Much Of Built To Spill's New Album Stemmed From Sessions With The Halo Benders

Boise, Idaho outfit Built To Spill are survivors of the golden age of '90s indie-rock, having spent nearly a quarter-century now crafting beautiful, textured songs with a propensity to melt into extended cosmic jams and coarse guitar squalls, all reliant upon the vision of frontman and founder Doug Martsch.

And while their recent eighth album Untethered Moon sounds defiantly like a classic Built To Spill record, Martsch explains that some of its songs date back to sessions he undertook with former side-project The Halo Benders, a detour he enjoyed throughout the '90s alongside Beat Happening singer (and K Records founder) Calvin Johnson.

"It just really didn't seem that there was enough time for me to focus on them as well as Built To Spill, so I kinda ended up joining the two together."

"Some of the album started that way, a handful of the songs," Martsch recalls. "Some of them were newer but definitely a lot of the ideas on [Untethered Moon] had been kicking around for a long time. I enjoyed playing with The Halo Benders a lot — we did three records and they're all pretty different and were different experiences — but it was always really fun playing with Calvin and the other guys, really fun.

"It was a real shame we couldn't get those recent sessions to fruition — we started working on new stuff but I kinda had Built To Spill stuff that I had to do, I dunno... The songs were sounding really good, it just really didn't seem that there was enough time for me to focus on them as well as Built To Spill, so I kinda ended up joining the two together."

Martsch explains that while Beat Happening were massively influential on the Northwest scene in the late '80s (where Martsch was based at the time) he wasn't hyper-aware of Johnson's stature when they joined forces.

"I was kinda late to [Beat Happening] — they were almost done by the time when I got into them, just after the last record came out," he tells. "I'd seen them open for Fugazi and liked them a little bit —  I thought Calvin was pretty interesting, but I couldn't really tell what the music was like. Then my old band Treepeople played a show with them while we were on tour in Austin in about '91 or something, and that's when I got really blown away by them. I'd heard a few songs here and there and liked them but after that tour I really got it. 

"As a band we weren't really into them that much, which is why a year or so later I asked him to collaborate in the The Halo Benders — we'd met him but we didn't hang out much or really hit it off in any special way, but I wanted to try to do some other music where someone else was singing and he was the first person I thought of and contacted and he was into it so off we went. I'd sort of imagined us doing something more electronic, to try and make more sample-based music and having him sing on it, but it ended up turning into a collaboration with other people and more of a rock thing. It was cool though, I really enjoyed it."