Greg Saunier of Deerhoof has announced his debut solo album, We Sang, Therefore We Were, which will be out April 26 via Joyful Noise. It’s a total solo album as he wrote, recorded and played everything on it.
“When Satomi, Ed, John and I were chatting between shows in Austin in early December, they encouraged me to make a record on my own, as a way to cope with the restlessness I’ve been feeling,” says Greg. “It came together quick. Intrigued by the announcement that the new Rolling Stones record was going to sound ‘angry,’ I thought, ‘Good, I’m angry too.’ But when Hackney Diamonds turned out more like cotton candy than punk rock, I ironically went back to Nirvana: not just the clever melodies over massive distortion, but also that dark Cobain sarcasm which still resonates in this age of phony blue-check-washing of fascism.”
The first single from the record is “Grow Like a Plant,” which is funky, skronky and glammy at the same time. Saunier says it “addresses that annoying quirk of the homosapien mind where it thinks it’s made of higher quality molecules than the rest of the universe. For millennia civilizations managed to temper this suicidal arrogance with ritual. Until 500 years ago, when a handful of self-appointed experts invented The Enlightenment, proposing that men can solve any problem given enough brooding and/or physical violence; that the cosmos is actually nothing but an inert blob of matter for us to buy and sell. What if this is all wrong? What if it’s humans who are really the mindless instinct-machines, competing for territory, food, and mates, and it’s the plant and animal kingdoms that secretly know how to think and have fun?”
You can watch the video below.
Greg notes that this album’s announcement comes very near Deerhoof’s 30th anniversary. “It was 1994 and I was playing in a grunge band in San Francisco,” says Greg. “The two guitarists were literally living with members of the Melvins. Rob Fisk, the bass player, and I had been listening to an AMM CD at home and decided we wanted to give free improv a try. So we came to practice an hour early. That was Deerhoof’s first rehearsal. An hour later our two bandmates walked through the door with the bad news: Kurt Cobain had just been found dead.”
We Sang Therefore We Were
There Were Rebels
Front-load the Fun
Yeah You, Person
Don’t Design Yourself This Way
Furrowed Sugarloaf
Rip the Atmosphere from the Wind
Grow Like a Plant
No One Displayed the Vigor Necessary to Avert Disaster’s Approach
Blame Yourself
Instead of Queen
Not for Mating, Not for Pleasure, Not for Territory
Playing Tunes of Victory on the Instruments of Our Defeat