Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws: Music is ‘Just Wishing There Was a Better Place’

metroweekly.com:

When Nada Surf plays Arrowbrook Centre Park in Herndon on Saturday, their typical closer, “Blankest Year,” will not appear on the setlist.“‘Blankest Year’ has a chorus of ‘fuck it,’” laughs the band’s frontman Matthew Caws. “We always ask the audience to sing along with us, and we all sing, ‘fuck it,’ together.” But the Northern Virginia outdoor concert is free to the public and considered a family event, so organizers have politely requested the song not be performed.“I think it’s all right to be asked not to do that,” says Caws, congenial and relaxed on a Zoom call from his home in England.

The artist adds, however, that most of the band’s melody-infused hits will be on tap, including “So Much Love,” “Always Love,” and “Inside of Love.” He laughs. “It’s silly to have three songs with the word love, but maybe that’s all right.

Maybe it’s not silly at all. Maybe it’s good.”Formed in 1992 by Caws and childhood friend Daniel Lorca, the alternative rock group’s bassist, Nada Surf is known for its shimmering, catchy melodies and poetically resonant lyrics.

Never Not Together, the band’s most recent studio album, its ninth, was released in 2020 and is a string of nine masterworks that speak potently to the human condition, touching on everything from “differentiating between real and imagined dangers” (“Looking for You”) to finding one’s true soulmate (“Crowded Star”) to the reconciliation of gender through a child’s eyes (“Mathilda”).“Mathilda,” in particular, resonates with the LGBTQ community, in its message about how bucking gender norms, willfully or not, becomes a target for bullies on the school playground.