The Plush album Fed is Chicago indie rock’s Smile, its Tusk, its Loveless, with singer-songwriter Liam Hayes standing in for Brian Wilson, Lindsey Buckingham, and Kevin Shields. It took Hayes almost three years to record and mix Fed, and along the way he not only spent more than a hundred thousand dollars on studios, engineers, and dozens of guest musicians but stretched many of his personal and professional relationships to the breaking point. In 2002, when Hayes decided the album was finished, it didn’t even see a stateside release–today it’s available only as a Japanese import.
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This latest chapter in the Plush drama began in June, when Hayes showed up at a barbecue at Murphy’s place–Murphy had quit the band in 2001, before Fed was finished, and he and Hayes, longtime friends, had drifted apart. Also at the party was Drag City boss Dan Koretzky, who hadn’t spoken to Hayes in a couple years. Though they’d known each other since kindergarten, they’d had a falling-out in 2001, when Plush was recording for Drag City–the label had balked at the skyrocketing costs of Fed and walked away from the project.
Most of the recordings on Underfed, made in summer 1999 with Hayes, Murphy, and Isotope 217 bassist Matt Lux, were engineered by Steve Albini and Bob Weston at nonstudio locations: in the Congress Theater, on the roof of a South Loop building, at an abandoned TV soundstage. The hushed, stripped-down renditions provide a counterpoint to the grandiloquent arrangements on Fed. “Obviously it’s the same songs, but it’s a really different reading of them,” says Hayes. “A lot of it was more relaxed because it wasn’t really supposed to be for anybody. It’s not aware of there ever being an audience.”
When the group began working on Fed in earnest in summer 1999, Hayes had already been living with the material for almost six years. “I wouldn’t say I ever got sick of those songs, but let’s just say you can lose perspective,” admits Hayes.
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