What started as a joke then became a reality as the group launched its We Also Have Eras tour last year. A second leg of Guster’s tour comes to the Agora on Sunday, Jan. 26.
“That joke got us imagining what an ‘Eras’ tour would look like,” says drummer Brian Rosenworcel via phone as he picked up cellos for a concert that his 7th grader was performing at an “old folks home.” “We do have a lot of material, and we could display it chronologically. We got into the idea of storytelling and skits. When a band that’s been at it for 30 years or longer starts to get outside the box, everyone gets a little excited. We’ve done the regular concert. It’s fun. But this is special.”
With the assistance of a narrator, the shows document the band’s beginning and demonstrate how band members initially couldn’t decide on which tunes to cover because they didn’t know the same songs. That, in turn, inspired them to write their own music.
“[Singer-guitarist] Ryan [Miller] was coming from a place of Brit-pop,” says Rosenworcel. “He was always playing [the British rock act] The The, which is the band that [singer-songwriter] Matt Johnson had. I could never get into it. I was more of a classic rock guy. Where we overlapped was a middle ground of harmonies. They just happened to have acoustic guitars that made writing songs in a dorm room more feasible. That became our sound. We weren’t good at our instruments, but we could write a tune.”
For ten years, Rosenworcel simply used hand drums.
“I was in a high school band for a couple of years, and my friends were playing mandolin and guitar, and we were jamming on Grateful Dead and R.E.M. songs,” he says. “I needed something to do, so I could still hang out with my friends. They gave me a pair of bongos. I kept growing the kit one drum at a time.”
The band self-released its first two albums and then signed to Sire for 1999’s Lost and Gone Forever.
“We didn’t feel any pressure when we made that record and didn’t care if there was a single or anything. We had [producer] Steve Lillywhite [U2, Rolling Stones] at the helm, and everyone was in a good mood.”
On subsequent albums for Warner Bros., Keep It Together and Ganging Up on the Sun, they ran into the “oh, there’s no single” issue.
“That’s annoying, but the end result was better after we did a second set of songs, so we’re not bitter,” says Rosenworcel. “The label put some songs on the radio, but we’ve never had a proper hit.”
The band now self-releases its music once again, and it just released Ooh La La, its first studio album in five years. It recorded with producer Josh Kaufman (the National, Bob Weir) at the Isokon, a Woodstock, NY studio.
“It got stuck in the COVID years,” says Rosenworcel when asked about the long gestation period. “We didn’t want to sit around when we couldn’t tour but we got into the studio maybe before we had material that was finished. that added extra responsibility to Josh Kaufman, our producer. It was great to work through it and coming up with the songs we did. We were just working in fits and starts. After we had eight of the songs, we still needed a few more and had to do a second writing and recording session, which made it take a long time. But the end result is one we are really excited about.”
In interviews with other publications, Miller has said the songs reflect existential questions, and Rosenworcel agrees.
“If you hear a song like ‘Maybe We’re Alright,’ I think he’s articulating what a lot of us were feeling from the pandemic,” says Rosenworcel. “It’s also about the chaos politically. I remember having my laptop open at the studio and those guys were doing vocals, and it was Jan. 6, 2021, and going, ‘They’re scaling the Capitol’s walls!’ There was a chaotic feeling in the air that’s captured in some of the songs. ‘The Elevator’ gets existential.”
With its funky bass and drum riffs and shimmering synths, “When We Were Stars” finds the band tapping into a ’70s soul/R&B groove.
‘The song definitely feels like something Guster hasn’t done before,” says Rosenworcel when asked about the tune. “There’s never been comparisons to Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder before, which are the two obvious influences on that. But that’s music we love and listen to. We’re always looking for a new direction. We don’t want to return to something we have done before, though Ooh La La in terms of its sonic palette of acoustic guitars and pianos and warm sounds was more in the wheelhouse that Josh [Kaufman] embraces and less in terms of angular and cold and challenging sounds which is where we went with Leo Abrahams on Look Alive.”
With its raspy vocals and barroom piano, “My Kind” gets bluesy and weird.
“We just wrote that song in a jam session,” says Rosenworcel. “When we got into the studio to do it, the bass and drums got into a deeper groove than Guster normally goes. We’re achieving some grooves that you could vibe out to a little more. That’s a real achievement when you’re 30 years in.”
Since the current tour finds the band revisiting its many eras, the new songs don’t play a major role.
“That’s the weird part of doing the show chronologically — you can only swim and immerse yourself so much in each album before you have to keep the plot line moving,” says Rosenworcel. “It’s also difficult to spend so much time on the mid-career years, which most people know, and arrive at something relatively new to them. We only did a couple new songs in previous shows because we only knew a couple. Now, we have ‘When We Were Stars’ sounding good live, so we might add that, and we’re changing the setlist even in the context of this sketch show. It’s still a little bit unpredictable”
Rosenworcel says this is the last time that Guster will present its music chronologically with sketches depicting moments in its history.
“We feel indulgent even doing a second leg of the tour,” he says. “We had so much fun the first time, we thought we have to bring it to the cities that didn’t see it. In the future, there are other weird ideas we might indulge in.”
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This article appears in Dec 18-31, 2024.
