Guster: Winds of Change

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POP-ROCK QUARTET GUSTER returns to the District to play a pair of sold-out shows at the 9:30 Club on Wednesday and Thursday. The band came together in the dorms at Tufts University and — acoustic guitars and bongos in tow — soon became campus favorites, playing fraternity parties and campus centers.

In the years since Guster's 1995 commencement, the band has worked to expand its sonic palette. The band's latest album, the relentlessly melodic "Ganging Up on the Sun," offers garage-ska, idyllic country-rock, jazz, quasi Brit-pop, alt-rock and Fleetwood Mac-influenced material.

We caught up with the Guster's drummer, Brian Rosenworcel, by phone as he was taking a day off in Columbia, Mo. Rosenworcel discussed writing lyrics, set lists and misperceptions about his band.

» EXPRESS: Which songs on the new record did you write the lyrics for?
» ROSENWORCEL: "Ruby Falls," "Satellite" and me and Ryan collaborated on "The Beginning of the End."

» EXPRESS: Do you care to talk about what those songs are about?
» ROSENWORCEL: Well, they're all personal. It's weird for me, as a drummer, to be writing lyrics that someone else is gonna sing. I don't put my nose in there till we're at a point where we're recording vocals and we have no lyrics for all these songs. It's like, "OK, I think I could be useful here." Even then, the singer needs to be meaning and feeling what they're singing, so a lot of my cues that I take lyrically are from the way Ryan writes lyrics, which is to say, you have something personal and you want to express it and you don't want to be too overt about it.

» EXPRESS: You wrote the lyrics for "Amsterdam." Do you see that as a career high point?
» ROSENWORCEL: It's definitely, to date, the most accomplished single we've written. We're not great at writing up-tempo music. We tend to gravitate toward mid-tempo. "Amsterdam" was a conscious choice to make that chord progression into an upbeat, fun pop song, so I don't know why the lyrics got so angry. I guess I had something to get out. It's a song I'm proud of. I heard it at karaoke the other night and I was like, "Oh, wow. This is a good song."

» EXPRESS: Do you remember what your first show in D.C. was like?
» ROSENWORCEL: Yes. We played this place called The Bayou. It was on K St. They would put the headliner on at 1 a.m. We probably played there a dozen times, trying to get a following going, before we accomplished that. It used to be really fun, but it was no 9:30 Club. The 9:30 Club is one of the most well-run and fun-to-play places in the country, and The Bayou was a train wreck waiting to happen every night.

» EXPRESS: Where else have you played in D.C.?
» ROSENWORCEL: We played Wolf Trap last summer. We played at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall opening for John Mayer. That was one of the more bizarre shows. It was carpeted. I felt like we were playing a hotel or something. The building's ornate, but the room feels like a really formal high school auditorium or something.

» EXPRESS: What does it mean to you to have sold out two nights at the 9:30?
» ROSENWORCEL: We're excited. This tour's doing well. Every time we release an album it takes like six months for it to find its audience, because people have preconceived notions about what our band should sound like and everyone's shocked when our albums come out because they're a departure and we're on a path of evolution. We just played in Orlando, a place where we traditionally half-fill a room, and we were able to sell it out in advance, so it definitely feels like this album is finding its audience.

» EXPRESS: Do you play your best-known songs at every show?
» ROSENWORCEL: That's a good question, because that can get tiresome [Laughs] and a lot of our fans don't really want to hear "Fa Fa" every night. We're making an effort to mix it up and be a little less predictable. You might hear "Amsterdam" every night and couple others, but we have enough of a repertoire now that we can do two nights at the 9:30 and play two very different set lists and that's what we hope to do for people who buy tickets for both nights.

» EXPRESS: Can you tell me about the Spring Campus Consciousness Tour?
» ROSENWORCEL: [Guster guitarist] Adam [Gardner] and his wife started a non-profit group called Reverb, and they exist to help artists green their tours, which is to say they coordinate bio-diesel in their trucks and buses. They offset the concerts with wind power and they encourage the audience to buy tags that will offset the carbon emissions they use to get to and from the show. And they inform people about local things: Ethanol and recycling and whatever you can think of. We're spreading some environmental awareness, using the opportunity, and it's all Adam. He's responsible for doing this.

» EXPRESS: Do you think your heavy appeal to college students has hurt your chances for broader success?
» ROSENWORCEL: I think broader success is something that you have to really go for. I think we appeal to college students because we evolved out of a college dorm room and we've been operating organically. If we really wanted to go for Top 40 radio, we'd have to make a conscious choice and I don't think that's something we could do. We're not really motivated by any outside forces. We're happy being a well-known college band.

» EXPRESS: What country outside of the U.S. is Guster biggest in?
» ROSENWORCEL: Good question. I guess we're not so happy being a well-known college band in light of the fact that we're dying to get to Japan. A lot of people tell us, You guys would go over so well in Australia or Japan, Europe, whatever. We've been to the U.K., and it's starting to happen for us there — we're getting our album released in a few months and everything — but we haven't had any kind of Hasselhoff experiences where we blew up in a country. It's difficult for us to get our music released over there. We're hoping that's gonna happen with this record.

» EXPRESS: Are there common misconceptions about Guster that you'd like to dispel?
» ROSENWORCEL: Well, we've been changing what we do, so what was an accurate perception of us years ago is probably no longer accurate. For some reason, people have thought we were a jam band when none of us could play our instruments well enough to improvise for a second, so that's a misperception.

» 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW; with Mason Jennings, 8:30 p.m., sold out; 703-218-6500. (U St.-Cardozo)

Photos by C. Taylor Crothers