Majestic 12 - Before Yo Gabba Gabba!…

Among the many notable releases from Shelflife Records, there's one that particularly moved me. I'm talking about the complete reissue of Majestic 12's output. The anthology, simply titled "The Majestic 12 Years 1994-1998", includes all of the band's 7"s plus previously unreleased songs.

A true godsend for anyone who was enchanted, back in the day, by melodies indebted equally to Sarah Records and to a certain strain of American sadcore, but also for everyone who never had the chance to catch the band while they were active.

This valuable release gave us the opportunity to exchange a few words via email with Scott Schultz, the band's singer-guitarist, who has since put his musical talent to work in television, creating the hit, multi-award-winning children's show Yo Gabba Gabba.

Hi Scott, how are you?

Hi Ricky, sorry it's taken so long, but I got sick over the weekend and even ended up in the hospital. It wasn't fun, but I'm feeling better now! I'm writing to you from my magical office near home, in Orange County, California.

Wikipedia puts your role as a TV producer front and center in your bio, but is there still room for (your own) music day to day?

Music is fundamental to everything I do in television, but also in my life in general. It always means so much to me: it's the backbone of everything I produce, it just so happens that I work in TV instead of recording with a band. You know, I grew up "on tour" with my father, who was a producer and ran a traveling variety show. Every night there was a new show in a different city, with singers, dancers and a full live band. Some songs even had choreography with tons of foam. After my son was born in 2001, I also developed an "obsession" with listening to music and watching TV with him. Yo Gabba Gabba actually came out of my disappointment with the state of music for little kids. It was like a garbage dump, full of cheap, disposable, substance-free stuff. I won't name names, but my dream was to make a musical show featuring real, genuinely good bands, who could play songs for kids written by me, Steve and Aaron (who came from Majestic 12) and Jarond Gibbs (later also of Majestic 12), plus other great songwriters we'd bring in along the way. And while the idea was to have a truly eclectic mix of musical styles, you can definitely hear the indie-twee-pop-shoegaze influence in various parts of the series, with nods to bands like Rocketship or Trembling Blue Stars and others I'm sure I'm forgetting now. Getting so much help writing and producing music for the show is really gratifying, and I feel lucky to still be here making music.

What did you think when Shelflife Records decided to reissue the Majestic 12 tracks?

It was moving, because it's really where we started from! Sure, beginnings are always a bit rough and naive, but they're also so full of passion and hope, even in the saddest songs. I appreciate these songs now much more than I did back then. It's a great collection of all our 7"s and scattered songs. The whole journey we went through, from our first attempt at songwriting with a nylon-string guitar, all the way to getting back together years later to record the last track.

What are your memories of 90s music? Do you feel a bit of nostalgia? Personally I think it was a wonderful era for music, and I'd rate it above the 2000s.

The 90s are dear to my heart, and it's still hard for me to explain or convince some of my younger colleagues that there are so many great songs beyond just the grunge radio hits. Even off the top of my head I could name you plenty of bands that influenced Majestic 12. First and foremost, the shoegaze of bands like Slowdive, Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Lush and Galaxie 500, who truly won me over back then (and still do). Then there's the beauty of The Field Mice and Trembling Blue Stars. They spawned a whole generation of followers, including several Shelflife bands themselves and other groups on different labels that I loved and knew well, like Brittle Stars, who rank among the bands I've appreciated most in my life, and then The Autocollants, The Fairways, Le Coupe, of course Rocketship, The Sherman's, Dressy Bessy and plenty of other bands I'm sure I'm forgetting now. That's not to say we weren't influenced by purely pop radio melodies too, because there was great pop music coming out of Europe, like Blur or Cardigans, but I think our sound was more shaped by American slowcore bands like Low and Mazzy Star. All in all, the 90s were incredibly eclectic, with so much great music. I'm glad I'm old enough to have gone beyond the usual radio hits.

I think your band's songs still feel very current. It's like listening to Sarah Records bands, songs that never age! What do you think?

You're right, and thank you. The sound of Trembling Blue Stars, for instance, is genuine and in no way "dated". I really think the same can be said of this collection of songs. I like that our sound isn't too tied to any specific style of music that might end up sounding old. Of course there are plenty of tracks I'd like to tweak a bit, so to speak, if I could, but making something perfect was never really the point. What we tried to do was capture and convey the emotions of pure, sincere hearts.

Is there a song on the album you're particularly attached to or proud of?

Very hard to say. I love all the songs for different reasons. "Lost And Found", for example, reminds me of the nervousness before starting a live show, already sweating before we even begin, but it represents the crescendo that pulls me out of that feeling and lets me feel the true emotion of the music. "Nothing On Tv", on the other hand, was our first and oldest song: I have a lot of bittersweet memories tied to it. "Coldwind" takes me back to a cold, sad winter spent in a basement with a bunch of other kids (basically squatters), all equally grappling with their own different problems. "You Are The One" reminds me of my wife, and the first clumsy romantic lyrics I ever tried to write. "The Day", meanwhile, is my favorite "fun" song among the ones I've written. But the one that sounds best to me, 20 years on, is "Heaven", a song that speaks directly to who I am.

I love the vocal harmonies with Jana Wittren Heller, they were truly perfect, one of your strong points, I'm thinking for instance of the beautiful "Long". Have you stayed in touch?

Yes, our families are still on great terms: we see them if we go up to the Pacific Northwest, and they visit California pretty often. I still remember the first time I met her in the recording studio. She didn't know anyone and laid down that beautiful vocal track for "You Are The One". We were all won over, and from then on we tried to weave more interplay between male and female vocals into our future songs. Playing live was always tricky for that kind of harmony, but Jana was consistently self-assured, so we ended up adding a lot more to the harmonies built around her. She went on to make some really great songs afterward with The Arrogants, which I think truly let her shine as a singer. That era was full of all those typical emotions of people in their early 20s, like anguish and heartache, fear of the future, restlessness, and I think in most of those tracks there's a youthful hope that makes me happy to hear them after all these years.

Thank you for being so kind! Now, to wrap up this interview, I'd like to ask which song from the collection you'd choose as the soundtrack for our chat.

Thank you, Ricky, and... wow, it's so hard to decide. Lyrically speaking, I'd say "Ghost Stories", which sums up the whole experience, but it was written much later. So I could tell you "Lost And Found", which simply announced the band's beginning and end. It represents a kind of state we ultimately found ourselves in, after having "lost" ourselves in music and somehow found our true selves: "Lose yourself in amazement, find what you are", and that line basically captures the sense of everything I've just told you.

Ride the wave of great music

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