http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003466526 Done With Touring, Pollard Preps Seven New Albums
November 30, 2006, 2:45 PM ET
Jonathan Cohen, N.Y.
Robert Pollard is saying adios to the touring life, but if anything, the decision will give him even more time to devote to his myriad music projects. Pollard canceled the last three shows of his recent U.S. tour after injuring his calf, and now that he's back home in Dayton, Ohio, he's decided to stay off the road for the foreseeable future.
"This is not to say I'll never play another show again, but this touring thing is too much," the ex-Guided By Voices frontman tells Billboard.com. "It's too hard to psychologically re-energize yourself each night." Pollard admits he's been disappointed by the turnout for shows with his solo band. "With Guided By Voices, it didn't matter what day it was. What I'm doing now, in my opinion, is not only the same thing, I think it's a step up, even," he says. "But you get tired of beating your head against the wall."
Onward, then, to Pollard's 2007 release slate. He's completed his next Merge album, "Silverfish Trivia," which is due in the fall, and has already wrapped work on the demos for another album after that. Of "Silverfish," he reveals, "It's much more somber and strange" than the recent "Normal Happiness." The 15-track album is book-ended by the string instrumentals "Come Outside" and "Speak in Many Colors," and also features "prog-like" songs such as "Circle Cell Boys Club" and "Coast to Coast Carpet of Love."
Pollard and longtime collaborator Todd Tobias are shopping a double-disc album as Circus Devils titled "Sgt. Disco," and "Bad Football," an album with GBV bassist Chris Slusarenko under the moniker Takeovers, is penciled in for the spring.
In March, Pollard will close the book on his long-running Fading Captain Series with a 50-track retrospective, "Crickets," which will sport a handful of previously unreleased songs. "To me, you've got to wrap things up to be able to take a look at the value and the worth of them," he says of shutting down the seven-year-old Fading Captain, which will be replaced by a new label, Record Company Records.
That imprint's first releases will be vinyl-only: a second volume of Pollard's drunken on-stage ramblings, dubbed "Meet the King: A**hole 2" ("the cover is a photo of me lying in a bathtub drinking a beer with a track suit on," Pollard enthuses) and a third volume of extremely lo-fi pre-Guided By Voices recordings from Acid Ranch, dubbed "The Great Houdini Wasn't So Great" ("the cover is my dad in the middle with a drink and a cigarette in his hand, my ex-brother-in-law Kevin Fennell, and me on the left of my dad with a pinstripe sport coat and a string tie. I don't know what the f*ck I was thinking," he says).
"I don't blame labels who tell me, you've gotta quit doing so much sh*t," Pollard says. "But this is not even my main stuff, you know? That's side stuff. That's the way I operate and that's the way I will continue to operate. They couldn't stop me. And here I am 49 years old, unsuccessful," he adds with a laugh.
