Fugazi On Fugazi
An album-by-album commentary from principal member Guy Picciotto
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As Fugazi’s latest studio album, The Argument, hits stores across the world, Nude As The News asked guitarist/vocalist Guy Picciotto for his insights on the band’s venerable recorded catalog.
The Argument, 2001
It’s a weird record, because some of the songs like “Epic Problem,” parts of it have been around since the dawn of time. But then things like “Life And Limb” we actually wrote in the studio. For us, it’s weird. We listen to the record and it’s almost like geological time passing. We can kind of see stuff that happened immediately and the stuff that is brewing in our heads.
“Instrument” soundtrack, 1999
To me, that’s the record I enjoy the most, to be honest with you. It reminds me of what it’s like for us to practice and the looseness of it. There’s something about making a record that’s always going to feel to me a little too considered. I don’t think the soundtrack is a definitive record, but it has a different feel so I can enjoy it. I really love “I’m So Tired,” the song Ian plays on piano. We recorded it in this wooden house up in Guilford, Connecticut, that his grandmother owned. The song reminds me of that hang. It was really fun.
Basically, we’d play during the day, take a break and go hit some batting cages, come back and cook, and then play again at night. We had a little eight-track setup in there. It was cool. We’ve done it a few times. Before In On The Killtaker, we did some demos up there that became that album, and before Red Medicine, we went back up there and did it. It became a routine for a little while, but we haven’t been able to get back up there.
End Hits, 1998
The thing I like about that record is the back cover, the picture of us in the mountains in Chile with our faces all blanked out. Things like that always remind me of hanging out. That picture was taken when we were sledding in the mountains of Chile outside of Santiago. People always think we’re standing in front of a poster, because the color of the mountains is so completely out of hand. It’s crazy red that makes it look like we’re on Mars. But it’s totally legitimately us there in that place.
Red Medicine, 1995 Of all the studio records, that was the one where I think we got a handle on, all right, we’re making a record, and it’s not just a blueprint of the live show. We put a lot of little practice pieces between songs. The record starts out with this really abrasive tape we made on a boom box with a condenser mic. I just love the sound of that beginning. It’s so fucked-up sounding. We did a lot of abrupt cuts too, like out of that and into “Do You Like Me?” For a lot of people, I think they didn’t particularly like the record. In “Instrument,” there are tons of kids ranking on it. But for us, it opened up for us that we could basically do whatever we want. To me, there are some really good songs on that record.
In On The Killtaker, 1993
That’s one we recorded a few times. We did demos at Guilford, and some demos with Steve Albini. The songs had been pretty well thought out by the time we recorded it for a third time. It’s pretty abrasive, and it’s got a lot of rocking songs on it, but there’s some interesting stuff on there.
Steady Diet Of Nothing, 1991
I think we recorded it right during the time of Operation Desert Storm. It’s the one we’re most ambivalent about, just in terms of the recording of it. The songs are cool, but this was the first time we really tried to produce ourselves. We were a little intimidated by it. We went in and were all looking at each other trying to figure out who should grab ahold of the steering wheel. Nobody really did, so, it ended up being kind of flat. But it’s interesting in retrospect. We were freaked out when Operation Desert Storm was happening, because we’d just come back to D.C. after a six or seven month tour. We were all pretty fried. It’s pretty ragged.
13 Songs and Repeater, 1990
Half of 13 Songs and all of Repeater was recorded really in a total basement. It was very, very small. The original Inner Ear [studio] was tiny. The first record, it’s the kind of thing where we were all really, really surprised by the reaction to it. The band was really just forming and we were still trying to figure out what we were going to do. People were so into it, it forced us to get serious pretty quickly. There really was a prolonged formation of the band. It took us a couple of years to feel like a solid group. By the time we got to Repeater, we’d done a lot of touring and we had a real sense of what we were trying to do.
JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"