Superchunk Frontman Gets In The Passenger Side

Montreal director Matthew Bissonnette is building a strong working relationship with Superchunk/Portastatic frontman Mac McCaughan.

The filmmaker has enlisted the indie rock stalwart's help to score his first two films, Looking For Leonard and Who Loves The Sun.

For Passenger Side, his third feature, Bissonnette again called McCaughan for some musical input into the film, but his involvement this time around is slightly different. The singer was asked to do every music geek's job by being the music supervisor on the film, which he says is very musically oriented.

The film follows two brothers on a soul searching road trip, and incorporates music from the late '80s/early '90s era of alternative and punk rock.

McCaughan says choosing the music was a very delicate process, as the soundtrack is less background noise and more of a character in its own right.

"The characters keep interacting with it," says the Merge Records founder of the film's soundtrack, which features disparate artists like Leonard Cohen, D.O.A, Guided By Voices and Silver Jews, among others. "They talk about music, they mess with the stereo, and it's always there. It reminds you of their past.

"The music is not so contemporaneous with the story, because it's from so many years previous. I don't think it's just background noise because it does have some meaning in the whole scheme of things. You don't want it to intrude too much, but I think that there is something to that."

The soundtrack functions much in the same way a mixtape would for a real life road trip in that it captures the moment of the two brothers' journey.

"The whole idea of the way the soundtrack was going to work evokes a lot of things about how you come to love music in the first place, and thereby evoking a certain age," McCaughan elaborates.

"I'm lucky in that my job allows and requires me to be around music all the time, but I know that I don't have time to listen to records as much as I did when i was 22.

"In this film, they do spend most of the movie driving around, and it makes sense if you have tapes that you listen to. When I think of certain tours that Superchunk has been on, I often think, 'Wow, we listened to that record a lot on this trip.' I think music serves the same purpose in the film."

Although they've rarely showed their faces since the release of 2009's Leaves In The Gutter EP, McCaughan and fellow Superchunk and Portastatic member Jim Wilbur will be playing a selection of their songs as well as covers for an acoustic set following the Toronto screening of Passenger Side.

As for Superchunk, McCaughan insists they're getting back into the swing of things, even if they're not ready to jump back on tour full time.

"Everyone's doing different things, and over the last couple years, we're ready to maybe be a bit more active," he says of his iconic band. "I doubt we're ever going to hit the road for months at a time like we did at one point, but over the summer, we did play shows.

"When you play shows, you want to have new songs to play, and you want to record new songs. Some of [them are] mixed, but a lot of it's not.

"We're still working on recording with the mixing soon to follow. We've been working with Scott Solter, who did the Mountain Goats records. So we're working on a record right now which will hopefully come out this fall."