Scroll back through the long discography of Guster, which plays Stamford’s Alive at Five summer concert on Thursday, July 23, and play a few tracks from any of its great studio albums — “Goldfly,” from 1997; 1999’s “Lost and Gone Forever,” produced by Steve Lillywhite; “Keeping It Together,” from 2003 (the first Guster album featuring a drum kit); or even “Ganging Up on the Sun,” from 2006 — or sample your way through their long list of live releases and EPs.
There’s a recognizable sonic identity to Guster’s music: jangly acoustic guitars, or slightly distorted electrics, strummed forcefully or arpeggiating chords under Ryan Miller’s earworm melodies, Adam Garder’s airtight harmonies and Brian Rosenworcel’s steady rock beats and hand-percussion grooves.
“Evermotion,” Guster’s new album, produced by Richard Swift of the Shins and recorded at his Oregon studio, unfolds with more atmosphere: layers of dreamy reverb, synth-strings playing high drones, warm electric pianos and tinkling mallet percussion, soaring slide guitar figures and horns.
There’s a spontaneity and innocence to Miller’s lyrics on songs like “Kid Dreams,” where he sings, “So there I was, fifteen / stuck in high school, was no prom king / zoned out in a daydream / of a pretty girl, my own beauty queen,” over a loping, casual beat and major chords, which turn darkly minor for the next few lines: “I was too shy to talk / I was round and soft / all the kids would drawl: “You got some beady eyes, boy.”
“I wrote every lyric the day I sang it,” Miller said in a Spotify commentary that accompanied the release, “and usually the first time I ever sang the lyric is the track that’s on the record.” The new album is also considerably more psychedelic; “We’re starting the album with our stoner track,” Rosenworcel said about “Long Night.” “I could not get the drums right. It just didn’t feel good, I got stoned, and then we played it, and that was it.”
In the past, label disputes and production problems delayed Guster albums for months, even years. “We’ve had situations where we’ve had to record in chunks because the label rejected our albums,” Rosenworcel said. “We’ve had to add four, five, or six songs to the album and revisit things.”
The band’s first dark period came during the recording of 2010’s “Easy Wonderful,” when the band didn’t get along with producer David Kahne. “The way he produced was tearing us apart, and slowly we all started peeling away from the sessions,” Rosenworcel said. Later, with auxilliary band member Joe Pisapia producing, Guster eventually resurrected songs for the record.
With “Evermotion,” Guster faced a different kind of problem: What, if anything, did they have left to say?
“It’s hard to be in a band this long and still find ways to be inspired or to not just keep writing the same song over and over again,” Rosenworcel, a West Hartford native, said. “There’s definitely a feeling here that we have more places to go. … But I think with this record we broke through a wall, and now it feels like we all want to see what’s on the other side.”
“Evermotion,” Rosenworcel said, was the first time the band — original members Miller, Gardner, Rosenworcel and multi-instrumentalist Luke Reynolds, who joined in 2010 — wrote songs in a jagged way, with long breaks between sessions.
“I think it took a long time for us to find the motivation, like, ‘What are we doing here?'” Rosenworcel said. “And then we realized: Oh, God, we’re stumbling across these great songs. It’ll probably have to happen that way the next time, too. There’s inertia at first, and then you have to realize: Oh, yeah, we’re on the songwriting vector and we need to keep going down it.”
Each song was created in a different way: Miller wrote “Farewell,” the last song on the album, in its entirety and brought it to the band. For “Long Night,” the opening track, and “Doing It By Myself,” the band jammed on song fragments, adding other sections and choruses along the way. “It takes months sometimes, and it takes minutes other times,” Rosenworcel said. “We don’t have rules. If it has a great melody, then it has a chance.”
Still, when starting a new record, there’ll always be a part of Guster that wonders if the songs are going to be there. Rosenworcel admits he’s amazed when they are, though he probably shouldn’t be.
“Maybe, as a band, we put in our 10,000 hours, and now we’re just good at it,” Rosenworcel said. “Or maybe, like with a lot of bands, if you don’t stay up on it, it’s going to atrophy. I know a lot of my favorite bands, like Wilco and Spoon, the Strokes, or whatever: I’m less into their new material, and I don’t want that to happen to us, although maybe a lot of our fans would have a hard time embracing ‘Evermotion.’ But I feel like we’re all aware of what we’re achieving and where we’re going, and I think regardless of whether it connects with people or not, we have to keep homing in on a classic record, which is ultimately Guster’s goal.”
GUSTER performs at Columbus Park in Stamford on Thursday, July 23, at 5 p.m. as part of the Alive At Five summer concert series. Admission is $10. Information: stamford-downtown.com.
