Putting The Pieces Back Together After A Messy Break-Up

Chicago rockers Veruca Salt burst onto the global scene like a hurricane in the early-‘90s, taking their sonic cues from the grunge and alt-rock explosion that was so all-pervasive at the time. Formed around the core creative partnership of co-frontwomen Louise Post and Nina Gordon the band’s radio-friendly blend of distortion and anthemic alt-pop found them hitting the ground running frenetically, with both their 1994 debut album American Thighs and its runaway single Seether proving massive hits all around the world.

Yet despite these rampant early wins they struggled to replicate their initial success, and 1997 follow-up Eight Arms To Hold You didn’t make anywhere the same impact as its predecessor. By early-1998 Gordon had quit the band for a solo career in what was rumoured to be overtly acrimonious circumstances, whilst Post kept the Veruca Salt moniker and assembled a completely new line-up to carry on alone. Stunningly, they’ve now returned with new album Ghost Notes – Veruca Salt’s fifth album overall, but third with the “classic line-up” that started it all back in the day.

“We weren’t intending on making a new record necessarily, we just got back together and thought that we’d play a couple of reunion shows or something,” Post explains happily. “So Nina and I got together with guitars and played a couple of songs from American Thighs just to start with, and it was such an incredible experience just to hear our voices together again. I think we probably both cried a little bit and wished that we’d sung together a little sooner and not let so much time pass – and then we got back down to work.

"We probably both cried a little bit and wished that we’d sung together a little sooner."

“We were really chomping at the bit to write new material almost right away; it was like history repeating itself, because when we first met we met on a musical blind date. Someone set us up to play music together, so we never really sat around and chatted aimlessly or just hung out or went to parties or whatever – we always had music as the core of our friendship, and the same thing applies this time around. We got together, we started playing music right away – we talked for about four hours and closed out a restaurant together first because we had so much to say, but the next time we got together we played music and we got bored with the old stuff pretty quickly and jumped straight into new material. Before you knew it we were writing songs that we were really excited by and bringing songs to each other that really inspired one another and made the other want to write more, and suddenly we were in the throes of making a new album. There was never a plan.”

Post explains that the innate chemistry between the four original Veruca Salt members didn’t even need fuel to reignite.

“It turns out that it never even went away,” she smiles. “The same magic that was there before is there now – it’s an incredibly charged atmosphere and creative dynamic between the four of us that seems to have only grown in intensity over time.”

That inherent rapport allowed them to concentrate on looking forward creatively, with little thought spared for legacies or past trials and tribulations.

“If we weren’t writing songs that we thought were really special and needed to be written then we would have abandoned ship – it probably wouldn’t have got started in the first place – but we realised that we had a lot more to say and a lot more to do together, and it all seemed to be way bigger than the four of us,” Post enthuses. “We were suddenly in the midst of this creative storm that was overwhelming us, and there wasn’t a whole of concern on what we did before because the focus was so firmly on what we were doing now. And we never got to make out third record together – I obviously made Veruca Salt records with other people, but the four of us weren’t done creatively; we were done inter-personally, but we were never done creatively. So this has been this incredible stroke of luck and time of healing, and just picking up where we left off really because we had so much more left to say and never got to say it together. Now we get to make that record.”

When asked whether they’d discussed staying true to a perceived ‘Veruca Salt sound’ for Ghost Notes, Post explains that such concerns were more prevalent during the band’s split than during the reconciliation phase.

“Interestingly I was more concerned with staying true to our sound when I wasn’t playing with these guys than any of us are concerned with it now,” she reflects. “I think we were just seeing what happened, and as it turned out we did stay true to our sound because that’s who we are. But we weren’t married to it – we weren’t trying to sound the same and we weren’t trying to sound different. I kept saying, ‘We aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel here, let’s just be who we are’, and for us to do anything that was radically different sonically-speaking would have seemed contrived at this point. We made music that felt natural to us and was written organically by us and through us, and I’ve heard that it’s compatible with our prior records, and that makes sense to me. We also recorded it with our first producer Brad Wood, but no one is trying to recreate or replicate a sound that we came up with in the ‘90s – we’re just playing what comes naturally to us.”

Post is first to admit that the initial Veruca Salt sound was a product of its time, even if they did impart their own unique spin on the era’s pervading sonic blueprint.

“We were definitely influenced by the Pixies and The Breeders and Nirvana and the bands of our time, and many, many bands who were of that moment. We were part of a flow, and I feel that our sound was in keeping with that time for sure. I’d like to think we had our unique brand of music that was our voices and our sound and that we weren’t like a cookie-cutter band – I’d like to think that we stood on our own, and I think our fans have spoken and they agree.

"We were being whispered to by various people and places, maybe being fed false stories by people who were trying to dismantle our ship, trying to get us to sink."

“I remember when Kurt Cobain said that he was trying to write a Pixies song when he wrote Smells Like Teen Spirit, and you would never know that when you listen to that song. The same goes for our song Straight [from Eight Arms To Hold You], I wrote that when I was listening to Nirvana’s first album Bleach and I wanted to write a song off of Bleach,” she laughs heartily. “That’s where that came from.”

And while the results of Ghost Notes aren’t miles removed from the sound of this foursome’s early output, the route that they took to achieve them has changed emphatically.

“It has changed dramatically actually,” Post concedes. “We always wrote our songs pretty much separately – at least the foundation of the song – and then we brought it to the band and the band would flesh it out; we’d all write our own parts and we’d add to it, but the song’s structure was pretty done and the lyrics were pretty much done by that time. But on this record we have such busy lives and two of us are commuting to be in the band – Steve lives in San Diego and Jim lives in Chicago and Nina and I are both in LA – so when we get together it’s like a big creative melting pot, everyone brings their ‘A game’ and we all go into the practice space and workshop these songs. The guys have a lot more creative input than they’ve had in the past, and we relied on them a lot more for that.

“Nina and I as songwriting partners have really been volleying the ideas – it’s more of a volley than a solitary game. We’re very much on the same team but we’re both really busy, so I’ll write a verse and throw it over to her and she’ll write the chorus and throw it back to me and I’ll write the bridge and then all of a sudden we have an incredibly powerful song on our hands. And it’s come from the two of us, so if anything we’ve gotten closer creatively, and these songs were sort of born of a duo rather than from individual people. It’s incredibly satisfying, and it’s also a huge relief – it’s a relief to be playing and singing with Nina and the guys again, and it’s also a relief to not be the person with all of the pressure to write all of the songs. It’s so joyful to be able to share the songwriting… I would say burden except that it’s so much fun with all of these guys.

“With me and Nina, we’re just not so precious about every little word anymore – we care very much and we’re every intense and thorough about our lyric writing, yet it’s just a much more collaborative process. She’ll be looking for a lyric and I’ll just throw one out and it’s the one that sticks, or she’ll write the verse for I’m Telling You Now and I’ll write the chorus and the list goes on – we just keep coming to each other’s rescue and the songs keep building that way, and it’s just been incredibly fun.”

Interestingly, despite these collaborative advances some of the tracks on Ghost Notes actually date back to the ‘90s, if not in their realised form at least in their foundations.

“Well, a couple of them do date back,” Post continues. “When we first broke up, some of the first songs that Nina penned were early versions of [Ghost Notes tracks] Black And Blonde and Triage – Black And Blonde was actually a bonus track on her first solo album [2000’s Tonight And The Rest Of My Life]. When we got together and we were making this record, we gave each other all of the music that we’d written during what we call the ‘heinous hiatus’ when we were apart, and all of the songs we said were open to be put on the chopping block. So if I had a song that I’d never released or was just a demo or something and she really responded to it, it could go on the chopping block and we could mess with it and possibly re-record it.

“She had a couple of my songs that she really liked but she wanted to add a chorus or change the outro or something like that, and I responded to a song of hers called Black And Blonde that the public had heard as a bonus track but I’d always wanted to change the chorus and she let me! We worked on it and did a new version of it as Veruca Salt, and we made it our song. It was a song that she’d released but we sort of reclaimed it and re-interpreted it, and now instead of it being a scathing indictment of me during our break-up – the story of our break-up really – it’s more now about us as a partnership, that was “ticking like a bomb that was about to go of any minute” and more about the people and the forces that led to that implosion. Because we were in a pressure cooker and being pulled by all sorts of people and institutions – we were being whispered to by various people and places, maybe being fed false stories by people who were trying to dismantle our ship, trying to get us to sink. Instead of being pointed towards me and being pointed inwards, that song is now being pointed outwards at the people who were essentially tearing us apart.

“That’s one example, and another example is the song Triage that Nina wrote when we were apart – a song that I’d heard that she’d recorded but never released, and even though I couldn’t imagine hearing a song from a darker time in her life the song is so bad ass and so beautiful and so poignant that I said, ‘We have to do this song together – we have to play this song and record this song’, and that’s what happened. And Prince Of Wales is about a time when we were all together, a point of time in the band’s life right before we split up, and that song we ended up recording and making our own, but all of the rest of the songs are from now – we’ve written them since getting back together, and they’re all very current.”

Post admits that its slightly surreal being back with her old bandmates after all this time, especially given the rollercoaster ride that the foursome endured in the ‘90s which eventually split them asunder.

“We weren’t prepared for it, and we didn’t really have the tools to handle it,” she reflects wistfully. “We were just like deers in the headlights, and we expected to reach such incredible heights and for our second record to explode exponentially from where we left off with American Thighs. There were various fights in our camp – professional, managerial and label-wise – about what songs to release and what should be singles, there was all of this controversy and dissent about single choices, and at that point we just decided to let the powers that be manage our career because we didn’t want to fight internally in the band about things as petty as single choices – we wanted to focus our passion on songwriting.

“So when various decisions were made and radio didn’t necessarily respond to what we’d hoped it would – or what the powers that be expected it to – we sorta felt like we had failed, even though we hadn’t failed by anyone’s standards. We felt like we had [failed], and we didn’t take that very well. Rather than just going back into the studio and starting to make a new record, we took it to heart and it was hard on us personally and hard on us as a band. At that point Jim had already left the band and we had a different drummer, so we were already not the band we’d begun as, and Nina and I often say now that if we’d just had someone who sat us down and gave us all the tools and told us how to handle that chapter of our career as a band we could have pulled it back together and kept going forward. But we did not handle it so we just imploded and abandoned ship, and we have a lot of regret about that but at the same time we also appreciate and honour that the stars had to align in just the perfect way in order for us to come back together and make this record that we’ve made now. We recognise that we are the sum of the parts, and that everything had to happen exactly as it has for this to be all happening right now.”