Underwear, a.k.a. Nick Grunerud, is one of the most prolific musicians in New Haven, producing five full albums of original music in the past year. He also performs steadily, recreating live what appears on the album — and also showing that it really is a performance, as he builds, manipulates, and then disassembles the songs before the audience’s eyes.
The Independent visited Grunerud last Friday so he could show us how it’s done. It turns out the music comes out of a dynamic mix of improvisation and planning, strategy and whim, to produce something catered to the audience he’s playing for, whether it’s people sitting quietly in an art gallery or dancing away the New Year.
As an electronic musician, Grunerud could just program everything in advance and sing along. And some elements of the songs — drum loops, riffs — are preprogrammed: “80 percent,” Grunerud said. “You have to have a foundation. I used to do all improvised performance, but sometimes when you do that, then it’s bad.” Though “it can be cathartic in a way,” he added.
Though some decisions are left for the moment. “I think especially with music, there need to be some things on the fly,” he said. “I leave room for things to happen, because it’s boring to me playing the same song.”
In that sense, Grunerud is re-creating for himself what a live band does. A band gets together to practice and learn songs well, but then leaves plenty of room to change things up at a show. “I’ve played 10-minute songs for three minutes, and four-minute songs for 10 minutes. I think it just adds something — it keeps it exciting if you can change it up,” he said.
As it turns out, the improvisation includes the lyrics. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
For the Indy’s “exclusive song,” he joked — it doesn’t have a title (yet) — Grunerud set up a few pieces of equipment that he called a “minimal setup.” First was a Casio CTK-6200 keyboard. “I got it used at Guitar Center,” he said. He particularly liked the keyboard’s pitch wheel, which lets him bend notes and get at pitches beyond and between the standard pitches on a keyboard. “Now I can add things that I’ve been wanting to add for five years,” he said.
Next was a Pocket Operator from Teenage Engineering. “It’s was the easiest thing to use” for the glitchy, low-fi sound he often goes for. “The reason I use a lot of old gear — or at least old by electronic music standards — is because newer gear is designed to be obsolete.” That is, changes in software and hardware can oblige musicians to constantly buy new gear due to compatibility issues. Meanwhile, a piece of gear like the Pocket Operator is “just a quarter-inch out,” that is, it’s as easy as plugging in a pair of headphones. It also had a set of sounds that he particularly liked, and likes to manipulate. “And it was cheap,” he said, with a laugh.
The next pieces of gear were an RC-30 Loop Station, which, as the name implies, lets Grunerud record and play back sounds on the fly. All of it is run through a series of effects that Grunerud can deploy at the touch of a button. Finally, of course, is a microphone. And a mixing board that lets him adjust the volumes of the various elements as needed.
With the gear hooked up, Grunerud was ready to go, and performed. Click on the video above to see the performance. After the song, Grunerud watched his own performance, and explained what he was doing.
0:00 – 1:42: Grunerud fed the musical elements he wanted to use for the song into the loop station, using the keyboard and the microphone. But this process for Grunerud is also part of the song, an introduction. “Most of what happens is deliberate.” But even here, there’s room for happy accidents. “If you’re using the microphone, then it picks up things from that environment,” Grunerud said. “It’s a wholly organic experience,” he joked.
It took him a while to learn how to do this quickly and efficiently. At first, the process wasn’t as deliberate and things would go wrong. “Sometimes the keyboard would fall over,” he said. He “definitely used up some loop pedals until they were burned pretty bad.”
The loop pedal has a natural decay to it — the more the sounds in the loop pedal are looped, the quieter they get. Grunerud uses that to his advantage, layering in the sounds he wants in the background first. “When I use the loop pedal it only has two channels, so I go back and forth and build on each channel. It’s harder for me but I think it’s more exciting.”
Use the natural decay in the loop pedal to his advantage. “I like that. The old things get quieter and go out, and I enjoy that.”
1:42 – 2:38: With the elements in place in the loop pedal, Grunerud could start in with the preprogrammed parts of the song, then add even more. “I definitely wait until all the pieces are together, because the pieces have a distinct start time. I have to make sure all the pieces are together and succinctly put in place,” Grunerud said. Though at the same time, “I try to change it up as much as possible.”
He’s a trained pianist, which helps. He bought the keyboard in part to be able to keep up his skills. “The new music I’m making is already better than the last thing I made, because I have more tools,” he said.
2:38 – 3:05: Grunerud’s lyrics and melody are totally improvised. “Sometimes it works good. Sometimes it’s bad,” he laughed. He employs the some process for lyrics when he makes records as when he performs, with one caveat: “I improvise the lyrics, and if the lyrics are bad, I just do them again,” he said.
But not when performing. “That’s why sometimes my songs just have a looped phrase, and I can harmonize them.” He has an older song called “Never See Me in My Car Again.” “Those are the only lyrics to the song,” he laughed.
3:05: With a pass through the first verse, he added more drums. “This song I’ve been practicing for a few days,” he said. so that was planned. But “the keyboard part here is a little different” than what he had planned, “because I forgot” what the specific phrase was.
3:15: The electronic flourish, created with a couple of layered effects, was also a split-second decision, but very much in keeping with the style Grunerud has developed. “I knew I was going to do that. But I also didn’t know I was going to do that,” Gruenrud said. “If you’re a musician — or a farmer — you’re going to do things a set way. You’re going to do it your way.”
3:18: “Clearly I just improvised” the second verse, Grunerud said, laughing again, “because I said ‘can’t gurn back.’ I would never have written that down. That’s part of the reason I improvise — sometimes what comes out is funny. So I might say ‘I can’t blern furkies.’” And if he likes it, “that’s the new lyric.”
4:01: After playing a keyboard solo, Grunerud hit the loop pedal to capture and be able to loop the last bit of the solo. This was part of the plan — it would be one of the elements that he could build on in creating a multilayered ending to the song. Over the next minute and a half, these layers would include stacked vocal harmonies and vocal percussion.
5:50: Finally, Grunerud brings the song to a glitchy conclusion. The sound was a “byproduct of what the loops sound like” when he turned them off quickly. “If you loop things, you have to end it that way,” he said, though he discovered that he liked the sound of it, rather than something gentler. It’s part of the style of his music. It was part of the song to put it all together at the beginning, and it was part of the song to take it all apart again at the end.
And thus a new Underwear song was born.
Grunerud’s style allows him to make music very quickly. “If Columbia Records hired me to make 80 songs a day, I feel like I could make a living,” he joked.
He considered the possibility of adopting a slower, more deliberate approach to making music. If he slowed down, “maybe I’d edit better,” he said. “But I just want it out.”
“I release my music for free,” he added. “Steal my idea. I don’t care.” He’ll just make more music.
Underwear’s latest album is Live With Your Possibility. Check it out here.