in the studio and record a record for Spain, because we’ve always had a great time there. We’re gonna go back there this fall. We talked the label there, and said, ‘Well, if we gave you a record in April or May, could you get it out in time?’ They said, yeah, for sure. I’ve had this pile of songs that I wrote in Spain or about Spain that I’ve been holding on to for years and years. I’ve also been holding on to them for the Fellows, so I’m hoping they’re gonna come together and we’re gonna be able to do them. I’m holding on to them until we make a record about Spain. Now I think it’s actually going to happen. So there’s things like that can happen.”
Of course, with a new album in hand, the band doesn’t have any shortage of material to tout. Surprisingly however, McCaughey says Loft came about strictly by chance.
“It wasn’t really planned at all,” he confesses. “In 2024, we were celebrating the 40 year anniversary of our first record and we had a day off from the tour in Chicago. So I said, we should go to the Loft, Wilco’s studio, and see if we can record something there. And the guys said, that sounds like a great idea. In fact, it wasn’t a great idea, because we were all fried. We’d been playing like two sets a night, and people were sick, and my voice was kind of shot. But it was like, well, it’ll be great. We’ll go in and we’ll record a few songs. We ended up having a great time and I just kept pulling out songs that I didn’t even really know I had. We recorded eleven songs, and that’s what turned into Loft. It was a one day session, and it was amazing. I kind of have a concept when we do a Fellows record, or a Minus 5 record… some kind of unifying concept behind the songs. But this time, I didn’t. I just was like shelling out whatever songs I had, some that I’d started or finished like on my iPhone or whatever. I found lyrics in a notebook I had, stuff like that. So this record didn’t have a concept, but the songs really, really fit. It really fit pretty well together somehow. I don’t know why, but it was kind of a magical day. It really was.”
Ultimately then, what began on the spur of the moment coalesced into one of the band’s best efforts of recent times. “We just went up there and made the record, and there’s no way we could have made this record like we did without that,” McCaughey continues. “It wasa day off, and they just made it available for us.We didn’t bring any equipment or anything. It was all set up. We just started playing. It kind of was a challenge for us to keep cranking, but we ended up making this whole record.”
VIDEO: Young Fresh Fellows perform “Amy Grant” in 1988
Still, given the fact that McCaughey is involved with more than one outlet for his ideas, he obviously needs to remain rather prolific. He does have several musical mouths to feed after all.
“It’s funny, because I used to always think I wrote a lot of songs, and now I really feel like I don’t write that much anymore,” he muses. “That of course is definitely a fallacy, but it feels that way to me, because my brain doesn’t work quite the same as it used to, and it’s harder for me to put words together like I did before. So now, I feel like I haven’t really written very many songs lately, but then when I think, ‘Oh, it’s time to make a record. Let’s see if I got some songs,’ I find them. I’ve actually been writing all along. It just doesn’t feel that way because I don’t go and record them immediately or anything like that. Luckily, I’ll leave a paper trail. It’ll be like in the notes on my phone, or I might have even sung into my voice memos on the phone. I’ve got all kinds of paper notebooks. I’ve got one big book that I put by my bed during the pandemic, poems maybe. I thought, these aren’t gonna be songs. These are gonna be poems. Then I’ve got another notebook that’s for new songs, and I’ve got a laptop, and I’ve got my computer that I record on. So there’s all these places that, when I look around, I can find things. I’ll find a whole lyric that I once wrote and maybe forgot. I may not even remember it at all, but I’ll rediscover it and think, “That was pretty good.’ Sometimes I think that that one’s terrible, but there’s a lot there. I’m actually constantly writing without really knowing I’m writing and without having a project in mind or anything like that. So when a project does come along, there’s a lot of resources for me to look into, and that way I can find stuff. So it is kind of unusual.”
Nevertheless, it’s a tribute to McCaughey’s proficiency that the Young Fresh Fellows were awarded a tribute album from various musical admirers in 2004, a compilation aptly titled This One’s For the Fellows. It featured such distinguished contributors as Robyn Hitchcock, The Presidents of the United States, the Silos, The Mendoza Line, Carla Torgenson, Charlie Chesterfield… and McCaughey himself.
Meanwhile, McCaughey’s future plans call for a solo tour as well as an appearance at Wilco’s annual festival Solid Sound festival this June. “I’m probably just gonna try to play a few solo shows to get used to playing solo again,” he suggests. “I’m not really that comfortable doing it now, but I gotta. I’m gonna do the Wilco festival. I’ve already played there with the Fellows, and as the Minus 5 and The Baseball Project. I told them I want to come back this year. And they said, ‘Well, you could do it solo. So I’ll be doing a Scott the Hoople show there.”
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