Jason Lytle: "Brand New Sun"

Of the decade’s many unfortunate band breakups and retirements, none saddened me more than the unexpected end of Grandaddy. It’s acceptable for a group to dissolve after a solid run (Silver Jews), while at the top of their game (Sleater-Kinney), after a single good record (Unicorns), after recording a few really bad records (Le Tigre), or while nobody could care less (Pretty Girls Make Graves). But Grandaddy, for me, were a very different sort of band with a very different sort of path, one which seemed headed toward honest-to-goodness greatness. They just kept getting better, and though our own Matt Stephens was right in asserting that their final record, Just Like The Fambly Cat (2006), failed to take chances and explore new territory—the result being an album that sounded “pretty much just like Grandaddy”—I think, looking back, it stands out as the most accomplished LP of the band’s too-brief career.

And so I miss Grandaddy, very badly, not simply because they were a lovable and endearing group with four good albums, but because they were a group of enormous promise. A group who, if given the opportunity to deliver on the promise of their already-apparent potential, could have floored us. The Sophtware Slump (2000) and Fambly Cat feel like the kind of early records we could point to later in a band’s career, hearing what they were working toward but hadn’t quite yet realized, signaling and suggesting the greatness to come. But then, suddenly, nothing. Grandaddy are dead. No more.

But then hello, what’s this? Jason Lytle, responsible for most of what Grandaddy had given us, is back with a forthcoming solo record. Stereogum unveiled this lead single, the summery “Brand New Sun,” earlier this week, and now we’re faced with the inevitable question: are Grandaddy back? Yeah, seems like it: “Brand New Sun” sounds like more or less the Grandaddy that left us three years ago, in large part because of Lytle’s voice but also because what we’ve got here, musically, falls back on his old band’s “folky guitar plus bubbly electronics” formula.

This is both a good and a bad thing. Early samplings of Lytle’s solo material, available for some time now on his Myspace page, was stripped-down and (by Grandaddy standards) austere, suggesting that Lytle sans-band would sound like just that: Lytle minus the lush instrumentation which had previously accompanied him. And all the words in his new album title are spelled properly. But if “Brand New Sun” is more indicative of the kind of record Lytle’s releasing this May, the Myspace material was misleading. The “Grandaddy sound”—from the the pseudo-spacey synths to the dreamy lyrics (“So you should hold my hand / While everything blows away / And we’ll run / To a brand new sun”)—is back, fully-fleshed out. But does that mean Yours Truly, The Commuter is going to be another retread through familiar and at this point well-worn territory? It’s true that I want another Grandaddy album, but I want one which takes the necessary (and exciting) steps forward. Though it’s nothing more at this point than speculation, I feel compelled to raise the question: what calibre of album does Jason Lytle have in him?