Doug Martsch

Douglas Martsch was born on September 16, 1969, in Twin Falls, Idaho, and grew up mostly there. He loved the Pixies and the Replacements and the post-punk of the day: “There was always the idea that regular people making music didn’t have to be good, as long as you had good ideas.” His first band, Farm Days, had Andy Capps and Brett Nelson in it, two names that come back later.

After high school he joined three older players from the Boise hardcore band State of Confusion, Scott Schmaljohn, his brother Pat Brown and the drummer Wayne Flower, and in 1988 they formed Treepeople. In 1989 they moved to Seattle. Martsch didn’t care much for grunge, but the band fell in with several scenes, from Capitol Hill’s Squid Row to punk shows in Bremerton.

Treepeople’s second album was the last made by all four founders. “It was all written when we moved to Seattle and we were practising like crazy,” Martsch said. “To me that’s Treepeople.” The band hoped its Sub Pop connections would lead to a deal, but the label passed, and after Flower left later in 1991 they signed with C/Z Records for Something Vicious for Tomorrow and Just Kidding.

Homesick and tired of the road, Martsch went back to Boise after three years, to his girlfriend Karena Youtz, and began writing songs he thought would be Treepeople songs. He knew he was finished in the band when he heard they were auditioning other guitarists. Treepeople made one more album without him and broke up in 1994.

Martsch formed Built to Spill in Boise in 1992 with Brett Netson of the space-rock band Caustic Resin and the drummer Ralf Youtz, and they recorded the would-be Treepeople songs that autumn. He told Spin that he meant to change the line-up for every album, with himself the only permanent member. The name came from a phrase invented in a game like exquisite corpse that he played with his wife.

The first line-up lasted only a few shows. Through the band’s early years Martsch worked day jobs, tending bar and mowing lawns, and the family lived in a trailer.

In 1994 Martsch started a side project with Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening, the founder of K Records in Olympia, with Ralf Youtz on drums. Johnson’s baritone and Martsch’s high voice are so far apart that, as one description put it, “each seems to inhabit a completely different song.” Trouser Press called the album “a sampler of extraordinary diversity” and “a stack of strange gems”.

The Halo Benders made two more albums for K, Don’t Tell Me Now in 1996 and The Rebels Not In in 1998, the last produced by Phil Ek and more polished than the first two. They came back for a pair of shows in Boise in 2007 and a benefit in Olympia in 2010.

For the second album Martsch brought in his junior high friend Brett Nelson on bass and Andy Capps on drums, both from Farm Days. The songs hang loosely together around growing up: playing seven-up with a grade-school crush, a stepfather who looks like David Bowie (made up), a town called Twin Falls. Karena Youtz is in several of them. “Reasons” is a love song to her, and “Cleo” is sung from the point of view of their child in her womb.

“That was the last record when I was able to make music without thinking a lot of people would hear it,” Martsch said later. The band played Lollapalooza in 1995, and that year Warner Bros. signed them to a three-album deal that left Martsch a large degree of creative control.

Martsch signed with Warner because it gave health insurance to his family, including his newborn son. Then he made the songs long on purpose, seven of the eight running past six minutes, so radio would leave them alone. “I didn’t want us to have a hit,” he said. “I was a little nervous that we might accidentally have a hit, and that our music would be shoved into people’s faces.”

The album was recorded three times. On the first try Martsch played everything but the drums, and only “Made-Up Dreams” survived. The second, with Nelson and the former Spinanes drummer Scott Plouf, was ruined when the tapes were left in Ek’s pickup truck and the heat got to them. The two failed versions cost $20,000, and it was Calvin Johnson who talked Martsch into trying again. By the time of the tour he could barely bring himself to play the songs.

Burned out on building long songs, Martsch set out to write short ones. Many began in a week of jam sessions in Boise that ran up to five hours at a time, with a foot pedal that started a tape machine; afterwards he combed the hours of tape for parts he liked and built them into songs. Nelson and Plouf were now permanent members, partly because it was easier than teaching new players the old songs.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it “the most immediate and, yes, accessible Built to Spill record.” It debuted at No. 120 on the Billboard 200, the band’s first real commercial success, and had sold 60,000 copies a year later. A live album followed in 2000.

The same trio made the fifth album, finishing it partly in the Manhouse, the studio behind Martsch’s house in Boise. It keeps to simple pop shapes. Pitchfork heard the closest thing to There’s Nothing Wrong with Love since 1994, with the sprawl of the Warner records cut away, and No Depression heard in it the country blues and plain playing of the solo album Martsch had already made.

Sam Coomes of Quasi plays keyboards, and opens “Strange” on the Rocksichord, his trademark instrument. By 2001 the band’s three Warner albums had sold 200,000 copies between them in the US.

Before he made it, Martsch had been listening to old country blues and folk he checked out of the Boise library, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and above all Mississippi Fred McDowell. “I took his tools, and his ideals,” he said. “All I did was put picks on my fingers and use my slide guitar, but play my own thing.” At first he thought the result “sounded crappy, and seemed sort of cheap and stupid”, until friends heard copies and liked it.

He wanted it out on Up. Warner would not let it go, and for a long while would not put it out either. Then the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack became a hit, and the label saw a link. “I’m sure the success of O Brother had something to do with it,” Martsch said, “but I’m not a fan of that at all.” It came out three years after he made it.

Built to Spill toured from 2003 to 2005, more than 150 dates, playing new songs as early as 2004. They recorded them in Portland in 2004 as a quartet for the first time, with the touring guitarist Jim Roth made a member. It was the first album since the debut without Phil Ek, and Pitchfork heard the band “casting off the usual meticulous guitar overdubs and studio polish in favor of a less refined, more spontaneous approach.”

It came out two years later, in a hard spring. In March Martsch had surgery for a detached retina and the band missed South by Southwest. On May 18 Andy Capps, the drummer on There’s Nothing Wrong with Love, was found dead at his home. When the tour resumed in June the band dedicated “Car” to him.

Martsch had always told interviewers that his lyrics carried no personal meaning. Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene heard this one “singing convincingly from the perspective of someone thoroughly humbled by loss”, and called it “an improbable late-career reawakening”. The only clue to the loss is “Pat”, two and a half minutes of anger for Pat Brown of Treepeople, with Scott Schmaljohn, Pat’s brother, on guitar.

It was the last record with Nelson and Plouf. Guests include Sam Coomes, the cellist John McMahon and Paul Leary, and there are horns, and on “Things Fall Apart” a mariachi trumpet.

“In 2012, I was a bit burned out on my ability to make new music,” Martsch said. “We actually recorded an album that year, and then we went on tour. The rhythm section guys quit the band, so we started over … it actually felt really good to start fresh.” In January 2013 he announced that Jason Albertini and Steve Gere were replacing Nelson and Plouf, who left on good terms.

He made the new album as a trio with them. It came out on vinyl for Record Store Day, almost six years after There Is No Enemy, the longest gap yet. In Exclaim!, Cam Lindsay called it “arguably the most enjoyable Built to Spill album since 1999’s pivotal Keep It Like a Secret.”

In September 2017 Built to Spill left Warner Bros. after 22 years, and in October 2018 Martsch went back to his first idea: a rotating cast of players for each record. On the band’s first tour of Brazil that year, he needed a rhythm section and found João Casaes and Lê Almeida of the psychedelic band Oruã. Despite the language barrier they clicked, toured the US together in 2019 and recorded new songs in Boise.

In 2019 Melanie Radford came in on bass and Teresa Esguerra on drums. “I never have a set idea in my mind of what music should be or what Built to Spill should be,” Martsch said. “For the most part, everyone I’ve ever played with has done their own thing.”

In 2017 Daniel Johnston’s booking agent asked Built to Spill to back him, with the band’s 1994 cover of “Some Things Last a Long Time” in mind. They played his last two concerts that November; Martsch called them “good” and “weird”. Rehearsing, they recorded his songs for themselves and their friends, and in 2018, at a session at Jim Roth’s studio, they decided to make an album of them, with Albertini and Gere.

Johnston died on September 11, 2019, before it came out, and the pandemic pushed the release back from May to June. “The songs just rolled right out of him,” Martsch said. “I haven’t been able to make that a part of my own thing.”

Casaes and Almeida recorded their parts in Boise at the end of 2019 and flew home to Brazil. Then the pandemic came, and Martsch finished the record alone on a computer, a way of working still new to him. “A lot of days, instead of making a record, I was looking on YouTube trying to troubleshoot to do some simple things in the program,” he said. His marriage to Karena Youtz, his co-lyricist since the early records, had ended.

Built to Spill signed to Sub Pop in October 2021. “I think I’m the first 50 year-old they’ve ever signed,” Martsch joked. Pitchfork called it “the first Built to Spill record in a while with new ideas”, made with a line-up that had already moved on by the time it came out.

Built to Spill toured When the Wind Forgets Your Name through much of 2023, with Radford and Esguerra, and that August Treepeople played their last shows, in Boise, Portland, Seattle and Bellingham.

In 2024 the band toured There’s Nothing Wrong with Love for its 30th anniversary, playing the whole album every night from Boise on August 9 to Sacramento on September 29. John McMahon, who played cello on the original record, joined them on stage.