Just to Feel Anything, the last album Emeralds ever released, had song titles like "The Loser Keeps America Clean" and "Search for Me in the Wasteland." A little over a year later, guitarist Mark McGuire is releasing his first solo album since the Cleveland trio split up (read one of the final interviews the band gave here ), and it kicks off with the gently percolating, one-two-three roll of "Awakening," "Wonderland of Living Things," and "In Search of the Miraculous." To call his Dead Oceans debut a "happier"-sounding album wouldn't be right; it shuttles through way too many moods, just as it's got way too much going on musically—including, but not limited to, vox, live percussion, piano and mandolin—to be described as the sort of drone-dude-with-a-guitar affair that his fans have come to expect from him. Still, there's a newfound hopefulness and openness to Along the Way, which follows a semi-autobiographical narrative McGuire included in the liner notes about one young man's quest for self awareness as he passes into adulthood. Stream the album here, and read an interview with McGuire about it below. Real talk: dude's got as many kernels of wisdom to share as this album has overdubs.

Stream: Mark McGuire, Along the Way



The last time we spoke, Emeralds had just released Just to Feel Anything. You guys disbanded shortly thereafter. What have you been up to since then? It’s been a pretty insane year actually—a lot of moving around. I was back in Portland for a while and I finished up Along the Way. That was almost a year ago. Since then, I’ve been collaborating with Greg Dulli from Afghan Whigs here and there; I played on a bunch of songs that are gonna be on their new record, which is coming out sometime this year. And I ended up moving to LA kind of permanently, and finding a place there that’s more than just a sublet. It was also kind of a purge year. Like, someone stole my computer at one of my shows in London, and I bought a new one, and like a month later, I was DJing and someone spilled a beer all over it and completely destroyed it. And I got back and I was bringing all my records down to LA, and something happened with my car, and the floor of the car started overheating and literally melted full crates of my records. I had to get rid of a bunch of stuff before I moved from Portland to LA just because I had too much shit, and then the stuff I brought didn’t even survive. I dunno, I’ve been trying to let go of a lot of shit this year. Even though I don’t like to consider myself a materialistic person, there’s a lot of stuff that I was more dependent on that I’d like to admit, and it was just waking me up to that. The computer and car stuff and all that happened, and it put me in this mindset of starting to think about the things again that are actually really important, and not to worrying about shit like that, even though it’s pretty intense.

So you feel like you’re in a very different place from when we last spoke? I feel like, yeah, a lot’s happened, you know? Putting in a lot of intense inner labor to create certain things—it takes it out of you. So it’s been assimilating that as the mode that my life operates in, which has been really great, but at the same time, I was forced to stop thinking about other things, and you get into your own sort of rat race, even if it’s not the typical rat race of driving into downtown and putting on a suit and tie or whatever and going to the office everyday. Your focus starts to get more and more narrow, or more and more personal and fixed and individualistic. So for me, I just started realizing that there’s so much more to life—there’s always more pieces to the puzzle. It’s kind of been just a slow process of waking up to that, and how that’s affected my life and my relationships and my outlook and stuff like that. So yeah, I’m definitely in a different headspace, but it’s been a train of thought that’s been going for a little bit.

Did that headspace rub off on the album at all? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, if you want to use the instrumentation as a metaphor, I was just working on solo guitar music for years. And it’s cool to have a thing like, “Oh, that’s your thing that you do,” but there’s a whole world of sound out there, and I’d gotten into this mindset where that’s not a part of what I am or what I do or whatever. And I started to feel like, “Why do I think that?” or “Why do I feel like that?” To be honest, when I started the record, I literally said to myself that there would be no boundaries in terms of what instruments I used, what it ended up sounding like, or anything like that. Whatever ideas and sounds came into my head, I would try to make happen, and I wouldn't worry about what type of music it sounded like or if it made any kind of logical sense.

What was the recording process like? My normal set-up is just recording guitar through a bunch of delay pedals, and sometimes adding vocals or more guitar later. On this record, I focused more on recording individual parts in separate layers, and building the entire thing, piece by piece. In addition to guitar, I used bass, vocals, live percussion, piano, keyboards, synthesizers, drum machines, and even messed around with sampling acoustic instruments, like santur and mandolin. There's a lot of layering of real instruments over fake versions of themselves. As far as where that took the sound of the album, I think my main thing was wanting it to sound full, and for there to be real harmony within the tracks. Using all these new instrument sounds made me realize how delicate the balance is once you get everything going, so I wanted everything to have a certain softness to it, even when it's kinda going off.