Except it’s a much brighter, poppier song than that description implies, with major-key riffs bombarding you from all directions and the rhythm section holding down a steady up-down undercurrent. Singing Chomsky-inspired lyrics about the futility of enacting large-scale change, Martsch resembles a man lost at sea, fighting for his life amidst the crashing waves whipped up by his band. The album hits hard from the very beginning, when “The Plan” comes careening in with a monsoon of riffs and strums. With Keep It Like A Secret, Built To Spill and longtime producer Phil Ek maintained that larger-than-life scope while bringing back in the airtight pop songs. One sounded like a measly kid staring up at the sky, dwarfed by the unknowable vastness of the universe the other sounded like God (defined by Marstch as “whoever you’re performing for”) staring down upon the same universe as it surged outward into infinity. With 1997’s Perfect From Now On, they pivoted to hi-fi space-prog epics that spurned conventional notions of length and structure. With 1994’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, the band presented punchy guitar-pop songs with scrappy production and a distinctly twee disposition. Keep It Like A Secret is a document of Built To Spill’s glorious guitar-slinging peak - and arguably the best possible Goldilocks-approved middle ground between the pair of disparate classics that preceded it. Martsch may not have lived like a rock star, but he definitely played like one. But theirs was not the trajectory of lifelong rock stars. The band was still playing events like one at Princeton called Bucks For Fucks, which Weisbard describes as “a university eating club party at which attendees dress as prostitutes or pimps.” Critics loved Built To Spill, they were making a living, and by the next album, 2001’s Ancient Melodies Of The Future, they’d even get a couple songs on the radio. Built To Spill’s previous album, the astonishing Perfect From Now On, had sold only 43,000 copies in two years. When asked why he and his bandmates lived so simply despite living off a fat major-label contract, Martsch replied, “We know it’s not going to last.

Author Eric Weisbard also mentions that Built To Spill were traveling without a roadie and routinely cramming all three touring members into a single hotel room, with one of them sleeping on a cot. Reportedly, this was a not-infrequent occurrence. He’d used the money from that contract to move his girlfriend and son from a mobile home into a house in Boise with a recording studio out back and was about to pay off the house - all this without ascending to the heights of fame that made life so complicated for Nirvana and other alternative-era heroes.ĭespite Martsch’s middle-class luxuries, that Spin profile - tied to the release of Keep It Like A Secret 20 years ago this Saturday - begins by explaining that he dressed and groomed himself in such low-budget fashion that he almost wasn’t allowed to enter the New Jersey Best Western where the band was staying because the staff thought he was a homeless loiterer. during that post-Nirvana era when major labels were lapping up every promising underground band they could find. Built To Spill’s singer, songwriter, and guitarist was still just 29 years old, but as recapped in this Spin feature, his largely excellent discography included “three albums with Treepeople, his caterwauling first band formed during the brief period he lived in Seattle… three more with the Halo Benders, a pairing with Beat Happening frontman and K Records guru Calvin Johnson and six with Built To Spill, including a rarities compilation and a Caustic Resin collaboration.” He’d also gotten Built To Spill signed to Warner Bros. By the beginning of 1999, Doug Martsch had already accomplished incredible things.

Built to spill keep it like a secret