Q&A: Superchunk's Mac McCaughan on the band's long-awaited return to Pittsburgh and more

It’s been 24 years since indie rockers Superchunk played a show in Pittsburgh, but vocalist/guitarist Mac McCaughan made a much more recent stop here.

“I was on a family trip recently, and we came through Pittsburgh like a month ago. We had a great meal at this place, Apteka. It’s a vegan Polish restaurant that’s incredible,” McCaughan said. “I’m hoping that we can get back there. And of course we went to the Warhol Museum. There’s just so much cool stuff there.”

The long-awaited return comes Sept. 16 with a show at Thunderbird Music Hall in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood, with Australia’s Tee Vee Repairmann opening.

As for the reasons for the delay, the band went on an unofficial hiatus after touring in support of 2001’s “Here’s to Shutting Up” before returning with 2010’s “Majesty Shredding.”

“We kind of stopped touring and putting out records for like eight years,” he said with a laugh. “So that was eight years right there when we weren’t really doing much except playing the occasional festival. I think that what tended to happen after that is that, when we would tour, we would be doing it in a different way than we had done in the past.

“Meaning, we’re not going to go out for six weeks at a time and just come back completely exhausted or whatever. So we’re kind of shortening the tours that we’re doing and just making them more humane, essentially. And so, Pittsburgh being where it is, unless you’re really doing the Midwest or venturing into the middle of the country in a van, it’s one of those places that becomes harder to hit like Ohio or Louisville or a lot of places that we didn’t get to for a long time.”

One goal for this tour, according to McCaughan, is to hit places they’ve missed for a while — like Pittsburgh — as well as cities they’ve never played in their 36 years together, like Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

While they’ll be able to scratch New Hampshire off the list, there’s still some work to do to hit all 50 states.

“I will have played a show in every state except Wyoming. Though Superchunk hasn’t played in North Dakota, I played a solo show there,” he said. “Superchunk will still have Wyoming on the list, and we tried to get a show in Laramie on this upcoming tour in October, and we just couldn’t find someone to do a show. So that remains not checked off, as well as Alaska and Hawaii, but we’re getting there.”

Superchunk is touring in support of their 13th album, “Songs in the Key of Yikes,” which came out on Aug. 22 via Merge Records.

“I think that it’s really gratifying when people are into it and people are ranking it in their top Superchunk records,” McCaughan said. “Usually people will say a record from the ’90s and they’ll say ‘Majesty Shredding,’ and people are comparing it to those records, so that’s very flattering.”

In a call from North Carolina, McCaughan spoke with TribLive about the new album, a change at drummer, caring less and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.

Is it important for you for the band’s new music to stand right alongside the early works?

It is just because in some ways it’s impossible because when you, if you’re – I don’t know how old you are – but if you’re my age, for instance – records that I heard when I was a teenager or in my twenties, those have a special power and attachment for me. So I think a lot of things have to do with the age you were when you first heard something, but just from a quality point of view and a songwriting point of view and just an excitement point of view, we want to make records that people still want to hear.

We want to make records that when we play live, people still want to hear songs from our new record. We’ve always been lucky with that, whether it was “What a Time to Be Alive” a few years ago or “Majesty Shredding” when we came back and started making records again, people have always been very kind and enthusiastic about the new stuff. So I’m hoping that with this record, it’s the same way.

With that live show, how do you balance the new work with the classic songs that people want to hear? Are you looking for a certain percentage?

It’s funny, I had a conversation with Lou Barlow about this because Dinosaur Jr. puts out new records and tours a lot, and when you have as many records as we do or as they do, yeah, it’s hard to find space in the setlist for everything that you want to play. You don’t want to bore people. You don’t want to play too many songs, so it’s just about striking a balance, as you said. So we’ll play a few songs from the new record, and then we try to fit in songs from all our other records, but we have a lot, so it becomes difficult to balance it out.

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This album also saw a change at drummer (with Laura King replacing Jon Wurster) for the first time in around 30 years, so how did that affect the record?

I think that it brought new energy to the record because Jon’s an amazing drummer, obviously, but by the time we made “Songs in the Key of Yikes,” we had been touring with Laura King on drums for a couple of years. So we knew how to play together. We knew what she could do. And we were just excited to get that on record. She’s a very exciting drummer, very hard-hitting like Jon and super propulsive. I think we were just excited to get that down in a recording and let everyone hear it because the people who’ve been seeing us for the last couple of years know how great she is, but it’s awesome to make an album with her.

I’ve read that “What a Time to Be Alive” could be looked at as sort of a protest against Donald Trump and “Wild Loneliness” as a response to the covid-19 pandemic. How would you frame this new album?

“What a Time to Be Alive,” we made that record before Trump was elected, but I think it was about just the rise and acceptance of white nationalism and authoritarianism on the part of so many people in this country, which is just so depressing. “Wild Loneliness,” we made during lockdown and I think it reflects that. But the new one, I think is more about how do you get through this time period? How is everyone coping? How is everyone checking in on each other? And trying to keep moving forward. So I think that’s really the themes of the new one. And just finding strength in your family and friends and hoping that that can get you through.

One of the lyrics in “No Hope” is “No hope, and here we are singing.” What’s keeping you singing during these times?

That’s been a question for a while now, like what good is art or what good is rock ‘n’ roll in the face of everything that’s happening? In some ways, the answer is I don’t know, but it’s kind of what we have and what we know how to do, so I don’t think there’s any great answers for that. But I do know that when I go see a band that I love and I’m in a crowd of people who are all enjoying the same thing, it does feel like that’s an important thing to keep doing, to be in a community of people who are sharing an experience.

I guess can you balance that sort of with the song “Care Less” – “I’m trying to care less” – but it’s hard to actually do that.

It is hard. It’s a little quixotic, that idea. I think that it’s in some ways healthy to try to care less what people think about you and worry less about that, and worry more about what you can do for people around you.