Sporting an appropriately-labelled Anti-hero cap and gripping the table like it’s a piano he’s really cross with, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle is telling us of his shock at the glut of messages his band’s website was bombarded with following the news that, after 15 years, Grandaddy are to split.
“It all seems so grim,” he rues. “I mean, sure, it’s a big deal, but it’s not that dramatic. I’d been viewing it in a much more natural way. More than anything else, people were saying, ‘That sucks: think you can squeeze in one more show in our hometown?’ (There is no farewell gig, just a final album Just Like The Fambly Cat – HH.) I have to look at it like I’m doing everybody a favour. The band, myself, the fans... It would’ve been ugly. Grandaddy had run its course. And there’s power in knowing when to say stop.”
Still, for a man who’s spent the last chunk of his life saying ‘Go!’ it was a big decision. Songwriter, frontman, chief protagonist, leader, spokesperson... touring musicians aside, Jason pretty much is, or I suppose, was Grandaddy.
“Calling time on Grandaddy is not such a horrible thing,” he reflects. “This is a self-preservation tactic. The work was endless and there’s more of it for me than the rest of the band. I do the majority of the work making the records, it’s up to me to dole out the parts, then we go on tour and I’m frontman guy, every single night making sure the shows were good and the setlists were always changed. It really, really wore me out. A lot of it ended up becoming a little self imposed as well, because of all the chemical stuff... It became this whole other deal. We knew we couldn’t do it like that any more and no one was coming up with any viable alternatives.”
For Jason personally, sounding the death knell of the band also means finally getting the hell out of his home town of Modesta, a Californian backwater that has more in common with the mid-West than Rodeo Drive.
“Which for me is good!” he smiles. “I got stuck there because of the band and I remained there. It’s not a very healthy place. It’s very un-California. Cowboys, pick-up trucks, conservative, blue collar, it’s a long way from a cultural hotbed. I adopted this new theory that’s almost worse – it’d be better to be stuck someplace completely remote where there’s no hope of ever getting out, because Modesta is actually in California. It’s all within an arm’s reach, but it’s a little too far to make a day trip and it’s such a hassle you don’t bother doing anything. But you can still see it on the horizon.”
Jason’s love-hate relationship with Modesta inspired some of his band’s greatest music, so the fact that he’s currently moving to the “Swiss Alps of America”, Montana – a cultural light year away – should imply that his sound will take a different path as well.
“I’ve always said that I could leave and go away to some polar base in Antarctica and still make the same music just because I’ve lived and breathed it and it’s such a part of me,” he laughs. “Do I feel liberated or intimidated by the move? It’s freed me up to literally revise and have a new perspective on things. I haven’t had some weird spiritual awakening, I’m not going to go live in a cave; I haven’t lost my mind. It was time for a change. Most of our career was literally by the seat of our pants. It was one big long experiment and I think this is a positive ending... that’s the best I can come up with!”
He laughs in typically humble style.
“It’s all I’ve got!”