Kentucky cult band Slint's classic album "Spiderland" turns 30 today. Rolling Stone Magazine reminisces. they were crazy kids who made a classic!

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they did a lot of stuff...i know them personally...THEY DID A LOT OF STUFF
 
rolling stones writes:

In spots, such as on “Good Morning, Captain,” which builds during seven tense minutes to a shattering, near-tearful catharsis, Spiderland can break your heart; in others, like on “Don, Aman,” a drumless dirge in which social anxiety seems to morph into something malevolent, it can chill you to the bone.
 
" Spiderland’s greatest legacy is not that it motivated a cluster of semi-popular bands in the late-90s and early 2000s to adopt its whisper-to-scream schematic. It’s the boundless inspiration it perpetually provides for all the bands that have yet to emerge from the basement."
 
i like this excerpt:
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“Brian seemed a little embarrassed about it when he played for me,” Pajo recalls of first hearing the lyrics for the final section of “Captain.” “I remember he called it ‘the crybaby part,’ and I was like, ‘Man, I love the crybaby part!'”

“It was noticeable that we had so few songs, but that we worked on them that much,” Walford says. “We liked doing it — we didn’t really think about it, or make an effort one way or another, but we did work on them a lot, and they would just expand. That was the magic of Dave’s guitar playing and Brian’s guitar playing and Todd’s bass playing.”

“It was just five songs,” Pajo says, marveling at how much time the band devoted to such a small body of work. “I never looked at it as being weird at the time, but in hindsight, who does that? I mean, unless you want to be like Captain Beefheart and lock yourself in a room and work on the same songs for a couple of years.”
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yeah, no kidding!
 
here's another crazy part:

Concern for a loved one also fueled “Washer.” The most obvious outlier on Spiderland, it’s built around a simple cyclical form and — for the first and only time in the Slint catalog — conventional singing, in the form of McMahan’s fragile croon. Even on a record that feels altogether warmer and more emotionally resonant than Tweez, it’s a startling departure.

The song takes the form of a goodnight address to a distant lover, encouraging them to make peace with their sadness (“Wash yourself in your tears/And build your church on the strength of your faith…”) and gradually taking on a more pleading tone (“Please, don’t let go/Don’t let this desperate moonlight leave me with your empty pillow”). Later in the song, over a tension-building interlude, the lyrics end on a note of dreamlike oblivion — “My head is empty/My toes are warm/I am safe from harm” — before the band comes crashing back in for Pajo’s screaming solo.

When he wrote the song, McMahan was thinking of his girlfriend at the time. He says that both she and he had dealt with mental-health issues in their immediate families, and that these had started to manifest in them as well. “We both experienced depression really early in our lives, and it was a feature of our relationship. I’m not going to say it was unhealthy, but it was something that we just had to deal with, and we were young and we were figuring it out,” he says.

After high school, both McMahan and his girlfriend moved away to attend different colleges. “We both pretty quickly felt isolated, got depressed, and there was a point at which I remember leaving Evanston, where I had been going to school, and getting on a Greyhound bus kind of spur of the moment to go to Madison, Wisconsin, where she was in school, because I was really concerned about her,” he says. “The lyrics or some of the tone of ‘Washer’ was definitely couched in a sense that, you know, we’re all fragile people. There were no illusions in her family DNA [that] being upset and expressing your feelings, even if it’s physically or through violence, was definitely on the table. … That sort of fear definitely led to some of that song in some ways. I was worried about her and I was worried about the idea of suicide, and physically I was not in the same place as her.

“And then on the flip side,” he continues, “the interlude, the quiet, more breathy part, it’s kind of the way I was taught to respond to intense emotion, or things that were not neat and tidy, just to kind of disconnect. That’s how I was raised: [Mock-stoically] ‘Emotions are bad, and expression of intense feelings is not appropriate ever.'”
 
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