An Interview with Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think
I have spent decades in the music industry, both writing about it and as a concert and venue publicist. Inevitably, I am asked about which artist are assholes and who are cool as hell. Well, now that I’ve interviewed Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think, it’s safe to say he’s easily in the top 5. Interviewing him was equal parts rock history and dad energy. Between stories about his son’s unawareness of home studio awesomeness, scoring David Wain comedies, and reuniting a band that helped define D.C.’s art-rock weirdness, Wedren remains infectiously enthusiastic and easy to talk with. We talked about having kids, rediscovering old songs, pacing yourself onstage (“comfy but stylish shoes”), and why Pony Express Record might actually be a “sensual horror with a healthy dose of black comedy.”
Racket: If you hear a six-year-old making random sounds in the background, I apologize for that.
STT: I’ll know that you have kidnapped a child.
Racket: Yes. I think more so he has kidnapped me.
STT: Yeah, that’s for sure. Forever.
Racket: He’s an assertive child. This morning, he was telling me that he’s in charge, and I don’t tell him what to do — he tells me. Because he wanted an everything bagel for breakfast.
STT: He’s got good taste.
Racket: Agreed. This child is not a normal kid. He likes salmon sushi rolls, veggie korma, Indian food. Loves pad Thai.
STT: Wow. That’s amazing. Is that your only dude?
Racket: Yes. He’s great and super fun, but he’s… energetic.
STT: We’ve got a 17-year-old who’s in the college application crunch right now, and my heart goes out. It’s so annoying.
Racket: Oh my gosh. What’s he looking to study?
STT: He’s a film nerd. He’s looking at NYU, Chapman, UT Austin — all the cool film schools. But I think in general he wants a different geographic experience. I imagine he’ll probably wind up back in L.A. because he’s very much a California raisin.
Racket: With your son pursuing the arts, how does he feel having a rock star for a dad?
STT: He definitely hasn’t noticed that. It’s more like a really fun playground-slash-production facility. This is the recording studio. We make stuff here — Shudder to Think rehearses and records here, I do my scores here, our son’s band rehearses here. It’s all very lively. It’s like the fish that doesn’t know what water is.
Like, dude, do you even realize you’ve grown up in this environment?
Racket: Yea, with fifteen grand worth of guitars hanging on the wall behind you.
STT: Yeah, just to get ’em off the floor.
Racket: With the time between tours, was having a kid one of the reasons it was time to take a break and focus on studio work?
STT: That happened well before this point. Toward the end of Shudder — phase one, I guess — around ’97 or ’98, we felt a little rigid: write a record, record a record, tour a record, all the usual stuff. It was tough to cultivate community. I’m sort of a domestic cat; I like to make music all day every day, which is the one thing you don’t get to do on tour. You get to play for an hour or two. I just really wanted to be making music all the time.
I just wanted to be making music all the time. All of us in Shudder to Think are all big film nerds, so we started transitioning into film and TV before we broke up. We needed to separate for a while, but it was really just a continuation of what we were already thinking and feeling.
Racket: You’re big movie nerds – I am not – I usually see a movie for the score or sound. But generally, I have terrible taste in films. Starship Troopers is up there.
STT: Dude, you have wonderful taste in movies!
Racket: I usually like sci-fi with haunting soundtracks. I loved Arrival and Interstellar. Dunkirk sound was great. What’s your most unpopular favorite movie? And what composers do you look up to?
STT: I don’t know, I love my taste in movies. I don’t know if it’s unpopular, but Saturday Night Fever is one of my favorite movies ever. Some people used to tease that, but I think that was just for the disco aspect.
Racket: I mean, it’s not Armageddon, but it’s good.
STT: Gone in 60 Seconds, The Rock, all those Jerry Bruckheimer movies. I love good American trash.
Exactly. And in terms of composers, Nino Rota — who did all of Fellini’s movies. Big, bold, weird, beautiful. When I first heard it in college, it rearranged my musical DNA and I am forever grateful. Our son just watched 8½ in his film history class, so we’ve been talking about Fellini and Rota and all that stuff.
Racket: After all these years and having that first Shudder rehearsal, did it feel like time travel?
STT: It was really crazy. We had it right here. Generally taking things sensibly, gradually. No three-year plan, let’s just get in a room together and see how it goes. Within ten minutes, it was on. A lot of laughter — a bunch of monkeys hanging from the rafters making weird rock music. Fortunately, Nathan’s son Nils is 15 and a total shredder, so he can teach us our songs if we forget where our fingers go.
Because I mostly work in a studio environment, and don’t do a lot of touring, most of my singing is just into this little mic over here. And I would just do bits and pieces as I am putting together for a movie or TV show. The singing for Shudder to Think is very muscular, I was curious what my “adult voice” sounded like. Turns out, it’s all still there — the original thing. That’s how everybody felt. So it was sort of a no-brainer.
Racket: Was that the biggest muscle memory surprise?
STT: Everything is muscle memory, and everything has come back pretty quickly. There are different levels to the muscle memory. First, it’s the songs, where in the body the sound is coming from, then the fucking lyrics. Then playing shows is a different kind of muscle memory, moving your body in a different way, you’re sort of completing this circuit with a room full of humans. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle — at first, you can’t tell what it’s supposed to look like, but then gradually, the pieces start gathering together, and you think, “Oh, I’m seeing it,” but the pieces aren’t fully clicking yet. By the time we hit New York the other day, it was like, boom. There it is.
Racket: When you revisit a record that’s 30 years old, do you ever want to tweak it. It must be hard with multiple decades of extra experience under your belt.
STT: Clint, our new guitar player, and I were just talking about this. It’s an interesting thing, for a long time, when I listened to anything I have written before, it would flip flop. Sometimes I’d be like, “Oh, that’s so lovely,” but usually I was still, taking mix notes and taking song writing notes like “Change the chorus. don’t enunciate so much, that lyric is, you know, too flowery”. Whatever it is, somehow recently, I don’t know if it’s because of this sort of renewed appreciation for Pony Express Record, or if it’s just because we’re doing new stuff now, so it feels like a continuum. It doesn’t feel like it’s locked in amber now, it feels very much alive. But now I can laugh at it. It’s like looking at snapshots of yourself at different ages — I wouldn’t change a thing.
It’s like. It’s like looking at that, snapshots of yourself at different ages and stages and I think as a parent, maybe you can relate to this. It’s sort of like. We almost see our younger selves and the things that we made then from like a parental perspective and like, I don’t have any criticism of my son, you know, it’s just like your perfect baby with all your craziness, I wouldn’t change a thing. And that’s a, that’s a I think that’s sort of the moment that we’re in right now.
Racket: Definitely. Even watching my kid be a different person at six than he was even six months ago is wild and it just builds on everything before. My wife and I have been writing a song about our kid called “Every Version of You.”
STT: Oh my God, that’s that’s cool. Dude, I swear to God, I have that title in my, in, like, a note or something very similar. Oh, man. In a note from when Lennon, our son, from when he was a kid. Right. And I just keep, like an either hundreds and hundreds of just, like, titles for things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I need a title and one is Every Version of You. I’m pretty sure it was some very close to that. I can totally relate, is my point.
Racket: Yeah, watching them grow is surreal. One second, you’re checking if they’re still breathing, the next they’re building Lego instruments.
STT: Exactly. Our guitarist Clint just had a baby a month ago, so he’s right back in that phase.
Racket: If Pony Express Record were a movie, what genre would it be?
STT: Sensual horror with a healthy dose of black comedy. maybe even body horror, but, like, definitely also fun and funny.
Racket: Pitchfork called the album “sinister and gleefully self-aware.” How self-aware were you when you wrote it?
STT: I mean, we are self-aware, but not I think people at the time thought we were somehow being arch or, what’s the word like? Wink, wink. we’re never ironic. We’re always dead serious. But there’s always a lot of humor in what we did, you know? But but we went full tilt. so I think we were self-aware, but not ever at arm’s length, which was very different from a lot of bands from the 90s who sort of, you know, their, their stock in trade was a kind of removed even some of my favorite bands from the 90s, but that that’s just never been part of our thing. So sometimes I think people mistook absolute commitment and a weird kind of sincerity, for. I don’t know, cheekiness.
Racket: Was there ever a review that stood out — best or worst?
STT: Yeah, I remember, I mean, I don’t remember the exact reviews, but we really got lambasted. I mean, people really, if they didn’t like us, they fucking hated us. and we were like, you guys, this is not important enough to elicit this level of negative emotion. Of course, if somebody loved us, we’re like, “Yes, of course, we welcome you, we love you,” but, we were very polarizing.
I think less so now, which is so great because we can just get about the business of making our music, which was really kind of all we ever wanted to do. Of course, as people lambasted us and got upset. It was so ridiculous and hilarious to us that we ratcheted up the provocation, particularly when we were opening for bands whose audiences, you know, I mean, it was like, the reactions we got from people were so disproportionate. But then at the same time, the positive reactions we got from people were, were also great. So, you know, sort of it was sort of a love hate thing,
Racket: With having spent so many years now composing and scoring the other people’s stories. how’s it feels to, to take the stage and it being your story.
STT: Again, very interesting. I was thinking about that as we were performing last week, and that was one of the jigsaw pieces that needed to come together for me, because at first I was like, we had these songs, but I don’t know, like as a, as a story or as a theatrical experience. And I don’t mean that in like a grand way.
Just when you when you see a live performance, there’s a ritual and theatrical aspect to it. And at first I was like, I don’t remember what this is. And then and then within a couple of days, I think it was just about like, remembering how to move and how to relax and when to relax and when to connect with somebody in the audience.
It started feeling like it was turning more into, you know, the kind of story I like when I go to great concert, you know, hopefully a great concert. but it’s obviously radically different. In fact, it’s sort of the inverse of, film and TV scoring, where you’re absolutely in service of the story and taking notes from other people and you’re in a band when you’re making music, especially when you’re young.
it’s a big fuck you to all that. It’s, we’re we’re serving our story and our pleasure. and so I think everybody, because there are three full time composers in the band now, me, Nathan, Jherek, and Adam and Clint do some of that too, that there’s such a release and relief and it was, it was just really something we all needed to sort of, you know, balance it out.
Racket: There’s going to be times where you screw it up. It’s not the final recording. You don’t get a do over, but you also don’t have to worry about, you know, the sync cues and yeah, the specific length. If your song goes over 10s, that’s like who cares?
STT: That’s right. It’s ours to play with. We get to be the writers, the directors, the performers, and, you know, the puppeteers.
Racket: What’s your favorite key for a sad scene?
STT: E minor or that sort of D7 thing. That’s maybe more… bittersweet. My fingers just go there.
Racket: And for a joyful one?
STT: You got C. Always C.
Racket: You mentioned, you know, as a youth playing in this band versus now what is, what is the difference in physicality? I think that so many of us when we were teenagers like, oh my God, 50 is soooo old, but like I’m 44. And other than needing (legitimately) a hip replacement soon, I feel great.
STT: We were talking about this last week. Jherek’s like 6 and a half ft tall, so he’s got, like, a lot of gravity that he’s dealing with. So, for him, it’s like his feet for me. I was warming up the other. I’m like, what’s going on? There was some weird knee stuff. but in general, it’s more just like, I guess I’m pacing myself differently, which maybe was not something I would ever have needed to think about as a teenager or in my 20s.
Just in terms of, like when I can bounce around and jump up and down, like if it’s before a big chorus, then I probably shouldn’t do like a bunch of cardio going right into it, because then I’m a little out of breath. Need a lot of support for those big choruses. but I also imagine that the more we do it, you know, we’ll sort of find our grooves. It’s just been a minute. Yeah, it’s more just about like comfy but stylish shoes.
Racket: Yeah, comfy shoes are the new rock-and-roll.
STT: Totally. There’s a whole backstage conversation about it — “You can’t wear your Hokas on stage!”
Racket: The bio said that we should be expecting a new record. How different is it to write a record that’s your story versus something that is far more emotive without lyrics?
STT: Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. And something that’s foreground music as opposed to background music. it’s great. I, you know, the truth is I never stopped writing songs and I never stopped writing. Started to think songs. A lot of them went into a folder. Occasionally they would show up in my solo records, but so it’s quite natural.
I find it to be highly complementary. In fact, this week between the tour legs, I’m finishing up a new movie. You know, David Wain, Ken Marino, right?
Racket: Yes!
STT: So, so right before we got on, I was working on, a cue for this movie, which is sort of a hybrid. There’s a lot of hybrid stuff. So there’s like, I wrote a few songs, I wrote a ton of instrumental stuff, and then there’s these, this stuff that bridges the two throughout the movie. so I don’t know if I personally speak for myself.
I don’t know if I make that distinction quite so much between like, this is a song and this isn’t a song, it’s sort of a it’s sort of fluid that’s in, it’s so nice just to, just to be in process with Nathan and Adam and Clint and Jherek working on these songs and knowing that we’re all on the same page, just wanting to make great music and to write great shorter songs.
It’s really very exciting. You know, we have so many, like, bullets of just, you know, riffs and verses and choruses and even whole songs just like folders filled with demos. It’s more it’s really more a question of the time. Figure out the time. Tetris and logistics of it, because everybody’s got lives and wives and careers and, you know.
Racket: Every time I think of David Wain, I think of the Searching for Santa Stella skit.
STT: One of my favorites ever! That’s my litmus test — if you can hang with Stella, we’re ride or die.