Superchunk line up (l to r): Jon Wurster, Mac McCaughan, Jim Wilbur and Laura Ballance
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. The opening line of L.P. Hartley’s The Go- Between has been misused and retrofitted a thousand times, yet it serves an evocative purpose – as we look over our shoulders at the Polaroid hue of our youths, things get fuzzy at the edges. But for those who came up in the indie-rock boom of the early 90s, amid major-label bidding wars for out-of-the-way, Nirvana-adjacent punk bands, the sentiment might not go far enough.
“In a lot of ways, it feels like a different world,” Laura Ballance says over the phone from her office at Merge Records’ HQ in Durham, North Carolina. In a few months, the label will celebrate 30 years of music – including canonical releases by Arcade Fire, The Magnetic Fields, Spoon and Neutral Milk Hotel – with a bash featuring stars past and present, including Ballance and co-founder Mac McCaughan’s band, Superchunk.