The Salt Collective

The Salt Collective: 

a Supergroup featuring Matthew Caws (Nada Surf), Mitch Easter (Let's Active), Chris Stamey & Gene Holder (The dB's), Lynn Blakey (Tres Chicas), & Rob Ladd (The Connells)

 Special Opening Set by Sneakers

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This album was written and composed with a sword of Damocles over my head. A sharp sword. The kind that makes you consider the wind’s caress on your cheek a gift from heaven. That life force has been directly injected into these tracks that you are looking forward to listening to. From this threat came hope, from this threat the music became a wonderful wall. This album is also a tangible proof, if not scientific, at least emotional, that dreams sometimes come true in life. All the fantastic collaborations on this album are a testament to that. Working with such talented people makes you learn and grow. Some say it’s hard to work with people you’ve admired for a long time. Here, it has been an immense pleasure thanks to their humility, their kindness and their competence. We rediscovered with passion the essence of music, a common language, a vector of emotions between human beings.

Life goes on, they said. They were right.

- Stéphane Schück

Salt is a Paris-based collaborative music project led by French guitarist and songwriter Stéphane Schück. Around a core group formed in the 80s with Benoit Lautridou (drums) and Fred Quentin (bass), Salt offers songs based on guitars and melodies. The first collaboration goes back to the year 2000 when Stéphane Schück and Scott Miller (Game Theory / Loud Family) met in San Francisco. From this luminous meeting with one of his idols will be born several projects including the common writing of a dozen tracks, 4 of which will be found on the posthumous album of Game Theory, supercalifragile. In 2016, during recording sessions for this album at Abbey Road Studios in London, Stéphane Schück met Anton Barbeau and Ken Stringfellow who would be associated with Salt's debut album "The Loneliness of Clouds". Released in 2019, the album contains 10 tracks, summarizing the common influences of members, from the Beatles to XTC, the dB's, REM and Game Theory.

The album received good reviews in the press:

In a Power Popaholic review, SALT was called "a power pop supergroup that skipped under the radar". Kopp suggested: "Now add a previously unknown quantity: Schück's high quality songwriting. The result is a must-have for fans of the better-known musicians. Somehow quirky and straightforward at once".

The Big Takeover's Michael Toland recommended the band to "aficionados of guitar-based melody and singalong choruses", adding that "songwriters Schück and Barbeau are plainly incapable of penning anything that doesn't have hooks" Toland described SALT's debut album as "a bucket of the kind of catchy, slightly psychedelic power pop you'd expect from these folks... "

Babysue wrote, "With a lineup like this... you can bet there's no way things couldn't sound rather fantastic." Pointing to XTC, Game Theory, and The Beatles as the group's main influences", the reviewer added:

"Perhaps most surprising is that many of these songs remind us very much of Split Enz (a band whose music we have always admired). Schuck's songs have smooth hummable melodies and cool subtle hooks. Barbeau's vocals sound fantastic (as always)... The Loneliness of Clouds possesses everything that's good about modern underground pop".

In Stomp and Stammer magazine, Glen Sarvady called The Loneliness of Clouds "a solid set of lite psychedelia well suited for fans of the Paisley Underground or Dukes of Stratosphear. The harmony-rich mid-tempo procession gives equal play to guitars and keys".

In 2020, SALT collaborated with the French rocker Dominic Sonic, to record the track "Combustible Heads" at Ferber studio in Paris

In 2022, a new album is in the works with an international "supergroup" collaboration between SALT and their guests Matthew Caws (Nada Surf), Matthew Sweet, Juliana Hatfield, Richard Lloyd (Television), Anton Barbeau, Susan Cowsill, Mitch Easter, Matt Douglas (Mountain Goats) and Chris Stamey, Peter Holsapple, Gene Holder and Will Rigby (the dB's). Recorded at Fidelitorium (Kernersville, NC), Ferber Studios (Paris), and Modern Recording (Chapel Hill, NC), as well as at artisan studios. This new album is produced by Chris Stamey.

Chris Stamey- who was hired to take on the producer role for the album wrote:

In the midst of chaos, upheaval, and uncertainty, the impulse to make art remains strong. Matthew Caws sings of having “found asylum [on] this hillside,” and in many ways this recording project became a similar place of sanctuary for an extended musical family during a time when we didn’t know what new calamity the next day might bring. Life persists, hope remains. Always, it was helmed and inspired by the ceaseless optimism of Stéphane Schück, who shepherded and cheered each stage of its circuitous evolution.

As early as 1918, in Paris, surrealist André Breton and his compatriots had begun to play a creative parlor game they (being, as I said, surrealists) mysteriously called the Exquisite Corpse. A poem or drawing would be passed from hand to hand, added to, modified, thus taking on the diverse flavors of a community of like-minded but disparate writers or visual artists. Each adapting to what had come before, but none knowing the whole picture. Two decades later, American friends including John Cage, Virgil Thomson, and Henry Cowell created music using the technique. And artists have continued to use variations of EC for collaborative, often consequentially surrealistic theatrical and literary works. 

Now three longtime friends, Stéphane Schück, Fred Quentin and Benoit Lautridou, the core of Salt, have done something similar, also from Paris, a century later. They wrote instrumental parts for songs, then passed them off to selected, sympathetic fellow songwriters, asking them to create words and melodies without any instruction beyond perhaps an evocative title. And these were not simple tracks, the music twisted left then right, splashed into dissonance then back to linearity. A recipe for chaos and disconnection? That’s what I thought! . . . until I tried it. For some reason, melodies were magnetically drawn to these cinematic, energetic songs. It was Ouija board stuff, the pen moved itself, voila. And Matthew Caws, Matthew Sweet, Peter Holsapple, Anton Barbeau, all clearly found this also to be true. As a twist, Salt even handed off their instruments, to another guitar-bass-and-drums trio, Gene Holder, Will Rigby, and Peter Holsapple of the dB’s, for about half the record, giving them only demos, letting the instrumental tracks be interpreted without any further input. The lyricists sang many of the new collaborations themselves, but were most charmed to have others given voice by the dulcet tones of Juliana Hatfield, Susan Cowsill, Pat Sansone, and newcomer Faith Jones. And although Stéphane played most of the many many many layers of guitars here, he was not the only one: Richard Lloyd (everyone’s six-string hero), Mitch Easter (likewise), Matthew Sweet (same), Gene Holder (an ace), and myself added our own electric touches as the project went along. From North Carolina, Leah Webster’s cello became a distinctive flavor, as did Laura Thomas’s massed violin tracks and Matt Douglas’s velvet flute and sax garnishes. These high-end additions were woven around truly stellar and sometimes surprising bass lines from Fred and Gene (to name just a few, “Dream Inside Me” and “Where the Wild Things Are,” for the former, and “Making It Up As We Go Along,” for the latter). And all was held aloft by the simultaneously precise and fluid drumming by Ben and Will. Zooms, emails, file uploads, a pandemic: there was a lot happening around us that André Breton didn’t have to face in Montparnasse parlors. The studio flooded in Knoxville, Tennessee, but Richard persevered; Pat in Nashville kept an eye peeled for tornados; Stéphane was no stranger to hospital corridors; Juliana darted out from under Boston blizzards . . . there were many obstacles along the way. But the essence—artists connecting through art, working together to make something flow out of the ether—remained. And although the parallel with the surrealists’ parlor is not a complete one (we had no absinthe onboard, for example), “exquisite” does seem to apply. Of the many surprises along the way, perhaps the biggest one, for me, is that this exuberant record is so full of joy. But I shouldn’t have been surprised, really: That’s the very stuff of life, that from which it springs.