Drifting through our back pages prior to a chat with Luna’s Dean Wareham last week, we were mildly astonished to see that our last chat with the Kiwi-born, New York-bred guitarist/songwriter was almost precisely 18 years ago, a few days after Britta Phillips’ first gig with the band as a (presumably) short-term stand-in for bassist Justin Harwood, who had returned to New Zealand to attend the birth of his first child.
“Britta’s first night was great,” Wareham told us at the time, and subsequent nights must have been fairly great as well, as Phillips became a full-time member of the band, as well as a regular post-Luna collaborator with Wareham. And in 2006, the two were married.
A reminder like that of the years past and the now receding milestones in Luna’s history seem a shade uncomfortable for Wareham, who now concedes, in his typically understated way, “Yeah, I guess it did work out…”
It did, but a handful of years after that, frustrated by seemingly endless road work and raw-chafed interpersonal relations, Wareham and the band called it quits, as memorably documented in Matthew Buzzell’s 2005 documentary Tell Me Do You Miss Me. Wareham and Phillips went on to a low-key duo project and moved to LA. But, after some gentle prodding from an overseas promoter, they got the band together again for a few dates in 2015. Now they’re following up on a November 2017 tour (15 shows in 18 days — welcome back to the machine) with a second series of dates through the Western U.S., including a Fox gig on Tuesday, April 10.
But don’t call this a “reunion tour,” because that might suggest a big-deal, new release, triumphant re-emergence from creative stasis or wherever our favorite artists go when they get tired of entertaining us. Like their creative oeuvre, Luna’s return to the stage is pretty subdued, buoyed by the release of a short full-length album of covers (A Sentimental Education) and a six-piece EP of instrumentals (A Place of Greater Safety).
“I guess it’s gone on a little longer than we originally… planned,” Wareham muses, almost reminding himself that much of the last couple of years weren’t really planned so much as collectively improvised, responding to the whims of the entreaties of promoters.
“I’m not sure how we really thought of it, maybe more of a commemorative thing. We haven’t really had a band meeting to discuss all this, but yeah, I guess we’ll continue to do some more shows… The world is changing, the music business has changed. I don’t think we’ll ever go back to being like it was in the ’90s, where we made a record every year.”
Things are coming back, Wareham notes. Shoegaze is coming back, “bigger than ever” he suggests, but he’s clearly reluctant to tag Luna’s re-emergence as part of some sort of retro-nostalgia thing. With their gentle jangle-guitar balladry, wry and sparely succinct songwriting and evocative Velvet Underground textural reveries, Luna seemed to thrive in its own intimate ecosphere, insulated by grace from the grunge and angsty pulse of the 1990’s Seattle wave.
“I guess some of the reunions I find odd sometimes are those that are so identified with a cultural moment. Like punk reunions. Punk was such a break with everything that had come before, at least it presented itself in that way. And after that, everything has kind of gone back, you get kids in bands that sound like the Doobie Brothers. So what does it mean to… I don’t know, it’s all for John Lydon to confront, I guess.
“The ’90s, at least a good part of them, were really about the grunge/alternative years; we were not in step with that, really.”
While for their fans, any new material from the band is welcome, the fact that one album offering is all covers and the other is instrumentals, it has been noted that, really, Wareham isn’t offering any proper new Luna material.
But he is writing.
“I’m actually supposed to write an article for Pitchfork right now,” he says after a good chuckle. “Your kind of writing. It’s hard… I find writing like that very difficult. It’s hard to write about music, or do it week after week. I have respect for any writer, whether it’s a sports writer or music critic or historian; it involves a certain amount of bravery to it. Putting your opinion on a page. Someone’s going to get mad at you.”
Roger that.
And maybe the environs aren’t helping. Wareham and Phillips moved to L.A. a few years ago, abandoning New York to its own pitiless devices.
“I haven’t written many songs since I moved to LA. I’m a little worried about that. It’s too sunny.”
Riffing on the impossibility of love and mortality and related matters must be easier on a drizzly gray morning in Brooklyn than on a brilliant L.A. morning, with birds chirping in the trees.
“Yeah it is. But people manage to do it.”
But in all honesty, A Sentimental Education is likely to be as satisfying to the Luna faithful as anything from Wareham’s own pen. Luna has a long history of re-interpreting songs, stripping away the needless filler and lifting its lyrical content atop their humble pedestal of harmony and hushed guitar lines. They have always had a way of making a cover sound like it was written for them.
“Yes. We’ve always tried to pull it toward us, instead of trying to ape the original,” Wareham says.
That’s a sign of… we can’t decide, strength or limitation.
“Heh. Must be a sign of strength.”
And as the band is re-connecting with the toil of cramped traveling quarters and tallying nightly T-shirt sales, mindful of their fans’ advancing years (“We’re bringing more XL T-shirts out on tour — even XXL,” Warham says. “XXL is the new XL… ”), we wondered if Wareham had re-watched the break-up documentary recently.
“I watched it about six years ago. Britta and I were playing a festival in Calgary, and they had a screening of that movie. It was painful for me… It’s like at the end of a relationship, you have to convince yourself that it’s really intolerable.”
It was your “Let It Be.”
“Yes. Without the hits.”
On the Bill: Luna — with Flural. 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 10, Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder. Tickets are $35-$30.
