Mean Everything to Nothing

I had gotten married, and then I immediately started writing this record and recording it. My wife and I — I was 21, and she was 22 — had zero idea of what we were doing in our lives. We hadn’t lived together before. There was a tension there that was always kind of brewing. I think that mixed with a crisis of faith and just freaking out. It’s pretty obvious when you listen to that record. Immediately, I let you know what I’m going through at that time. I was just obsessed with stuff like Pinkerton, and this idea of, ‘How do you make records that are super, super raw, but sound really great and big?’
I had no idea what music production was. By the time that first record came out, and then we just beat it into the ground touring, over and over and over, I started to understand what I was capable of doing, and wanted to spread my wings on the production side of it. I definitely felt like I had something to prove with Mean Everything To Nothing, since the first one had been so unexpectedly well-received. There’s always the fear of the sophomore slump. It’s like, ‘How do we just destroy that altogether?’ Create something that just, in my opinion, blew the first one out of the water.
By the time it came for us to pick a producer, we landed on Joe Chiccarelli, who was on an incredible streak at that time. He’d just worked on the third Shins record, Evil Urges by My Morning Jacket, that second Raconteurs record, and Icky Thump by the White Stripes. So, we were like, ‘Oh, shit, this guy wants to work with us? Let’s do it!’ We didn’t know that we were then entering Joe’s world, which was 25 takes of every single song. Zero room in the initial recording for experimentation. It was all about getting the live thing to where he wouldn’t even need to add anything else. The whole time, I’m thinking, ‘Man, there’s so much more to this record that we’re not getting here.’
I was pretty dumb as well at the time. When we went down to Atlanta to finish it, Joe left, and I just wouldn’t get back to anybody. Wouldn’t talk to the label, just kept working on this record. Joe would leave these voicemails like, ‘Where are you?’ I wouldn’t call him back, which is terrible. But, I just knew that I had to ‘save it,’ in my mind. So, we brought in Dan Hannon from the last record, and he then let me go crazy. Added all the stuff that I want to add.
Joe did end up coming back. Joe and the band would work from 10:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., and then I would work from 11:00 p.m. to the next morning. I brought in an engineer, and put in background vocals, new lead vocals, and added instrumentation. The engineers that I was bringing in were not respectful of ProTools at all, and so they’d come in the next morning and it was like a madman had been there for 10 hours, destroying the organization of all these files. They’d have to sift through all the shit that I’d done.
It ended up, though, being one of my favorite things we’ve done, because it feels like that time to me. It took me a long time to listen back to that record, and actually enjoy it. I remember waiting to do a lot of the vocals until I had gotten sick, so that I could have this really raspy scream, and that’s all over that record. I was smoking so many cigs, too, so it sounds like I’m 35 on that record, and I’m 21.

— Andy Hull via Uproxx (April 2021)