Built to Spill
by Kyle Duvall
photo curtesy of Warner Bros.

It’s easy to shoot oneself in the foot when trying to describe Built To Spill’s music to someone who has never heard them. From the beginning, it’s obvious the easiest labels and adjectives won’t do.
You could start with Built to Spill’s punk roots. Of course if you go that route, people will start thinking about the Ramones and the Sex pistols, and Built to Spill front man Doug Martsch admits his band is more “inspired by the spirit of punk”, and more melodic, expressive groups like Dinosaur Jr., Thinkin Fellers, and even The Butthole Surfers or The Meat Puppets.
Then again, Built To Spill doesn’t really sound too much like any of those bands either. Maybe describing their methods would be helpful. They write songs in an intuitive, free form manner, “messing around while they record” as Martsch puts it. It’s an almost jazz-like philosophy. But as soon as you’ve got that nailed down, Martsch admits he’s not a jazz enthusiast, and if you push the jazz angle, people will think of Tortoise, and Built to Spill definitely doesn’t sound like Tortoise.
Built to Spill likes to jam. Some of their songs hit fifteen minutes, and the tunes are never static. In concert, you won’t hear the same version of a song twice. But they are not the Dave Matthews Band, nor are they The Grateful Dead.
So where do you go next? Compare Martsch’s lyrical style to R.E.M? That really doesn’t tell you much either. Maybe its best to fall back on cliché and say that nobody sounds like them, and that the music they make is their’s alone.
Of course, this makes them sound like some kind of experimental avant-garde group, and despite 9 well-received albums and a loyal pack of fans, Martsch himself might take you to task on his own band’s uniqueness.
“I don’t think we’ve ever done anything too original,” Martsch explains. “The music is just a regurgitation of everything we like.”
But anyone who has ever heard Built To Spill would have to say the group’s work is not so simple. Unraveling the often-complex music of the group is more than just a matter of connecting the influences, and if one were to find one common thread to the whole Built To Spill, experience it would have to be the idea of total, unrestricted creative freedom.
Like many of the bands they have inspired, their songs are the products of in-studio experimentation and jamming with no real agenda or concept other than what the music gives itself. “The music is about being honest and doing what moves us.” Comments Martsch. “Its completely about what we like.”
This idea of creative freedom is one that extends to the listeners as well as the artists. “The kind of music we make is open-ended,” says Martsch. “We don’t really have any idea what a song is about when we make it. Anyone can interpret it in any way.”
When it comes to making their music, they answer to no one but themselves and their emotions. Of course, the band still wants to make albums that people will listen to, and trusting their own intuition when writing songs also means trusting the audiences attention span and receptiveness to songs that can hit 15 minutes and lyrics that can border on stream-of-consciousness. Martsch, however, has no worries about whether or not listeners can relate to such a purely subjective vision.
“We write songs in that intuitive kind of way, but my ideas of what’s good are still pretty universal,” comments Martsch. “I like a good melody, a good song…it’s always a complex thing to try and figure out who you write songs for, but I’d like to think I’m not too different from most people.”
But is there ever a point where the lack of restriction and boundaries is a problem? When everything is done by instinct and feeling, how do you tell the good from the bad?
“It’s just whatever sticks in my head,” explains Martsch. “If I find myself humming a tune a few days later, I’ll go back into the studio and work on it some more.”
This approach means they depend on the same instincts that inspire the songs to finish them.
“By the time we’re finished with a song we’ve usually forgotten what the song originally was,” admits Martsch. “You just go on to the next step and at each step you add a little more, and by the time you’re listening to it at the end, all you are really listening to is the mix.”
Sometimes, getting so lost in the process means they are almost coming to their music on an equal footing with their fans. “It may be a year or two later before I really hear the music and give it a bit more consideration,” says Martsch. “The album I hated most when we finished, Perfect From Now On, turned out later to be what I think is our best album.”
The technique of trusting so much to personal feelings and gut reactions is obviously one Martsch and Built To Spill have been comfortable with from the very beginning, and being so free with their music doesn’t mean having the freedom to experiment, but it also includes the freedom not to experiment with what they’re comfortable with. “I’m not interested in making the groundbreaking album,” Martsch explains. “I’m not interested in creating the newest sound. It’s about being honest and doing what we feel.”
In a musical world where so many artists feel the need for forced re-invention with every album, their acknowledgement of all their works, past and present, as one and the same, is refreshing, especially when you consider that even without turning their sound upside-down on every outing, they always sound fresh. “We don’t change the way we work,” says Martsch. “But I think we do try to approach the music in different ways.”
And when they do add new elements to their sound, it isn’t the result of some artistic master plan. “Some critics talked about using the cello on Perfect from Now on…or the slide guitar on the new one…but we didn’t really plan those things, they were just available to us, so we used them because they were there.”
Built To Spill’s legacy along with Martsch’s influential work in Treepeople has turned Martsch into a sort of quasi-icon. Few reviews of Built To Spill neglect to mention Martsch’s status as some sort of indie rock poster boy. “The thing I have going for me, that is I’ve done this for over 10 albums,” explains Martsch, taking it in stride. “When you are around that long, you can’t help but be made into an icon…and when people talk about me that way, its usually because they’re mimicking what other people have written, so it just gets repeated over and over…”
Being a post-punk, post-grunge poster boy certainly didn’t keep Martsch and his band from jumping to major label Warner Brothers in 1997, a move which, in the past, might have set the DIY purist into fits of angst. Built To Spill’s major label work, including their latest, Ancient Melodies of The Future (their best album yet) is a strong argument that the whole indie vs. major label politics are becoming less and less relevant.
“Basically, we didn’t change anything when we went to a major label,” says Martsch. “Its obvious to people we’re generally the same band we always were. We still have the final say in our music,” Martsch explains. “We’ve got that written into our contracts.”
Martsch, on the whole, seems to be more satisfied with Built To Spill’s current circumstances than ever before and, although promoting a major label album often entails more touring and time away from his family than he’d like, for Martsch, actually playing the music is as satisfying as ever.
“It wasn’t that long ago that I was in high school going to these shows,” says Martsch. “Once we’re on stage I think to myself: This is why I’m doing this. The album is finished, the work is already done and I can just play and feed off the crowd and feed off the music.”
Ultimately, maybe this article doesn’t tell you much about what Built To Spill really sounds like, but if you haven’t heard them and you happen to pick up a Built To Spill CD, you can take it in without boundaries, completely free. Make up your own mind and your own rules. I doubt Doug Martsch would want it any other way.