Goodbye Bread

Ty Segall was 23 and known for loud, fast garage rock when he moved to Drag City. Goodbye Bread, his first album for the label, came out on June 21, 2011, and it turned the volume down on purpose. “When I made this album, I was sick of fast, aggressive music,” he told Pitchfork that May. He called it the most serious and thought-out record he had made, and said that this time he hoped people would listen to the lyrics.

He played everything himself. The liner notes credit Segall as the only performer and Eric Bauer as the engineer, and the sessions ran from June 2010 to January 2011 at Bauer Mansion, Bauer’s basement studio in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Segall spent about six months on it, a long time by his standards, and told Scout Magazine that he recorded 25 songs and kept the ones he liked best. That left ten songs and 33 minutes. The records he cited while talking about it were Neil Young’s Harvest, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan, and he said he was “shooting for something to sound like it was from 1972.” He also turned the vocals up, because for once he liked what he was saying.

The subject is California, seen by someone who grew up in Laguna Beach and left. Segall described the idea as “the California apathy, or listlessness”: beautiful scenery that is also dark and depressing. “You can be at the beach and be really sad,” he told Interview Magazine. “California Commercial”, 78 seconds long, is his answer to the MTV reality show Laguna Beach, which he says ruined his hometown, and he called it “more of a joke, really, but it’s a little serious too.” The title points at money. Asked whether it meant he had accepted a career that would never pay well, he said that was one of a couple of meanings.

The title track opens the record with Segall singing over strummed guitar, and the BBC’s reviewer noted the first short solo arriving around the two-minute mark. Segall has said the song is about life and growing up. “Comfortable Home (A True Story)” turns a partner’s wish to buy a couch into a question about settling down. “You Make the Sun Fry” is knuckle-dragging boogie in Paste’s phrase, and Exclaim found its romance comically forward. Pitchfork singled out the enormous chorus of “My Head Explodes”, and Paste heard the mood turn darker and more electric by “Where Your Head Goes”, the eighth track. “I Am With You” starts as an acoustic ballad and ends on a guitar solo that Segall modelled on Neil Young’s in “Down by the River”. Drag City later put out official videos for the title track, directed by Matt Yoka, and for “Where Your Head Goes”.

Most reviews were warm. Metacritic’s average settled at 80 from 18 reviews. Pitchfork gave it 8.1 and later ranked it 31st among its albums of 2011, PopMatters gave it 8, and AllMusic heard a calmer, tighter and more coherent record than anything he had done before. The BBC praised how little was wasted in under 34 minutes. The split was over pace and voice. No Ripcord, at 6 out of 10, complained that the first 15 minutes felt like one song, and Paste, while admiring the songs, still called his voice “a weak and warbly instrument”.

The complaint about pace is the best argument for the record. An album about listlessness, played at a stroll by one man in a basement, is doing what it says. The songs deal with a hometown sold back to itself on television, with money, a couch, growing up and, by his own account, his state of mind on the road, which is why this reads as more than a mellow detour. Segall said a mellow, clean record was the hardest thing to make, because there is nothing left to hide behind. Ten songs survived out of 25, they last 33 minutes, and every instrument on them is played by the man singing.