Last year delivered the first new Grandaddy in 11 years, but it appears there’s a bit more in the coffers from Jason Lytle and company.
Arriving today is a solemn new track called “Bison On The Plains”, a cosmic composition Lytle says was expected to be included in 2017’s excellent Last Place LP, but it had some “baggage” that needed to be worked out. That baggage has been sorted out and claimed, thankfully, because it finds the California band sounding as fresh as ever.
“Setting out with the intent of replicating the ‘feel and vibe’ of the song ‘Drive’ which is one of my favorite Cars songs …I got a little of the way into ‘Bison on the Plains’ and realized I had failed,” Lytle says. “I blamed the lame new spot I had set up my studio in Portland Oregon. In the basement of some super pretentious magazine lured by cheap rent… I just really was not feeling it. I stopped working on ‘Bison on the Plains’ and cursed my new studio location and immediately began disassembling everything …eventually moving out and setting up all my gear in the living room of my little house in Portland. A recent divorce and a purging of all domestic belongings/furniture made setting up all of my gear easy and convenient. This location also ended up being where I wrote and recorded most of Last Place, the most recent Grandaddy album.”
Lytle continues: “Anyways… I thought ‘Bison on the Plains’ might make the cut for Last Place but it did not. Apparently it still had some baggage carried over from whence it came. I loved the words though… and didn’t want to give up on it… so it simply got shelved in some incomplete form until I could come back and spend some more thoughtful time with it. So here it is. It sounds as if the words are about the melodramatic lengths I go to… and methods I employ… to frame an image in a song. Almost jokingly. But respectfully. Like all of the noises, sound samples, buttons, keys, circuits, wires, strings, and gear it takes for someone like me to facilitate the lonely looking image of a solitary bison standing out on the open plains.”
Lytle says that he has “no regrets of being a songwriter that cannot simply just pull this off with an acoustic guitar and some lyrics,” adding that he needs his “tricks of the trade” to finish these types of jobs.
“Im just relieved,” he says, “I got the song out of that dank basement and out into the light.” Listen in below.