With a Porchfest blowout and a new album release, Guster is back in a big way (2024)

Music

The band, which formed at Tufts in 1991, just released their ninth studio album, "Ooh La La."

By Emma Furrier

May 18, 2024

Alternative rock group Guster have a lot to celebrate. Just over 30 years into their career, the Tufts University graduates now live far from the city where they built foundations, but the home they found in Boston will always stay with them. Most recently, they wowed Boston audiences as they concluded their “We Also Have Eras” tour at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, and played a memorable, albeit hectic and short-lived, set at Somerville’s Porchfest last weekend.

This year, Guster celebrates the 25th anniversary of their seminal third studio album, Lost and Gone Forever. They will return to Red Rocks on Aug. 1 to play the album in its entirety alongside the Colorado Symphony, as well as at their annual On the Ocean festival at Maine’s Thompson’s Point.

Amidst the reflection of anniversaries and career milestones highlighted on their tour, Guster are here to remind you that they are no nostalgia band. On Friday, the group released their ninth studio album, Ooh La La, and they’re preparing for a string of career-topping shows.

We spoke to founding member Ryan Miller from his hotel room in New York City as he prepared for a performance at Carnegie Hall for the Crosby, Stills & Nash tribute show in which they would perform with Todd Rundgren. After three decades of Guster, they have shown no signs of stopping.

The following interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Boston.com: This has been quite the year for Guster. This past weekend you played a show at your old stomping grounds, Aberdeen Road in Somerville for Porchfest. You drew an unbelievable crowd. How was this experience? How did it come to be and how did it play out?

Ryan Miller: We’ve known about it for a long time. Porchfest started after we left Boston. We left Boston decades ago. We only stayed in Boston for four years after college, but we lived on Aberdeen. We wrote our album Lost and Gone Forever there. Our office is in Somerville and our managers live there, so we’d been trying to figure it out. I think we were trying actually in 2020 and [the pandemic] kind of screwed it up. So it was always on our radar to try and do it.

The spirit of the event is awesome. I love Somerville. We’ve played a bunch of shows in Boston over the last couple years and I’ve spent a bunch of time here. Every time we play Boston, it’s hard to not contextualize the whole narrative arc of the band. And we just played at MGM in March and selling out that room and thinking about where we came from …

But this [Porchfest] was really a much closer thing, it didn’t require much leaping of the imagination to be like, “Oh yeah, we were in that house and we were parking our van right here.” We had an answering machine where you could call the band and were doing our mailing lists out of there and doing some of our bigger songs from there. I wrote our song “Happier” upstairs, and that was a big song for us… But we got a lot of positive feedback from people who hadn’t seen us that just thought it was kind of cool. It’s very on brand for us to do that kind of stuff. I was really happy it worked out.

It’s a testament to your fans as well. And it’s maybe even more of an inclusive experience than sometimes going to an actual concert can be. There is an image that is circulating around now of a fan holding a baby across the road as they watched your set, decked out in Guster merch. It must be those full-circle, generational moments that feel the coolest. You’ve grown alongside your fans and now your music is being carried on through new generations.

Probably about five years ago it started happening. I would talk to a grown woman and they’d be like, “I’ve been listening to you since I was 5!” Oh man. But we have a festival that we do every year in Maine called On the Ocean, and kids tickets are $20. We’re all parents and our kids are growing up on it. It’s very easy for me to contextualize this because I’m a fan of bands too. There’s music I’ve grown up alongside and there’s people I meet that I just think, “Oh wow.” When people say to me, “Thank you for your music” or “I grew up on your music,” it’s not a cognitive leap for me to figure out why that’s meaningful for them because that has meaning for me very deeply.

You’re celebrating a lot of milestones this year. It’s just over 30 years of being a band, the 25th anniversary of Lost and Gone Forever, and this Friday is the release of your new album, Ooh La La. While reminiscing about Guster’s origins so heavily this year, how has that influenced the next era of Guster music?

We’re pretty focused. I think one reason we’re still a band and at the level that we’re still a band— we’re headlining Red Rocks again and we sold out The Ryman in a day, and just played at MGM and play all these festivals. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that, even though it could be tempting, we tried not to and never really had any interest in being a nostalgia band. Like, of course we’re playing the 25th anniversary of Lost and Gone Forever, that’s nostalgia in a way, but we’re also playing CBS Saturday Morning with three new songs that we’re really proud of. I think there’s always sort of been gas in the tank with the band for challenging ourselves and changing our sound and keeping ourselves interested.

We didn’t do anything super radical, but after Lost and Gone Forever, Brian stopped playing percussion which was a signature part of our sound. We played new instruments and we’ve had new band members come in twice. I think we’ve been really lucky that our fans have hung with us through a bunch of different sonic changes and as we’ve gotten older. And with this new album … You always want your fans to be happy and you want to consider them, but not antagonize them just to antagonize them, especially the depth of support that we have. We also feel like we need to keep growing as performers and as songwriters and musicians and storytellers.

You had a Boston-exclusive album release party where you sold your CD prematurely to fans attending the MGM show, three months before its release. This is quite the trust exercise to hand your album over before release date. What made you decide to do that?

Where would anybody ever leak it? Napster doesn’t exist anymore. Does anybody know how to torrent an album? [laughs] Yeah, there was a little bit of a trust fall there. It’s the same reason as the Porchfest idea, conceptually it was like, “This is our hometown. These are our biggest fans.” The Eras tour was kind of a love letter to the fans because it told the story of the band in this theatrical framework. The whole thing is very lovey-dovey, it’s a big warm hug. And the idea of us doing a CD release party just sounded kind of stupid and fun and it all came together.

You are always doing things that are unique to yourselves and creative and fun for the fans, so that’s something that keeps them coming back year after year. I was lucky to attend your show at MGM back in March and it was a smash. Dividing it into acts and creating your own theatrical play-concert hybrid, I can only begin to imagine how much time and energy you put into preparing for a feat like this. How was the show conceptualized and executed?

We’re always trying to find reason to compel people to come to our shows. I don’t think it’s enough right now to be like, “Cool, Guster’s on tour in support of their ninth album and you’re gonna see them play again.” Some of our fans have seen us 25, 50, 100 times.

We started futzing with it a bit in an improv comedy tour with our friend Connor Ratliff where we kind of did stuff that was really weird acoustic and we didn’t know how that was gonna go. The orchestra shows feel like they re-contextualized the band in a cool way. Brian listened to a lot of pop radio with his kids and really loves Taylor Swift and was like, “We should just do an Eras Tour!” The second that he said that, it all came spilling out.

I’m working on a musical, so I’m already in this world of theater and I had this idea independently. I was like, “Dude, we should tell the story and play the songs in order.” Brian worked on the script for a lot of the winter and basically showed up with this 13-page script. We had talked about what things we wanted to talk about. We knew we had to talk about playing Red Rocks for the first time, how we almost broke up in the middle of Evermotion, our meeting and where we are now. I’m really proud of us because I hadn’t seen anything or heard of anything like it. It’s kind of fun to think of the band as an art project. Not that everything has to be gimmicky, but it was just a different way of presenting things.

We were really nervous. It took a ton of work and we had to rehearse and learn lines and hire someone to do our costumes. But it was really rewarding. It was an unequivocal success. Even on our worst nights it worked, and I think we just kind of knew that no matter what, it was a love letter to our fans. We’re just now booking the second round of it and we’ll go hit a lot of the cities we didn’t hit the first time. I’m proud of us for the swing that we took. We’re empowered to do it now more than ever, which is cool when you’re 30-plus years in.

So much of your story was relived in the script of your show, but for fans who couldn’t attend, let’s dive into the Guster timeline. Tufts University, 1991. You and Adam started the band, at the time called Gus. What do you remember most or feel fondest about these early days?

I think those college years were really exciting because we were away from home for the first time and also, none of us are music majors. We all have liberal arts degrees. None of us were studying music, I’ve still never studied music. It was this fun hobby we were doing that started to have a life of its own. We would play in Harvard Square and sell our demo tape and then the CD that we made in ’94.

Our junior or senior year, it was like, “Wait, could we actually do this?” It was never an intention. People go to Berklee or music school. None of us ever had that in our heads. I was pre-med for a minute. But as the band progressed, I think it was really exciting to feel like if we made enough money playing shows, which we were able to do by the time we graduated, it could be our job. The audacity!

I think those first formative years, those first four years in college and also the first four years we were in Somerville living in that house on Aberdeen, was just that kind of Act I of any biopic. We learned how to build a community and have one form around us. We had these Guster reps at the beginning, which are ostensibly like a proto-street team, but no one had ever heard that term. They didn’t exist back then. That part of building the band and sleeping on couches and underneath pool tables, that part of the band was exciting because we were young and resilient and the whole thing was moving up.

You released your first two albums independently before you were signed. At that point, were you still in Boston and playing local shows?

Goldfly came out in ’97. We moved in the fall of ’99 actually. Brian wanted to move to Brooklyn, then I followed a couple months later to the Lower East Side. Adam was kind of meandering. We got signed in like ’97 or ’98 I think, to Seymour Stein, a legendary record producer who signed Madonna and The Smiths and Talking Heads. By ’99, we made the record with Steve Lillywhite at the Record Plant and that’s when it kind of felt like, “Alright, now we’re getting our shot.”

1999 brought Lost and Gone Forever, which is celebrating its 25th birthday. That was your first record you put out while you were signed to that deal and it gained you a bit more mainstream attention. Around this time, you switched up the band’s sound. Brian switched from bongos to drumsticks for the first time and you added bass guitar. What stands out most to you about this time and making these changes to reinvent your sound?

After we made Lost and Gone Forever with Steve, Brian was tired and just wanted to groove a little bit more. We were scared a little bit. It was a very big part of our sound and our live show. But ultimately, breaking things in that way allowed us to get to a different level of songwriting. The record after that was Keep It Together, which was also a lot of people’s favorite record and it has some great songs on it. We still play those songs all the time. We thought that as long as we kept focused about what’s good about our band, our melody and lyrics, we could still grow.

2020 brought forward its own challenges, and you navigated as many other artists did, trying to play the drive-in shows and feeling that loss of connection. Emerging out of it though, you reached some career highs like selling out Red Rocks, creating this spectacle of a tour, and working on your newest record. How did the band navigate these times?

I think a lot of what we came out of that with was a tremendous amount of gratitude that we’re able to keep doing this at that level. Even though it was just a dark time, and a worry if we were ever going to be able to play music again or if anybody would care about this stuff. It did turn out as almost the opposite in a way, I feel like a lot of people really relied on music during that time, trying to get them through. So when everything started to turn on again, it felt really special. It felt almost spiritual in a way, because that’s what music is when it’s really important. So I think that those couple years, and also outside the pandemic and what’s going on in general, the internet and anxiety, the places where we find refuge sort of emotionally can become even more important. And especially for bands that have been with you for a long period of time.

It was also very full-circle that you concluded that tour in Boston. But you’ve long been a fixture in Bostonians’ lives. You’re not from here, none of your grew up in the area, but New England has adopted you as their own. Why do you think that is?

It’s sort of weird because we started there and then we lived on Aberdeen for four years, so the first eight years we were a Boston band. It was definitely part of our identity. Luke and I live in Vermont, so there is that, and Adam lives in Maine, so we are a New England band in that sense. But I think it’s not really like where your address is per se. The Boston shows really felt like hometown shows. That’s how I could always feel like we could get away with saying we are a Boston band. It’s because those were hometown shows, that’s where we did our big CD release parties.

So you’d say then, that Boston made its way into the DNA of Guster? It’ll always be in you.

Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s what the Porchfest thing felt like. They wouldn’t let us play on the actual porch [where we lived], but we were looking at it. College is when we figured out that we could be a band and those next four years up until Lost and Gone Forever in ’99 when we moved, that was the DNA of the band. Whether or not we changed our instrumentation, there’s a through line between Lost and Gone Forever and Ooh La La. You can tell it’s the same band. Still us singing, still our melodies. So that’s when that kind of stuff solidified. That part is fundamental.

What are you most excited for in this new era of Guster?

It’s been nuts to have Red Rocks sell out so quickly and to have the Ryman go really fast. We have our festival and we play Newport [Folk Festival] and we’re going to play with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Ford. I’m excited, it feels like there’s a little bit of new momentum around the band. We hadn’t sold that many tickets in Boston inside in like 20 years. It feels like maybe people are reconnecting where maybe they lost, or maybe we’re doing slightly better at compelling people to come and check it out.

I’m also just really proud of this record and I’m really proud of the songs we wrote. I’m excited to keep writing — we’re learning so much about songwriting and performing and storytelling. It’s all exciting. Like I said, the eras thing kind of broke us in a sense and I think it’s really empowering us to keep getting weird.