Superchunk: Foolish

The arrival of Superchunk’s fourth album, Foolish, in April 1994 accompanied significant changes for the North Carolina band that, nearly two decades later, have become indie-rock lore. First, Foolish was the band’s first full-length on Merge Records, the indie label run by guitarist-vocalist Mac McCaughan and bassist Laura Ballance. Now on its own away from Matador, which released its preceding albums, Superchunk had no label advance to fund the studio sessions. That made for a breakneck pace at Pachyderm Studios with producer Brian Paulson—17 songs in three days. As drummer Jon Wurster writes in the new reissue’s extensive liner notes, he stared glumly at a hat Kurt Cobain had set on fire during Nirvana’s In Utero sessions and thought, “I’ll bet those guys had the luxury of doing more than one take.”
But the story from Foolish that gets most of the attention is the breakup of the romantic relationship between Ballance and McCaughan, which informed the writing of the album. To what extent is a matter of debate: In Our Noise: The Story Of Merge Records, The Indie Label That Got Big And Stayed Small, guitarist Jim Wilbur dismisses the assertion that Foolish is Ballance and McCaughan’s break-up album. McCaughan backs that up: “Some songs start off about one thing, and by the end of the last verse, you’re in a different country,” he says in Our Noise. Wurster mentions the break-up in the liner notes, but adds he doesn’t know how much it informed the lyrics and that he didn’t “recall any awkwardness while touring.” He must’ve not understood why Ballance asked soundmen on that tour to take McCaughan’s vocals out of her monitor. “Because the words were making me cry,” she says in Our Noise. “I would be on stage, playing these songs, and I would be crying. It was terrible. It was a hard tour.”