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Jason Narducy has one of the best resumes in not just local rock ‘n’ roll, but the entire genre itself. After all, Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl credits Narducy with inspiring him to get into music in the first place—and that was when Narducy was 12, playing guitar in the scrappy Chicago punk band Verboten. On top of that, notable names such as Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, actor Michael Shannon and more have declared him to have the “Sexiest Elbows In Rock.” No, seriously.

The 45-year-old Evanston resident channels his main songwriting efforts into Split Single, which now features Wilco bassist John Stirratt and drummer Jon Wurster on his new album, “Metal Frames,” due out Friday. Before that he was in Verbow, his rock band with cellist Alison Chesley. With Wurster, Narducy plays bass in Superchunk (replacing longtime member Laura Ballance on tour) as well as the Bob Mould Band. He’s performed and toured with Guided By Voices’ Robert Pollard, recorded with former Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos and even sang on a jazz record by Patricia Barber. Getting tired yet? We could still go on and on with Narducy’s long list of credits.

So, for that reason, Narducy’s Personal Playlist interview is longer than most, and that’s not even touching on other projects he’s been involved in, such as Verboten, Jason and Alison (with Verbow’s Alison Chesley), the short-lived offshoot Rockets Over Sweden and more.

However, below, you can read the eight songs that Narducy feels define his career.

Live: Split Single on Nov. 19 at Evanston Space with the Kickback. $20-$35. Tickets here.

Patricia Barber—”Touch Of Trash” off “Companion” (1999)

What happened was that Patricia Barber, a jazz singer, was managed by a guy who was familiar with my work, and she told her manager that she wanted to sing a duet with a rock singer. And this was her Blue Note Records debut. So he reached out and I submitted a recording of some Verbow songs, but it was so out of left field that I honestly didn’t think anything of it again. But then they contacted me and said, “Let’s do it.”

She lived in North Chicago at the time and invited me over to her house. She was very down to business. I walked in, and she walked straight to the piano. It was like, “OK. I will sit down, and we’ll do this song now.” She’s so talented, and the song is in an odd time signature, I think it’s 5/4 or something. I think it went OK when we first practiced it, but it only lasted like 15 minutes.

It was recorded live at the Green Mill, and I remember sitting down there in front and next to me was Bruce Lundvall, the owner of Blue Note Records—he’s a jazz legend. During Barber’s first set, her band played and I panicked. I just watched these amazing musicians and thought, “I do not belong here.” (And I was not wrong.) [Laughs.]

But the second set started and she called me up, and the owner of the Green Mill, Dave Jemilo, he put his arm around me. He’s a much bigger guy than I am, and he handed me—it was almost like Monterey Pop or Woodstock or something—two microphones taped together. He said, one is for the record and one is for the P.A. Again, I’m super nervous and wondering how is this going to go. I thought, “Well, if I sing for the record, I won’t hear myself and the crowd won’t hear me, but if I sing in the P.A., I’ll be able to hear myself and I’ll sing better and the crowd will hear me and hopefully they’ll just pick up enough.”

So I chose the P.A. [mic]. You can hear on the record that my voice is more distant than hers is, and that’s why I think it sounds great. But I’m so honored to be on a Blue Note record. That was in 1999, and I’ve not been asked to do a jazz record since. [Laughs.]

Verbow—”Crest Of Mary” off “White Out” (2000)

We had done a number of demos for that record and with one of them, I brought it to the studio with Alison not having heard it before. I just asked the engineer if they could just set up mics on my voice and my acoustic guitar along with Alison’s cello. I just showed her the song, and I had a couple of cello lines in mind. [Vocalizes the cello lines.] And we just played it. Then when we were making the record with Brad Wood, I played him the demo. I thought this was really cool of Brad, because when you’re a producer, your job is to take a song and bring it to another place, but he was like, “You should release this as is.”

What’s cool about it is you can hear how Alison [is] changing chords a little bit late sometimes—after all, she had just learned the song. There’s little moments like that on the song, like me breathing. It’s just very raw and vulnerable. I’m really proud of that song. I thought it captured a real interesting emotional place that I hadn’t achieved before in songwriting.

Robert Pollard—”Love Is Stronger Than Witchcraft” off “Moon” (2006)

This is 2005, and Bob Pollard had ended Guided By Voices. He had a solo record ready to come out, and he wanted to put together a solo band. At that time, he had [drummer] Jon Wurster and [guitarist] Tommy Keene, but he didn’t have anyone else. So those two saw me play with Bob Mould, and they suggested that I join Pollard’s band. It all worked out, and the band was, I thought, really great.

We did a number of really cool shows. One of the shows we did, we basically did all the major markets in the U.S. and they were all sold out, which was great. Then we get to Seattle at the old Crocodile [theater], and the crowd is just still, like nothing—no reaction. I mean, it was sold out!

But Pollard was getting frustrated with it. We walked off the stage before the encore, and he goes, “No one is moving. No one’s giving us anything.” And I said, “Yeah, except for that one guy in the back bouncing up and down just going ape[bleep].” It was Eddie Vedder. So Eddie came back after the show, and Pollard joked that the next time Pearl Jam plays Dayton, Ohio, we want to open up—just giving him a hard time.

Sure enough, a month later, Pearl Jam gave us Midwest dates to open up, and not only did they do that, but they [also] recorded all of our shows and handed us the recordings and said, “Do what you want with it.” So, at the time, the record was called “From a Compound Eye” and [Pollard] had this song called “Love is Stronger Than Witchcraft,” which I think is just an incredible rock song and incredible pop song.

I think that if I remember what he said about the song at the time was that it was like love is way better than religion. That was the theme of the song. And sure enough, we’re doing that song last and Eddie jumps up and sings the last part. So me and Pollard and Eddie are alternating lines, and it ended up on this live record. It was just such a cool moment.

Superchunk—”Live In NYC” (2013)

So we were playing two shows at the Bowery Ballroom on this tour, and it was my New York debut with Superchunk. [Singer] Mac [McCaughan] had invited Eleanor Friedberger to come up and do a Ramones song and a Patti Smith song. After the show, they ended up releasing this 45 [record] of the show taping. So on the album art, this guy Casey Burns drew this comic-book sketch of us. I think it’s so cool, and I love how you can just barely see that he made it that I’m wearing a Husker Du shirt, which is a nice tip of the hat that I’m Bob Mould’s bassist.

So this is just a weird, quirky thing that happened. Another funny story about this show is that I was so new to the band that no one knew who I was. And sometimes after soundcheck you have like two hours and you’re starving but you don’t want to eat too much and you don’t go too far away, so I just went next door to the bar and got a burger and sat at the bar. And, of course, a half an hour later I’m surrounded by Superchunk fans talking about the show, but they don’t know who I am.

So these guys next to me, they start talking about what songs they hope Superchunk plays and one of them turns to me. … I just didn’t want to get into that conversation of like telling them I’m in the band. I just wanted to eat and then go, so I just threw out a couple songs. But he really wanted to chat about it. And then I kind of, unfairly, ran with it. [Laughs.] I just kept the conversation going without mentioning that I was going to be onstage. I remember saying, “I really hope they play this one.” And then I forgot about it, and then we’re onstage and we get to the encore, and I looked down at the set list and there was that song. I look up, and just like five rows back, this guy’s looking at me, shaking his fist at me. I doubled over laughing.

Split Single—”Last Goodbye” off “Fragmented World” (2014)

What’s interesting to me about that song is that it’s only three chords. I rarely write like that, with just three chords. I actually used to take a songwriting class from Steve Dawson at Old Town School. And so I called and I was like, “Can you get together with me for an afternoon to try working on these songs?” So he and I actually wrote a number of different parts to what became “Last Goodbye,” like its bridge and chorus and even alternates to all of them—even though we didn’t use them.

Then once I recorded the basic tracks with [Spoon’s] Britt Daniel and Jon Wurster, I brought everything back to Chicago and started to add that arpeggiated keyboard thing at the beginning. I just listened to it this morning because I wanted to have it in my brain when we talked about it, but on that record, I was out of my mind as far as detail work. That keyboard part is three different sounds happening at once, and if you listen to just that in that song, it ducks in and out constantly. We really spent a lot of time working on that because if it just goes throughout the whole song like that, it just becomes like an alarm clock where you just want to turn it off. The song has a dreamy feel, too. And then I brought the strings, and this was cool for me. It was a cellist and a violinist, and they had never heard the song before. So I told them parts that I thought would sound good, and then they actually came up with a part in the chorus, and there’s one note that they came up with that was just enough to tip it forward to make the chorus urgent.

That’s a really important song to me. It’s partly about my friend Ben [who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease]. I hadn’t written songs since he had passed away … in 2008, and this was like 2012. I just lost my father-in-law to an aggressive brain tumor. A month after being diagnosed, he was gone. Lyrically, it is definitely touching on those two experiences.

Bob Mould—”Nemeses Are Laughing” off “Beauty & Ruin” (2014)

With “Beauty and Ruin,” that album to me is such a Bob Mould songwriting master class. It goes all over the place as far as moods and styles and tempos and emotions. But, you know, if Bob was sitting right here right now and you asked both of us who’s the best band ever, we wouldn’t even hesitate to say the Beatles. And on that song, Bob, I feel, really took what he heard in Beatles music and made it his own and made it this cool, psychedelic, dreamy gorgeous song. It was just so much fun to record because when you’re making a record, you don’t know if the song is going to fade out or if you’re going to end at the same time. The way that we make records is we don’t rehearse; we just start playing the song in the studio. When we started playing that, and when it got to the end, Wurster was going over the bar. It just became this trashy, fun mess. Bob ended up keeping it that way on the record, which I love. I love when those moments happen where you’re just like, “This is the three of us playing.”

Bun E. Carlos—”Do Something Real” on “Greetings from Bunezuela” (2016)

Cheap Trick was my first concert, and I had actually played with Bun once before for a benefit at Metro in 2000, and I talked to him then. A mutual friend of ours, Nick Tremulis, was the musical director for Bun E.’s solo record. He reached out to me and said, “I’m going to do two songs with Bun and Bob Pollard, would you like to play on those?” And of course I wanted to, but I had a little bit of hesitation because I’ve become good friends with Daxx Nielsen [of Cheap Trick] and familiar enough with the rest of the band, and there’s tension between Cheap Trick and Bun. So I reached out to the Nielsens, and I was just like, “I would like to do this, but I don’t want it to be weird, so you tell me.” They were like, “Of course. Go have fun.” They had absolutely no problem with it. …

Before Robert Pollard got to the studio, we recorded bass, guitar and drums live for two songs in an hour or something without rehearsing. It went really well really quickly. When Pollard got there, he sang. Then Bun and Nick asked if I wanted to add acoustic guitar and then asked if I wanted to do the solo on “Do Something Real.” I just totally copped what Doug Gillard does on the original, and I can’t do it as well, but it’s in his spirit. Then I did backing vocals. In seven hours, we recorded two songs, and I’m playing bass, guitar, acoustic guitar, backing vocals and percussion. It was a blast.

I think Bun maybe knew that I know the other guys [in Cheap Trick] because he was very respectful of talking about the band that whole day. It was all good vibes. I’m really proud of how the songs turned out. I remember while we were recording, I was looking around and thinking, “That’s Bun E. Carlos! Cheap Trick was my first concert.” It was a total trip.

Split Single—”Untry Love” off “Metal Frames” (2016)

The way I write is, music and melody first, and then lyrics are the very last thing. And “Untry Love” just sort of had this bombastic, playful and independent energy to it. I just tripped upon this notion that I think both men and women have—it’s probably appointed to men more often, the fact that they don’t want to commit or whatever, but I know just as many women that are like that—but the notion that, maybe we all have a little bit of this in us, where you try to decide when you fall in love. And then tell yourself, “Well, if it doesn’t work out, then I’ll just untry love,” right. So that was the concept, and I just ran with that, that this character is just on the road. I think the first line is “A suitcase full of cash and whim.” It’s just this idea of going out and living in the world on your own terms.

And I even told my wife this, but when I was 28 and we got married, in the back of my mind it was there. It’s just like a security thing, I guess. I just told myself that if this doesn’t work out, we’ll just split up. You know, it’s funny: Why do you have to tell yourself that? Why is it hard to just dive in? I guess there’s just something in some of us.

By the way, the character in the song is an exaggeration: It’s not something that I feel, but I just thought it was a funny notion. Plus, “Untry” is not even a word, but I love that people know what I’m talking about when I explain the concept.

@joshhterry | jterry@redeyechicago.com