There is a real strength to having a positive attitude and being able to see the joy in almost any situation. “I feel like there’s a kind of cheerfulness that I choose or want to live with or live under. If I can choose what tent I’m in, I want it to be that if I can,” says Nada Surf frontman Matthew Caws.
Caws credits his sleepy mother during road trips who would wake up at the most mundane of moments only to exclaim about the beauty she was seeing, despite having missed the actual pretty parts of their road trips.
Nada Surf will perform at The Heights Theater on Friday, April 25 for the fourth portion of their Moon Mirrors tour with support from their good friends The Cle Elum, a band made up of Sarah Sargent Pepper and Ian Lee who have worked with the band as merch slingers and tour bus drivers for years.
“I’m super psyched,” says Caws from his home in Cambridge before beginning the tour. “The audiences have been so kind to us and it’s always a good time and a good vibe. I’m never happier than when I get on stage, that’s the best mood I’m ever in is after doing that.”
Nada Surf has been riding the waves of positivity and making music together for over 30 years. They’ve seen the ups and downs of the music business and maintain a kind of optimism and joy in their presence and music that is not always easy to come by.
Though the band met while everyone lived in New York many years ago, now all four members are quite spread out with Caws in England, bassist Daniel Lorca in Spain, drummer Ira Elliot in Florida and keyboardist Louis Lino in Austin.
“On a practical and financial level it’s disastrous that we live so far apart,” laughs Caws. “However, nineteen million years later, we are still together and that’s got a lot to do with it. It’s not the being away from each other, it’s just us all pursuing our lives and doing whatever we needed or wanted to do for our hearts or families or whatever it is that took us in different directions.”
Caws and Lorca met way back when they were just six years old in Brooklyn. As teenagers they ended up at the same school and went to see Elliot play in his garage rock band The Fuzztones.
They became a band and after passing on a demo to cars frontman Ric Ocasek, released their first album High/Low produced by Ocasek. High/Low was well received commercially and the band had a huge hit with their satirical single “Popular.”
After being dropped from their label at the time, Elektra, the band members took day jobs and found ways to keep working on and releasing music on their own. During those years Caws worked at a record store which he relates to attending “rock college” as he surrounded himself with music.
During this time he even sold a few of their own albums to customers, a trippy experience no doubt. “It would also be a fun psychological thing that happened where I would remember that I was in a band,” laughs Caws.
Nada Surf have gone on to make nine albums with their latest release Moon Mirror being their first release on New West Records. “New West has been amazing,” says Caws. “It’s been really great so the label had a big part of it,” he says of the bands re-emergence into venues across the world. Caws clarifies that while he and his bandmates don’t really sit around thinking about themselves, he can’t help but wonder if there is an innate curiosity about a band that has stuck around this long.
“It does cross my mind once in a while that at some point you must graduate to some legacy, been around forever group because I remember even when I was a kid, the stuff that had been around longer you just wonder about it. It’s like seeing a beat up guitar it’s like, where has it been?”
Wherever they’ve been, with Moon Mirror, Nada Surf keeps the party going while offering songs that remind the listener about the importance of staying present and being open to whatever life may bring to the table. “There isn’t a theme to the records but that is a theme probably to all of them,” agrees Caws. “It is the theme to me, it’s true.”
The first single from the album “In Front Of Me Now” was written after a particularly disappointing experience where Caws accidentally overflowed the bathtub in his home causing damage and requiring repairs.
The experience really drove home the importance of staying engaged with what one is doing and not spreading oneself so thin that nothing really gets done with effort while sitting in the unique human experience of shame and guilt.
Caws began writing Moon Mirror at the end of the pandemic, getting up before the sun and before his mind was filled with the noise of the day to work on his writing.
“I could go into the living room when the family wasn’t up yet but most importantly, I wasn’t up yet and the clock wasn’t up yet and I hadn’t wasted the day yet and there wasn’t a day to waste yet and there were no rules because it was non time and it was fantastic,” says Caws.
For the band, this mindset along with their dedication, hardwork and trust in one another has kept them able to reconnect easily to work on new songs and keep performing together.
“I’m so glad we had those years early on where we all lived in the same neighborhood and that was great. We really enjoyed that and I’m hoping to a certain extent that some of that is a ghost memory that still works because we don’t play together as much as we used to but we’re hoping that some of that glue was established early on and hopefully is permanent ish,” says Caws.
Caws remembers performing at Fitzgerald’s back in the day and was disappointed to hear that the venue and it’s whole vibe are gone but no matter what stage they take, the band is ready to rock together in Houston again. “It feels great when we step on stage together, I just love it. It’s like a great animal waking up, it’s amazing.”
Nada Surf will perform with The Cle Elum on Friday, April 25 at The Heights Theater, 339 W 19th. Doors at 7 p.m. $24-38.
