Courtesy Chromatic PR
Audio By Carbonatix
The pandemic meant Tim Kasher never set foot into a proper recording studio for his fourth solo effort, Middling Age.
“Most studios were shuttered,” he says. “And if studios weren’t shuttered, then you had to know someone who was doing it under the radar. So I just worked with musicians who just do their own stuff.”
The Omaha-raised and Los Angeles-based Kasher wraps his current tour – what he describes as a quick loop around the country – at Summit Music Hall on Tuesday, May 31.
Kasher gathered a large ensemble of musicians to work with remotely for Middling Age. Jayson Gerycz of Cleveland-based indie-rock band Cloud Nothings recorded the drum tracks; Laura Jane Grace from Against Me! provided a verse on “Forever of the Living Dead”; and members of one of Kasher’s other bands, Cursive, offered up trumpet and cello. His nine-year-old niece also appears on the record.
The cast is expansive, and it was a recording method brought on by necessity. Kasher hopes to never have to record this way again.
“You can get away with it because of how advanced ProTools has gotten, and everyone’s gear,” he says. “But it’s not something I’d want to do in the future. I definitely would want to get back in the studio for the next album.”
He says the lyrics to Middling Age were written prior to or at the start of the pandemic. That crossover made him realize how quickly the pandemic had an effect on him.
“We all know it was one of the most abrupt shifts that we’ve had in our lifetimes or life experiences,” he says, “to be all of a sudden in an actual lockdown. Songs like ‘Forever of the Living Dead’ and ‘100 Ways to Paint a Bowl of Limes’ were written in the months following the start of the pandemic.”
When writing, Kasher says, he tries to convey an honest take on his life experiences. That’s why he chose the title Middling Age for the record. The album tackles a variety of topics, including a “fear of losing loved ones, feelings of personal stagnancy and uncertainty, sweeping self-evaluations, and a sense of unrelenting disquietude,” he says.
​​It’s a record with meticulously crafted instrumentals, and literary, thought-provoking lyrics that are melded together by a slight sense of sadness lurking beneath the surface. In spite of that touch of melancholy, however, the songs have a certain whimsy to them, and the album never becomes too heavy or takes itself too seriously.
“I felt a lot of the record was about feeling a certain stagnancy of ending up in your forties and not sure what’s next, and feeling the weight of mortality,” he says. “With every decade, we feel the heavier burden of mortality.”
Kasher adds that a song like “What Are We Doing” is less about mortality and more about how strange it is to live in a first-world society such as the United States. The lyrics paint a picture of the collective shrug as we recognize how messed up the country really is, but fail to come up with any answers about how to improve anything.
“Even the most progressive liberal people still shop at Target,” Kasher says. “Just keep reaping the benefits of this society when there’s so much inequality. It’s staggering. And even the song is kind of a shrug, right? It’s just like, I’m pointing it out, but that song is not going to move the needle or change anything.”
Kasher considers “You Don’t Gotta Beat Yourself Up” as the most personal song on the record, and for a time, he pondered making it the opening track and calling the record “Life’s Work.”
“I was going to kind of frame everything around that song,” he says. “As more songs were written, everything just kind of kept shifting. I ended up tucking that song into the album and giving it a different title.”
He says the lyrics are based on trying to answer questions he’s asked himself: “What am I? What’s my plan in this life?”
“I also kind of mixed in my ongoing white American citizen guilt I have about the fact that we stole this country that was Native land,” he says. “We barged in, and we continue to imperialize and colonize in one way or another even if it was as obvious as it was 300 years ago.”
He says that touring again when live music resumed was novel at first, but he feels like he’s back in the swing of things now. Kasher adds that for some musicians, playing live is everything, but he likes to strike a balance between that and working in the studio. He did miss playing live shows, though, and he’s learned to not take them for granted.
“It’s nice to have contact with people,” he says. “I mostly avoided doing livestreams, but I did do livestreams, and I actually tended to feel more nervous doing those, because it’s so weird. You are alone in a room, but you’re connecting to people, I guess. Kind of. I’m not ready for it.”
Tim Kasher, Summit Music Hall, 1902 Blake Street, on Tuesday, May 31, 6 p.m. Tickets are $25 and available at ticketmaster.com. For more information, visit timkasher.com.