Nada Surf has announced today’s premiere of the powerful music film for “Just Wait,” one of many highlights found on their acclaimed new LP, NEVER NOT TOGETHER. An ambitious, evocative collaboration with award-winning filmmaker Mark Pellington (Pearl Jam, U2), “Just Wait” is streaming now at YouTube following its official premiere earlier today via
American Songwriter.
In addition, an official Deluxe Edition of NEVER NOT TOGETHER arrives at all DSPs and streaming services via Barsuk Records on Friday, November 13. The newly expanded collection is heralded by the brand new track, “Stories Going ‘Round,” recorded last year at the legendary Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, Wales during the NEVER NOT TOGETHER sessions and available now at all DSPs and streaming services. The deluxe edition also includes two other never heard before songs as well as versions of the hit “So Much Love” in French and Spanish. Complete track listing below.
LISTEN TO “STORIES GOING ‘ROUND”
“I wrote ‘Just Wait’ with Gavin Slate in Nashville,” says Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws. “I’d been thinking about what it might feel like to be a teenager or a young person in this era. To have one foot in childhood and one in adulthood has always been daunting, but I can’t imagine what it might be like now, with so much more information, and with more pressure to be something special.
“The phrase ‘just wait’ has been on my mind for years. I grew up with a slightly nervous and impatient nature, which I’ve had to learn to temper. I’ve had to learn to trust that anxiety passes. I’ve had to learn not to speak when upset, to wait for feelings to soften. In Zen studies, it is said that the right thought and the right action will come if you give them time.
“I’ve always been a great admirer of Mark Pellington’s work. We have a dear friend in common who connected us a few years ago, and I’ve been hoping to have the right project to ask him to work on. ‘Just Wait’ seemed right and I was thrilled that he was open to it. We got on the phone and quickly found that we had very similar ideas. When writing, the psychological setting I’d imagined was evening and night, solitude and quiet combined with inner crowdedness, a need to make sense of the busy world and one’s place in it.
“Mark was interested in expanding on a traditional music video, possibly involving some spoken text, and asked me what I was reading. My father Peter Caws passed away in April and I had been reading and re-reading his meditations, both published (The Book of Hylas) and unpublished. I shared these with Mark and he connected with them. I was open to using them in the film because while I think they do a better job of it, the spirit of the song is really to comfort and support, to help. Now we are in this pandemic era, this era that demands patience and calm. I wish the times didn’t match the meditations and lyrics so well, but they do.
“Mark’s vision of a sort of dystopian Los Angeles of the mind, with its beautiful and mysterious cityscapes, where we are all a silver traveler trying to find solace and direction, has brought the song to life in ways that I never could have imagined, though that is exactly the kind of place I was trying to find.
“I have been a huge fan and committed devotee of the band Nada Surf for many years,” says Mark Pellington. “I love to merge my mind with the soul and music of brave artists like Nada Surf, open to new forms of visualizing their music, and collectively come up with work, which expands the limitation of both music video and pop song into something deeper – structurally, sonically and conceptually.
“Matthew and I connected and we decided to collaborate together on this music film, a labor of love inspired by his late father’s Peter Caws’ profound meditations. The piece actually benefited from the corona virus as we really took our time, let ideas percolate, and did not feel a need to rush and make a product. Matthew is a very generous artist and let me interpret pretty freely. We really connected to the themes of the piece, and I was magnificently inspired by his relationship to his late father, the words he created and they shared. This meditative philosophical fabric served as the character’s fuel in the film. We gathered imagery and filmed globally in three cities: Cambridge (UK), Los Angeles, and Sydney. The construction and gathering of images was very free form, unscripted and completely motivated by the music. The loose idea of a silver clad faceless ‘traveler’ moving through these lights and image landscapes was conceived as a narrative through line, and this constant imagistic metaphor was captured in all three countries.”
Nada Surf’s ninth studio recording and first in almost four years, NEVER NOT TOGETHER was released February 2020 and includes the singles, “So Much Love,” “Something I Should Do” and “Looking For You,” all of which are joined by official videos streaming now at the official Nada Surf YouTube channel.
