Superunloader back with album after 20 years

“We’ve been a band since the early ’90s and are probably up on the list as one of the longest running San Diego bands,” says drummer Chad Farran of Superunloader. “We started playing shows as Bad Mood Zeus with a different bass player in 1991 and toured the West Coast, with the highlight being an opening show for Santana and Bob Dylan.”

It’s been almost 20 years since the last Superunloader studio album in 1997. “We started to slow down as other things in life took priority. Chris [McGreal, bassist] had always wanted to live in the Central California coast and, when the opportunity came, he moved into a yurt in Big Sur. He still comes to San Diego every couple months, for work and the occasional gig.”

McGreal co-founded a tech startup and plays in the Big Sur band Songs Hotbox Harry Taught Us, Farran works in web design and studio recording and gigs with Puente, and singer/guitarist Jimmy Lewis is the band’s only full-time musician, with steady solo gigs, his group Pushers, and an acoustic duo called T.V.’s Watson and Lewis.

“Superunloader started recording a new album in 2008.... The band knocked out the basic tracks in one weekend at Audio Design studio with local producer Ben Moore engineering. We originally wanted a raw recording that captured our live performance but, after taking it to our home studio, we put on our producer hats and had fun exploring sounds and layering multiple tracks of vocals and guitars.”

“At one point, we recorded each note of a series of guitar chords onto separate tracks. On a couple songs, I even maxed out my Pro Tools session track counts from all the crazy guitar tracks.” Nine years later, the album is about to debut. “The title Twice in Half refers to an inside group joke about the band playing ‘twice the show in half the time.’”

The July 8 release party at Winstons will feature guest players Davey Carano (Wise Monkey Orchestra) and Mike Watson (TV’s Watson & Lewis). “This will be Superunloader’s first show of 2017,” says Farran. “The band doesn’t book many shows these days.”