In Conversation: Ducks Ltd.’s Tom McGreevy

Photo courtesy of Ducks Ltd.

Few contemporary groups have harnessed the charm and urgency of jangle pop in recent years like Ducks Ltd. Their debut album, Modern Fiction, is a worthy addition to the canon, replete with lavish arrangements and shrewd, narrative songwriting. Tom McGreevy, the group’s lead vocalist, recently sat down to talk with The Eisenberg Review to talk about the rich history of jangle pop, its place in the contemporary music landscape and some of his favorite records.

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First off, I just want to congratulate you on Modern Fiction. I think it’s absolutely brilliant. You’ve got those resplendent layers of jangling guitar, propulsive rhythms that power all ten of these cuts and the soaring melodies are just infectious. I’m curious, from one jangle pop fan to another, what was your entry point and who are the overlapping artists that you shared with Evan that allowed for the genesis of such a great sounding project?

Thanks so much. I really appreciate that. Thank you for your kind words about it. My entry point into this kind of music was definitely Orange Juice. As a teenager, I was curious about a bunch of it and I heard a bunch of the other Postcard Records—which I now really like, but at the time Josef K was a bit much for me—and Orange Juice was the one that really connected and (made me realize] this is exactly what I always wanted a thing to be. I got really excited about it and that led me into more and more of it as I got deeper into this kind of stuff.

In terms of what me and Evan are into, when we started working together we kind of had different interests in sort of different ends of what couple generally be called jangle pop or this kind of music. I was coming into it into a lot of that Postcard Records stuff, a lot of the Sarah Records—like Field Mice and things like that—some of that like Cherry Red, UK stuff from that period of time, and then I had a few of the Flying Nun bands I was really into, especially The Verlaines, like I really, really love.

Flying Nun is so good. One of my favorite labels.

Evan was into some of that stuff, but kinda into different stuff. Like, I had never listened to The Go-Betweens before me and him started working together and he’s like a huge, huge Go-Betweens fan. They became one of my favorite bands too. He’s really, really into Felt, who I had never really listened to, but I have subsequently gotten really in to. He had a deeper knowledge of a lot of that Flying Nun catalog than I did. He was like into The Clean and The Chills, which I think are bigger things, but he had a lot of other things he had dug into, like Sneaky Feelings and stuff like that. He had slightly different tastes and interests in it, and then we kinda showed each other a lot of stuff, which was cool.

I do want to use that to launch into what you detail as a pretty interesting creative process on the record. It sounds like it started pretty intimately and then grew and grew. There’s some chamber pop leanings that get into some of the latter cuts on the record, like “Sullen Leering Hope” in particular with its gorgeous string section. Can you walk me through what the writing process for the record was like between you and Evan and what I presume that looked like over the course of a pandemic that made it hard to get together in the same room and collaborate for portions of it.

So the process is something that we’d been doing before as well, but I think we really refined it during the pandemic in a way that I don’t think we’ll changer after it. Essentially, the way it works is that I kinda like will write the bones of song, normally on an unplugged electric guitar, and just record a quick phone demo of it. Then, I’ll bring it to Evan and we’ll flesh it out together. He will fix it’s obvious flaws and then we’ll immediately get into a kind of demoing process and start adding the arrangement and the layers to it, which we always do together, and just sort of break it down section by section, passing backwards and forwards the instruments that we’re trying to put in and hone the parts together. It’s been a cool thing. We kind of realized at a certain point that this kind of music, at its best, is detail-oriented in a way that is hard to accomplish when you’re playing and writing with other musicians because it’s unreasonable to ask a drummer to repeat the same eight bar phrase as many times as it will take to make all the stuff fit together. They’ll get angry at you and they’re not wrong.

*laughs* It’s maybe not unreasonable, but it is definitely kind to not ask a drummer to do that for two hours.

We’ll sit down and we’ll loop a lot of stuff and decide what can fit where and how things can fit together. Really dial down into it and get into the pieces of arrangement and writing from there. That was the way it was done with most of the things on there. “Under The Rolling Moon” was a little bit different. On that one, Evan had kinda demoed it, and he had written something and I re-wrote half the lyrics—maybe a little bit more—to make it fit a little bit better and we went about our process in the normal way after that. That’s more or less how it works.

That’s really interesting to hear, because what I hear in your music that transcends the jangle rock and jangle pop revival that I hear is that your perspective is a studied one, to be sure, but it sports—I love the fact that you said detail oriented—because it is almost a very detailed oriented narrative style that lends a freshness to the record that I don’t hear from some of those more derivative bands. Is that what you were hoping to capture and communicate with the music and the title of the record?

Yeah, it was about that kind of detail and trying to do something that wasn’t strictly imitative even though its a thing where we are particularly trying to make a specific type of music. We were trying to make an entry in the canon, or what we perceive as the canon, of this kind of jangly guitar pop that we really like. That was very much our intent, but I think that we were trying to find ways to sort of bring our own detail to it, to bring our own things to it, and sort of to try and, I guess, to avoid ever being lazy. *laughs* I think that was our thing that we were the most concerned about: [making] sure that we thought about everything and that we didn’t just do the thing that was the obvious thing. I think that we got, built by the process of the two of us writing all the time, really good at pushing each other to not settle. Evan especially. He’s very detail oriented and he’s very good at follow through and commitment to a thing. If we start it, we’re going to finish it and take it through to the end. That was a thing that was very helpful in working on these songs for sure.

And that makes complete sense and I love it. Certainly, the point is to communicate and work within a certain genre to make sure it’s within that genre, but you want to feel like you’re advancing it or contributing something to it, right?

*laughs* I hope so. If other people feel that we do that, that would be great.

I certainly do.

It’s definitely what we were trying to do. I’m not sure I would presume to say we’ve done it, but that’s the dream.

That was the dream and the aim and I think it’s beautiful; that’s how music moves forward. We all listen to stuff that we love and then we write based on those influences and that ends up progressing forward genres and music as a whole. I love it. I’ve noticed that is seems like jangle rock and post punk both have made a significant comeback during the pandemic. I think maybe its something about the depressive yet cheery quality of the music. Have you noticed that? Do you think that there’s something particular that this genre can offer to music fans during this time, or in this current music landscape?

I think that there’s an element that I find interesting about it and that I think made it an appealing medium to me, in this context at least. A lot of this stuff is coming from the UK in the ‘80s, which was a particularly bleak time period there in a lot of ways. There’s an interesting way that those records tend to reflect that environment of what was like, certainly felt like a collapsing society and a very troubled time in a bunch of ways. There’s a way that it reflected that and addressed it directly or indirectly. It makes sense that there’s a resonance there in a kind of current context to be revisiting those sounds and ideas and using them in that way. It’s certainly, I think, the way that some of those bands do that is a thing that like appealed to me and I thought about a lot while making the record.

In closing, always our final question: what are three records you’d recommend to the audience?

The Go-Between’s Before Hollywood. I think it’s a little bit hard to track down because it isn’t on Spotify for reasons that remain somewhat obscure, but it’s a really great record. I think it's their best one and not always the most heard one. The last track on it, “That Way,” I think is one of my favorite songs, maybe their best song.

I would also recommend McCarthy’s I Am A Wallet. McCarthy are, or were, a stridently Marxist jangle pop band. All of their songs are very explicitly about that. That’s kind of considered their classic album—definitely the best one all the way through. It’s a great record. The funny thing, that band later on went on to form Stereolab, which is a weird fact. I Am A Wallet, from a compositional jangle pop perspective, is absolutely perfect and from a way of addressing subject matter, kind of like what we were just talking about, it’s really interesting. It’s some of the sharpest political songwriting I can remember hearing.

And then I might go with The Verlaines’ Bird Dog because we were just talking about it. It’s a really great record. It’s one of my favorites. I think a thing that he does on that—Graeme Downes, like the guy who is sort of the main guy in the Verlaines—is the way he sort of uses orchestration in the context of this post punk sound, which has some commonality with a band like Echo & the Bunnymen, but like moreso. *laughs* He goes like way more over the top. He gets way more into arrangement and the depth of that and it’s really, really cool. Really cool record.