Great Mac McCaughan Moments – Falsetto

I’m not going to walk through Superchunk’s album history again as I covered it in my 4-part series starting here, so I will summarize to say that their first 5 albums (plus 2 singles collections) were all manner of rockin’.

Foolish is generally considered the first big shift in direction for Superchunk, and while I definitely agree, t it was Indoor Living that gave me the first real WTF moment.

Indoor Living starts off very strong with Unbelievable Things and then moves into the moody but equally rocking Burn Last Sunday.  The album at this point is already establishing its own tone, one that is noticeably different from Here’s Where the Strings Come In but nothing too “out there”.  Then we hit the third song (start of song provided here).

I distinctly remember hearing the chorus or Marquee for the first time and thinking “what just happened”.  I believe I also laughed out loud.  Given that I was used to straining to make out the vocals that were generally buried in the mix, this felt like I leaned in and got a pie in the face.

Mac achieved a new level of confidence in his voice and in that Marquee moment defined a new era of vocal variation.  It definitely took a while to get used to Mac singing up in the high-end registers (as opposed to just shouting from up there), but classics like European Medicine, Cursed Mirror, Honey Bee or Portastatic’s I’m In Love (With Arthur Dove) and Oh, Come Down would not be the same without it.

Look to the side bar for other articles in this series —->

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