Feeling Lucky

Matthew Caws finds his muse and earns his paycheck on Nada Surf’s new CD

By Alan Sculley

Nada Surf performs June 2 at Studio A.

Matthew Caws may be about the only musician who says he actually misses having a day job. Usually people become professional musicians hoping to avoid working the 9 to 5.

For Caws, though, being the primary songwriter for his band, Nada Surf, can mean missing out on one of the main things he found rewarding about his “regular” job.

“One thing that’s hard about songwriting is you don’t get to have that do-a-day’s-work-every-day type of satisfaction,” Caws said in a recent phone interview. “That’s why I miss actually having a day job. I know it’s like a crime to say that, but I really do [miss it] because with a day job, no matter what, when I came home at night, I’d done a day’s work. I’d been industrious no matter what because I was earning my paycheck.”

The creative process that works best for Caws, by its very nature, means he will have days when nothing of substance gets accomplished. He has found that he has to step out of the day-to-day world and wait for inspiration to happen.

“I really have to dig into it for a couple of months and isolate myself and turn down invitations to go out to dinner with friends and stuff and just stay home because I have to wait for that moment to come,” Caws said. “What really works best for me is to be home so that when the feeling does come, it’s just kind of unpredictable, so it’s best to be in my house surrounded by a bunch of instruments.”

In writing the new Nada Surf CD, Lucky, however, Caws finally found a way to regain some of the satisfaction of daily accomplishment in those times he was waiting to find his songwriting groove.

During the writing period, he forced himself to go through a stack of some 30 cassettes he’d accumulated that contained fragments of song ideas, lyrics and instrumental parts to see what bits might be worth revisiting and developing into songs, or at least sections of songs.

“I’d been putting it off for three albums now,” Caws said. “So I did sit down this time and I went through, you know, 30 hours of stuff. So some of the little moments on this record date back five or 10 years. And it was satisfying. It felt like I had done some real work going through them.”

To be sure, Caws also wrote plenty of new music, too. And what emerged on Lucky — as on recent Nada Surf CDs such as 2002’s Let Go and 2005’s The Weight Is a Gift — is a collection of finely crafted, timeless-sounding guitar pop.

The music on Lucky shifts easily between such relaxed mid-tempo tunes as “See These Bones” and “Are You Lightning?” and friskier songs such as “Whose Authority?” and “Beautiful Beat.” No matter the tempo, the melodies are rich, graceful and figure to sound as fresh a decade from now as they do today.

This is precisely the kind of timeless, nontrendy music Caws said he has been chasing for much of his Nada Surf career.

“That’s kind of what we’ve been trying to do all these years, is have fewer and fewer reference points and get rid of the influences, really,” Caws said. “Just strip them away until all that’s left is just simple, just the songs. I don’t really listen to our (older) records, but if I have to hear them at a party or if somebody plays them at a club or something, I can sort of hear what we were going for. And it’s really satisfying to not hear that anymore.”

If Caws finds Lucky to be the most fully realized Nada Surf album, that’s not to say the group hasn’t always produced worthy music. In particular, Let Go and The Weight Is a Gift were excellent efforts, and the band’s first two releases, High/Low (the 1996 debut that contained the modern rock hit single “Popular”) and The Proximity Effect, had their share of strong songs as well.

But given the growing satisfaction Caws and his bandmates have felt with the three post-Elektra albums, it’s not surprising that Nada Surf’s current live set focuses mainly on music from Let Go, The Weight Is a Gift and Lucky (all released on Barsuk Records).

And fans can expect a generous set running two hours or more — although Caws said the group is sensitive about giving fans too much of a good thing live.

“I’m torn there because I guess I have an inner paranoia that I feel like if we go too, too long, it will be like ‘Well, I never have to see that band again. That was great, and I’m done,’” Caws said of the live set. “But people seem to come back, so it’s all right. But you don’t want to be too indulgent with the encores.”

Nada Surf will perform June 2 at Studio A, 60 N.E. 11th St., Miami. Tickets are $15 at ticketmaster.com.