SPILL FEATURE: SONGS ARE JUST CONSTANTLY EVOLVING – A CONVERSATION WITH SPENCER KRUG

SONGS ARE JUST CONSTANTLY EVOLVING

A CONVERSATION WITH SPENCER KRUG

Highly prolific indie rock artist Spencer Krug, best known as a member of Wolf Parade, whose song “I’ll Believe In Anything” has seen a resurgence in popularity since appearing in an episode of Heated Rivalry, is back with new music. Krug’s upcoming solo album Same Fangs is composed of songs he hand-picked from demos he shared on Patreon throughout 2024 and 2025 as part of his song-a-month series. He picked a group of demos that he felt made the most cohesive statement and reimagined them in a studio setting.

“I am able to sort of try things out on Patreon to an audience that is very forgiving and very into hearing the songs another way later,” Krug says. “Songs are just constantly evolving, so the first thing that goes on Patreon is the first snapshot of the song. Then I pick ones that I really like and make another snapshot of them basically… I try to put something new up every month, and I am the first to admit it is not always my best work, but it is sort of almost a journal entry or a diary entry of like ‘This is where I am at this month. This is what I made musically.’”

The album opens with the ravishingly elegant “Get To Live.” Krug tells me he decided to start the album with this track as it is like an appetizer for the rest of the album. “There is a lot of stuff on this record that is songwriting about songwriting itself,” Krug states. “I usually don’t allow myself to step into that world as far as I have on this record, but I allowed myself a lot of liberties with that this time around, so it does get kind of meta.” An example of this meta storytelling is the opening, which features a voice memo of Krug talking to himself about “Get To Live” and “Hasn’t It Always.” “I am just talking to myself about how I basically almost threw that song away, but I liked the little riff that happened at the very end of it. I took that riff and made an entirely different song called ‘Hasn’t It Always.’ Then I was rewriting it at the time I made that voice memo. I was considering rewriting it for the record, and that’s what I was talking to myself about. Instead of trying to hide the fact that the end of that song is really closely mimicked in the beginning of ‘Hasn’t It Always’ by putting it way later in the sequence, I just put it right after. They tie into one another in a way that I think sounds cool. You can hear how the end of ‘Get To Live’ is the beginning of ‘Hasn’t It Always.’ That was a nod to songwriting about songwriting, and starting the record with that was to acknowledge that it is very much going to happen in this record.”

“Listening To Music In Cars 2.5 (All The Tired Horses),” which Krug describes as “really sad, beautiful, and ridiculous,” is an intricate, multi-layered song. “The whole story is absurd and is really only something that a very informed fan would get all the references,” he explains. “‘All The Tired Horses’ is one of the songs that we were playing on repeat in the tour van in 2023 on the Sunset Rubdown tour when the band first reunited. I had never heard it before – really fell in love with just its simplicity and how pretty it is. We were driving one night in the tour van after a show, and I had that song going on repeat… That was just one instance of us all listening to music together in the tour van and having the music bring us together.” After this tour, Krug returned home and wrote the song “Listening To Music In Cars.” Continuing, he says, “That was sort of my journal entry for that month, just celebrating the success of that tour and my gratitude for being friends with these people again. The song itself, ‘Listening To Music In Cars,’ which I posted on Patreon, which is not on the record, is not, in my opinion, a very good song… I liked the chords, though. The chords were based on an old Sunset Rubdown song called ‘The Mending Of The Gown.’ There is a chorus, and at the end of the song, the chorus is in a new key, so I took those chords and those transposed chords, and I lumped them together and made them into the song ‘Listening To Music In Cars.’ The lyrics weren’t great, so I never did anything with it.”

PURCHASE SAME FANGS

Krug returned to this song when Sunset Rubdown went on tour again to support their 2024 album Always Happy To Explode. “This time things kind of fell apart again,” he recalls. “Everyone still remains respectful and honest with each other, but and I’m a huge part of this problem too, the whole interpersonal dynamic of the band imploded again in a way that made me sad. When I got home from that tour, I thought I would rewrite the song I had written to try and maybe make the song better, but also to explore what had just happened with the band. It didn’t work. There was just nothing more to make out of that bad song. So I ended up writing a song called ‘Timebomb.’” Writing “Timebomb” helped him finish the other song, which he ultimately called “Listening To Music In Cars 2.5 (All The Tired Horses). “It is just the story of all that happening and then tagging on those [Bob] Dylan ‘All The Tired Horses’ lines to the end to sort of bring it full circle. There is sort of a meta, breaking-the-fourth-wall quality to the lyrics in that song. It’s like ‘Here’s the song I wrote. It’s based on this other song. Here’s why.’”

With “Real Long Headlock,” Krug explores the topic of political fatigue. “[It’s about] me getting so wrapped up and depressed about geopolitics in 2024 and 2025 and realizing it was having a bad effect on my life on just who I was,” he reflects. “I wasn’t becoming a bad husband or a bad father, but I was becoming maybe less present in a way that was scaring me. I had to reprioritize a little bit, take a step back, and look at what I was really doing and whether I was doing anything productive with this energy or just letting myself fall into despair.”

Elbow Kiss (Em Boreen) provided guest vocals for numerous songs, including “Timebomb” and “Berserker Mode.” “Their contributions are really transformative and really added something new to the songs, and always in a positive way,” Krug states. Krug, especially points to “Berserker Mode” as a song that was completely transformed by Elbow Kiss. “It wasn’t until Em sang on it and I heard their contributions and their harmonies that they wrote themselves when I knew the song was a keeper because they transformed it so much, and it just became so much prettier.”

Krug also worked remotely with a string player based in Russia named Maria Grigoryeva. “She arranged and performed all of her own parts,” Krug says. “I have never done that before – to work with a stranger and to trust them just entirely. I just threw the songs at Maria and said, ‘Do what you will,’ and she came back with what I thought was really great material.” Krug cites “Hasn’t It Always” as a song that Grigoryeva really helped shape. The first incarnation of the song had bass and synth. Krug wanted the album version to be different. “I thought I could take it to a place that was a little prettier and a little more elegant… I asked her to recreate the bass and synth using a cello and high strings, respectively. That is basically what she did, but she took it a little bit further. She just didn’t do it note for note. She embellished – added her own flair to the parts I asked her to recreate and made it much better.”

Krug is embarking on a tour to support the release of Same Fangs. Elbow Kiss will be joining him. “They will be opening all the shows and joining me on stage to perform a few of the songs that they sing on,” Krug says. “We have never performed live together, so I am looking forward to that.”

Same Fangs is set to drop on May 15. “It’s different than any record I’ve made before, but it is undeniably my work,” Krug says.

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Photo Credit: Simon Liem