Instant Nostalgia (Revisited)
BOOK EXCERPT: Inside The Mind Of 2nd Grade's Peter Gill
Our semi-annual Remember The Lightning: A Guitar Pop Journal is on an indefinite hiatus, but we’re really proud of the four volumes we released. Today I’m sharing my exploration of Philadelphia’s 2nd Grade, the cover story for Volume 4. —S.W. Lauden
Instant Nostalgia (Revisited)
Inside The Mind Of 2nd Grade's Peter Gill
By S.W. Lauden
If there’s one band that inspired me to take the leap into writing about new music again it’s Philadelphia’s 2nd Grade.
I first discovered their smart take on guitar pop with the combined video for “Velodrome” and “My Bike” from the 2020 album Hit to Hit, instantly connecting with the lo-fi production, high-quality hooks and the dreamy, wistful feel. Taken together, these two songs captured the spirit of the genre in a way that somehow felt fun and fresh, even as they conjured compulsory comparisons to Big Star, Teenage Fanclub and Fountains of Wayne.
It wasn’t until I sat down to stream the entire 24-track album as a body of work that I started to grasp the depth and complexity of multi-instrumentalist Peter Gill’s deceptively simple song craft. My appreciation for Hit to Hit increased exponentially when I heard favorites like “Trigger Finger,” “Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider,” “Sunkist,” and “Boys in Heat” on vinyl.
This was around the time that I started writing for The Big Takeover magazine, so I interviewed Gill a couple of times, conversations that only confirmed my suspicions that there was a lot more going into these tracks than met the ear.
A few of his main songwriting influences include The Beach Boys, Guided By Voices, Outrageous Cherry, Royal Trux, Serge Gainsbourg, and The Troggs, a deep and varied list that speaks to the quiet intellectualism and playful sense of exploration lurking just beneath the surface of these brainy, blissful 2-minute blasts.
“I totally understand the urge to keep chasing the perfect guitar pop song over and over, but as a songwriter that method can eventually yield diminishing returns. For me it’s divorced from the mystery of music, from the way certain music can help you to see yourself and the world differently. It stops being as nourishing to me as a writer, especially when there’s so much more to explore,” Gill told me.
“Look at Alex Chilton, who decidedly turned his back on power pop to embrace the whole cosmos of American music, from frazzled no wave to the great American song‐ book. I’m not saying I’m turning my back on this style of music, and in fact right now I’m writing what I think are some of the catchiest rock songs I’ve ever written, and I’m excited to share them someday! But yeah, there’s a whole world of music that interests me beyond the ongoing perfect pop song project. I’ve also been writing lots of twisted bossa nova type things lately, full of weird jazz chords smashed together and moody chromatic melodies.”
2nd Grade formed in 2018, a solo project that quickly grew into a full band with an expanding cast of collaborators.
They released their first home-recorded album, Wish You Were Here Tour, on the Philadelphia cassette label Sleeper Records soon after. The band signed with Brooklyn-based indie label Double Double Whammy in 2020, releasing Hit to Hit that year, followed by 2021’s expanded Wish You Were Here Tour (Revisited) including standout tracks “Superglue” and “Favorite Song,” and the 2022 studio album Easy Listening featuring the should-be-hits “Strung Out On You,” “Teenage Overpopulation,” and “Me & My Blue Angels.”
Starting in 2021, 2nd Grade also evolved into a respected live band that has shared the stage with a variety of indie pop and rock acts including The Beths, Kiwi Jr, The Umbrellas, Babehoven, Bad Moves, Florry, Ducks Ltd., and Jeanines, among many other. The current line-up of the band includes Catherine Dwyer (guitar/vocals), Jon Samuels (guitar), Lucas Knapp (bass), and Michael Cormier-O’Leary (drums).
Their latest album, Scheduled Explosions, was released in Oct. 2024.
It’s a return to home-recording with Gill playing most of the instruments—aside from cameos by Dwyer, Samuels and Cormier-O’Leary, among other contributors and previous band members—and Hit to Hit producer/engineer Knapp back behind the soundboard.
“I think I’m more of a home-recording guy,” Gill admits. “The biggest thing I missed about home-recording was the freedom it gives you to mess around and experiment with stuff—arrangements, textures, mic placements, whatever—to go on wild goose chases down stupid little rabbit holes that might lead to bad or useless results. You can do that in a professional studio too, but the time you’re being billed for is going to add up quickly.”
“Many elements that made the final cut on Scheduled Explosions were improvised on the spot, especially lead guitar and bass parts, and certain arrangement choices were pretty much decided on a whim. Very little was mapped out beforehand beyond the basic skeletons of the songs, so the finished record to me sounds like a bunch of little discoveries, little search-and-rescue or search-and-destroy missions being carried out in real time.”
The impressive 23-song collection combines the many modes Gill has toyed with on previous releases including: the pure pop of “Uncontrollably Cool,” “Evil Things” and “Made Up My Own Mind”; the irresistible jangle of “Fashion Disease” and “Jingle Jangle Nuclear Meltdown”; and garage-y stompers “American Rhythm,” “68 Come‐ back” and “No Fly Zone.” In between those tracks, Gill and Knapp veer into sonic experimentation and deconstruction on tracks such as “Ice Cream Social Acid Test” and “Like Otis Redding.”
“Exposure to lots of lo-fi music has probably changed the way my brain hears music, so I’m attracted to sounds and recordings that are unbalanced in a conventional sense; it’s just way more interesting to me. It’s kind of like what Tolstoy wrote about happy and unhappy families—all balanced recordings are alike, while each unbalanced recording is unbalanced in its own way. That’s not entirely true, but it points to the infinity of options under the blanket of lo-fi,” Gill said.
After my first couple of Scheduled Explosions listens, I asked Gill to comment on a few tracks that jumped out at me.
His responses provide a fascinating peek behind the curtain at the songwriting approach and home-recording process for this latest release:
“Uncontrollably Cool”: “This song started with the drum beat and I just built it up piece by piece. When I wrote the line about ‘integrated circuits coming in and out of style,’ I remember thinking, ‘Huh, I don’t know what this is about, but it could be interesting.’”
“Fashion Disease”: “This song was written more or less as a series of innuendoes and character studies, some of which are looser than others. An interesting thing is, sometimes you write a character and, in theory, you have total control over the character but still find that they end up doing their own thing in spite of you, like they have their own rich inner life and wish you would leave them alone. That’s how I feel about the people in this song. Like, ‘Who are these people and where could they possibly be going?’”
“Airlift”: “This was inspired by the ‘90s solo records of the Ohio songwriter Bill Fox that he made on a four-track. It’s a folk ballad about a young man lost out in the world, about how ‘you can’t go home again’ like the Thomas Wolfe novel and all that. It was recorded really quickly, probably in one or two takes. Catherine and Jon both added nice little electric guitar things throughout.”
“Like A Wild Thing”: “I wrote this pretty quickly in the middle of a Troggs phase. The title came first and I didn’t really know what it meant, so I wrote some verses to find out. I recorded this one by myself on the four-track without much regard for mic selection or placement, I just wanted to get it on tape as quickly as possible.”
“68 Comeback”: “This song was written vaguely about Elvis and is pretty impressionistic. Again, I just knocked it out on the four-track as quickly as possible.”
One track that immediately caught my attention was “Instant Nostalgia.”
The non-stop, stream-of-consciousness lyrical approach, chiming guitars and persistent backbeat, overlapping vocals, sound collage digression at the end, and relentless handclaps throughout might be the perfect crystallization of Gill’s style. But I was also drawn to the provocative title because of previous conversations I’ve had with him about the power and pitfalls of nostalgia in modern pop rock.
While acknowledging that ‘nostalgia is a beautiful thing,’ Gill remains ever-vigilant about how he chooses to deploy it in his songs—a balance he strikes effectively throughout Scheduled Explosions.
“‘Instant Nostalgia’ is a bit of a mystery to me. I recall in the lead-up to writing it I was thinking about something I had read, about how neuroscientists have estimated the duration of the ‘present’ as approximately three seconds, which is the amount of time it takes the brain to process incoming information and knit it up into a nice little package of ‘experience’ that can then be neatly sorted as belonging to the ‘past.’ Those three seconds we’re perpetually living in are a real mess; I love those three seconds. In that song the past, present, and future get all tangled up. Where the song ends, in some ways, is a very different place from where it starts, but in other ways not so different at all,” Gill said.
Structurally, the album builds to the glorious closing track “I Wanna Be On Your Mind.” The beautiful Byrds-y guitar line combined with Dwyer’s lilting lead vocal (an effect somewhat similar to Mo Tucker’s turn on the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours”) allows the collection to close on a definite high note, one that delivers on the pop promise of all the music that came before it while offering an ecstatic escape.
“‘I Wanna Be On Your Mind’ is an older song from my earliest days of trying to write in the parameters of power pop,” Gill said. “That song is written from the perspective of a pop song that wants to be stuck in a listener’s head. ‘When you close your eyes, I wanna be on your mind...’ It’s an endless feedback loop of pop fetishizing itself, conceptually imitating a locked groove on a vinyl record that theoretically repeats forever even after the song is ‘done.’”
It’s precisely Gill’s awareness of that “endless feedback loop of pop fetishizing itself” that makes his music so appealing to fans like me.
You can sense in most of his tracks the endless hours he’s spent listening as a fan and the enormous amount of brain power he has used dissecting all of it to create his own songs.
In that way, 2nd Grade is part of the never-ending pop rock continuum that pays homage to everything that came before while striving to transcend the instant (and addictive) nostalgia this music so often evokes. I hear the intentionality of that evolution throughout their catalog, a meta-narrative that only becomes more complex with repeat listens.
“In general, our style has become less twee and less purely pop, and more chaotic and distorted. I think after our first two albums, I was afraid of our band being pigeonholed as twee or cutesy, especially since much of the music that motivates me has rough edges to it,” Gill said. “On the first couple albums, I tried really hard to craft perfect little pop songs in a classic formula, while now I have greater trust in my songwriting instincts and am more compelled to just explore my own little corner of the world and see what comes up.”
It’s a corner of the music world I happily visit often and I’ll keep coming back for as long as Peter Gill and his many talented collaborators are releasing albums.
See 2nd Grade LIVE This Summer!
i love this band and i also have so much love for all the great music in my town <3