In Conversation: Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think
On the 30th anniversary of Pony Express Record, Craig Wedren looks back on the era with more wonder than regret. To say he simply "survived" the nineties would be a literal understatement.
If you’re asking Craig Wedren to take stock of his own life in 2024, he’d tell you it would be difficult to imagine a better outcome: He is a happy family man, a proud father, and perhaps the most successful he’s ever been as an artist and musician—an in-demand composer for film and television projects, whose most recent work includes scoring for the Emmy-nominated Yellowjackets. The road to now, however, has not been linear. And it sure as hell hasn’t been easy.
When Craig and I first met for an Anti-Matter interview in 1995, he was the loveably eccentric singer for Shudder to Think, whose fifth album, Pony Express Record, boldly expanded the language and possibilities of post-hardcore. It also, quite plainly, almost killed him. We didn’t know back then that the internal pressures of making and supporting this record would drive Craig into insomnia, illness, and lingering self-implosion; we certainly had no idea that, less than a year later, he would be diagnosed with cancer.
But as we stand in the 30th anniversary of that album, we are also able to stand in the knowledge that his survival—from all of it—gave him the perspective he needed to step out of the darkness and into the life he actually wanted. In a lot of ways, it looks a lot like the one he hoped to have found when he first discovered hardcore in the early eighties: Twenty-nine years after our first interview, I feel privileged to find a healthy Craig Wedren, still dedicated to creative pursuits, self-determination, and living a life unbound from outside rules. “That was the promise of punk to me,” he says. “It wasn’t just two chords and a mosh pit. It was about being sprung from restrictive ideas and being inspired by a whole lot of weird shit.”
The first thing that strikes me from going back to our original interview from 1995 is that you were quite possibly the most meticulous and well thought-out—or maybe over-thought-out—26-year-old kid in the world.
CRAIG: Oh my God, I was so over-thought-out [laughs]. I think about that so much now, especially because sometime over the last couple of years I got all of my journals digitized—from age fifteen through to now—and occasionally I’ll be looking for something, and… Well, I just want to massage that dude’s temples and loosen his jaw and be like, “It’s OK! You’re OK. You can breathe and relax because it’s all going to be OK. You’re doing great” [laughs]. I can’t believe how nuts I was.
Sure, but let’s contextualize this. Because at the time of that conversation you were in a situation where you were basically hurtling towards true adulthood: You graduated college. All of your friends are out there getting jobs. Shudder To Think signs with a major label. You’re being forced to make lots of decisions. For a young person, all of those things carry weight.
CRAIG: Stakes is high, right? I mean, I don’t know how you feel [as a musician], but at this point in my life, I’m really able to enjoy making music so much. I make music virtually all day, you know? This was not the case back then because you’re dealing with other shit. You’ve got to wait for your bandmates, you’ve got to get to the venue, you’ve got to set up. There’s always so much downtime. Now I just make music all the time and I’m so happy most of the time. Then, I was almost never happy or free or relaxed. It was so fraught. It was so loaded with ambition, competition, that odd combination of self-loathing and self-aggrandizing. And I really think that’s just how you feel at that age. I don’t know if there’s any way around that. Especially if you’re a weirdo or a punk or a thinker.
What’s funny to me is that you had a real naked ambition during the Pony Express Record era. But typically, most people with that kind of naked ambition are making something relatively palatable [laughs]. You were ambitious about making music that was truly difficult for a lot of people.
CRAIG: Yes! That was part of the ambition! It was like, “Not only are we going to fucking do this, but we are going to fucking do this on our terms. Because that was the contract [we made] with our punk gods and literary heroes!” [laughs] It was such a strange combination of things, but that conflict never seemed contradictory to me. Because if you’re going to go for it, then you’d better go for it on your own terms. Otherwise, what if it works? What if you are successful but you make it on somebody else’s terms? It’s got to come from [the heart]. That was the promise of punk to me. It wasn’t just two chords and a mosh pit. It was about being sprung from restrictive ideas and being inspired by a whole lot of weird shit. And once that bug bit when I was a teenager, it didn’t stop. It kept growing and growing. So when we met, and I was in my mid-twenties, there was already this Frankenstein that had been created, which was myself—this funny creature that I had been working on for ten or fifteen years. When I look back on it now, I think it was both freeing and a total straitjacket.
The way you describe it feels relevant to two things that I think are important to the Shudder To Think origin story: The first part is when you’re asked to try out for Stüge [the more traditional hardcore band that became Shudder To Think], and you think to yourself, quote, “I love some hardcore, but I am so not a hardcore singer”—and yet you still go on to do it. And then the second part is that you join the band, and according to the lore, the new band is named when Mike Russell supposedly says that he “shuddered to think that we would be just another hardcore band.”
CRAIG: That’s right.
Clearly, you continued to operate inside the hardcore community, so I was curious as to what more you wanted from hardcore at that time. What did you feel like you needed to contribute?
CRAIG: I think it connects to what we were just talking about, which is the idea that the rules are that there ain’t no rules. We were kind of a smarty-pants band, right? Everybody was very well-read and super into film and into a lot of different kinds of music. As with our entire generation, we grew up listening to whatever was on the radio in the 1970s. Classic rock and then first-wave punk and then new wave—which, at least in the first half of the ‘80s and partly because of MTV, was such a wild, wild west of identity and gender and fashion and avant-pop. But then there was this restriction that happened with some of American hardcore at the time, at least in terms of composition and lyrical content and vocal style. It just seemed like the easiest target in the world because obviously this was some conservative-ass restrictive shit. But also, everybody in D.C. was growing up, and everybody’s music was starting to spill out over the edges of what had been the more teenage strictures of D.C. hardcore.
I got to D.C. right at the end of what has come to be known as Revolution Summer. I was living in Cleveland, but I was already listening to Minor Threat and for sure Bad Brains, maybe Government Issue. And then I got there and I immediately got the Rites of Spring record, and honestly, that record blew the doors wide open for me and for anybody else with an exploratory mindset. It was just gorgeous and free. It had a strange combination of being both hyper-individualized and hyper-collective. It was almost a cell made up of radically different, staunch individuals, and that just really spoke to me. There was something in the water in 1985 and 1986. It was a really great time to be coming up with new ideas and throwing them against the wall. So by the time I tried out for Shudder To Think, I think I just sort of felt like, “Whoa. This isn’t like other things. And I like things that aren’t like other things.” I had already learned that in Cleveland because… There were no rules in Cleveland because there were just no people [laughs]. You couldn’t get a minion together of any one style. It was just like, if you were a freak, you would hang out with the freaks, and everyone would bring in their freaky shit. It was like first-wave L.A. punk or first-wave CBGBs, where it was just weirdos, homos, punks, and artists, and you just sort of bumped into each other and tried to come up with something new. The first wave of D.C. hardcore, that kind of Dischord sound, it had a style. And even if it wasn’t intentional, it still felt rules-y.
The perception outside of D.C. in the eighties was always that it was more of a haven for the freaks than other places, but I recently came across this thing that Ian MacKaye said about you coming onto the scene that was funny. He says, “[Craig] just suddenly appeared wearing a fucking sweater and his belly sticking out. We’re like, ‘What, who is this guy?’ I mean, he was really very annoying onstage, to begin with. Then I just grew to love him, you know? I just loved the guy.” [laughs]. But when I read that I thought: That doesn’t sound so much like a freak haven. That sounds kind of judgey.
CRAIG: I mean, I was annoying on stage. I was pretentious and theatrical… I was a theater kid! I was both super cocky and super insecure. I had been sort of a local cover-band rock star in Cleveland, so I was like, “Well, I’m just gonna come here and show them how it’s done because I’ve been singing Journey covers for the last three years!” [laughs] And then I got kicked out of a bunch of bands for being annoying and singing the way I do and having my belly sticking out. But the thing is, I got there at exactly the right time because everybody was wanting and needing to do something new. Everyone was evolving.
One of the things we talked about in our original interview was how Shudder came out in D.C. at a time when there were a lot of big messages and political activism—all of the things that we typically associate with Dischord and with the city. And then here you come, singing about clock-climbing cockroaches and plastic yachts [laughs]. In 1995, you said that was a very “fuck that” choice. That’s the way you phrased it.
CRAIG: That’s interesting, because from my perspective now I don’t think it was a choice at all. I just always ran from [big messages]. I still do. I did a podcast with a friend of mine a couple of years ago, and at the end of the podcast, she asked me a question—something to the effect of, “In what way are you an activist?” I came up with some cockamamie answer that I felt uncomfortable and embarrassed about afterwards. It wasn’t a lie, but the truth is, I am not an activist. I like personal things. I like relational things. I like dreams and I like psychedelics. I like movies. I like photos and photo imagery. I like stories. But on a limbic, unconscious level, I never liked to talk about politics. I just feel like the point of music is to get sprung. To be free of this body, this world, and these rules. So to then talk about our bodies and our world and our rules? It’s like, just run for office, man. We need better leaders! [laughs] I’m running from office, you know what I mean?
Back then, you thought that your aversion to it may stem from the fact you want to reserve the right to change. And you felt like making concrete statements on records might lock you in somehow.
CRAIG: Well, look at how it’s haunted Ian! Well, maybe not haunted, but…
It would haunt me, to be honest.
CRAIG: It’s just, he wrote this song. An amazing fucking song. A personal manifesto—or just a diary of the moment—called “Straight Edge” and look what happened. I don’t want that. I just want to stay slippery and free. I can still sing any of my songs anytime because they’re loose enough. They’re in this liminal space between meaning and interpretation. I can sing them and have whatever associations I have to the imagery that are relevant to me now, or even revisit where I was and whatever those associations were back then in a more dear and tender way. Like, I’m going to rehearsal later. I’m playing with some friends of mine who have this band called Middle Aged Dad Jam Band—it’s David Wain and Ken Marino from The State. It’s a wonderful, hilarious band where I basically sing background vocals and shake my ass [laughs]. But we’re doing a big New Years show and David asked if we could play a couple of Shudder To Think songs, so we’re going to start working on those today. Is that going to be strange? No. It’s not going to be strange at all. I love those songs. They’re all very sturdy boats, you know? Part of that is that they all exist a little bit outside of time and trends.
One of the things I love about doing these reunion interviews is that whenever I go back and look at these old conversations again, I am not only looking at who you were and where you were at, but I’m also getting to see the younger me—and this interview struck a particular chord in that way. In the introduction, I described what you were wearing that day as “an overtly fuzzy sweater that I could never get away with wearing.” And that sentence is dripping with subtext for me. Because 29 years ago, I was still in the closet. And “getting away with it,” for me, meant feeling like I wasn’t allowed to wear something a little more flamboyant without giving away my sexuality. So on some level, I was sitting there kind of jealous of you because your ostensible straightness actually somehow allowed you to be gayer than me! [laughs] Did you actually look at your personal style back then as a site to challenge gender or sexuality? Or was that really a pure expression?
CRAIG: I think it was both. I always liked costuming even from a pretty young age. I loved to dress up—similar to music, where I really like to try it all. Even when I was thirteen or fourteen, sometimes I wanted to dress punk and some days I wanted to look like Boy George. Some days maybe I would wear a skirt and other days I would dress like a surfer. I mean, it’s all just costume, right? It’s all just stuff we invent and put meaning up against.
You’re born naked and the rest is drag.
CRAIG: Exactly. I still get emotional whenever I see someone or something—whether it’s a movie or reading a story—that feels like outlaw freedom. There was always this sense of trying to stretch the parameters of things I could try so that I could feel free. In the eighties, it felt fun and provocative. But when I was living in Cleveland, and I would go out looking sort of New Romantic or punk or whatever it was, I would get my ass kicked for “being a faggot.” Which would just make me more mad and more determined to be free.
When the “alternative” thing happened in the nineties, honestly, it was a bummer. It was really drab and judgey and restrictive, I thought. Because I always thought the whole thing was to try your ideas, to throw them against the wall and play around, to use all the colors. But [alternative rock] felt brown and gray. So that also made me rebellious. It was definitely provocative on some level, but it was coming from a genuine place.
Pony Express Record was, in so many ways, a fuck-you record.
CRAIG: Yes [laughs].
This is kind of a weird counterfactual question, but bigger budgets aside, do you think you would have made the same kind of record on Dischord? Or did signing to Epic actually make you want to fly your freak flag higher?
CRAIG: I mean, we had already been writing and performing a lot of those songs before we signed to a major. But the major label interest was there, so there may have been a little bit of that, “Well, if we’re going to make any kind of move, we’d better really show them what they’re signing.” We weren’t even 100 percent sure that we were going to leave Dischord; we just knew that we wanted to do it as a career. We knew we wanted to reach as many people as possible, and Dischord has its own ethos—which, you know, has its own freedoms and its own constraints. So I think we would have made the same record because we were well on our way. But I bet it would have been a little chiller.
There were a bunch of years that I was like, “I wish I could go back and really let some air and some light into that record—into the performances, into the presentation of the music.” Not the actual music, the songs I love. But in the last few years, I’m like, “No, no, no. It’s Pony Express Record! It’s awesome. I love it” [laughs] It’s just got that discipline. It feels mean in a way that most of our records don’t, but in a cool way, in a sexy or almost leathery way. There’s something nocturnal about it. It can be dark.
At one point in our original conversation, perhaps because we were two twenty-something over-thinkers, we get into this deep dive on mortality. And then one year after our interview, you are diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease. It’s hard not to connect the two things in my mind.
CRAIG: Right.
Recently you wrote something about Pony Express Record, and I wanted to read part of that here. You said: “When the album didn’t do as well as we’d hoped, it felt like a personal rejection on a level I hadn’t experienced before. Between that and some other contributing factors, things started to fragment and shatter, and I think I went a little bit insane. Within a year or so of the album’s release I got really sick and was diagnosed with cancer. It was a brutal crucible. I can still feel it now.” What can you tell me now about this experience and how it relates to the way you remember that year?
CRAIG: The first thing that comes to mind is the nocturnality and intensity around Pony Express Record and our ambitions for it. There was a really brutal kind of perfectionism and rigor around it that wasn’t healthy. Certainly I was grinding myself down, trying to just overachieve. It was so important to me. The way I look at it now, it was just this singular focus that started from age twelve, or whenever I started singing in bands, to this final culmination of what had been a lifelong dream—and it fell short of the mark on a commercial level, even though we were doing such great stuff. Every band wanted to take us on tour. Smashing Pumpkins took us out. Pavement took us out. We went out with Foo Fighters. It was really great, but everything was starting to fragment. I think I also started to have this idea about how I was “supposed to be,” or what “a rock star” was supposed to be like. Which is ironic with all this talk about independence, doing your own thing, and being unique to yourself. I was not being myself. I wasn’t mature enough. I was trying to fit into some mold or idea that I had about who and how I was supposed to be.
That was the beginning of the era where Nathan [Larson] really needed to break off and do something on his own. He recorded Mind Science of the Mind with Joan Wasser and Kevin March and Mary Timony. Such a fucking great, underrated record. But he needed his own project. He was kind of gunning for my position—not overtly, but in an increasingly and frankly dark, psychic, mindfucky way. I basically felt like I was losing the room. Because Pony Express Record and Get Your Goat, even though they are totally band records, they are also very much my records. The ideas, the style, the direction of the music, obviously all the vocals and lyrics, but also so many of the riffs. It felt like I had discovered my songwriting voice and it was being rejected. And not only was it being rejected, but I was losing my band. They were losing faith in me.
All these things were happening to me personally, as well, that I literally felt like I was starting to disappear. I couldn’t sleep. For a handful of months, I would just stay out as late as I possibly could—until the last person who would stay out with me was like, “Baby, I gotta go” [laughs]. And then I would go back to Jesse [Peretz]’s apartment, where I was living, and just lay there for a couple of hours, from four to six a.m., when I knew one of my best and oldest friends would wake up. So I would just lay there and think the crazy thoughts you have between four and six a.m. when you’re going through something difficult.
And then I started to itch. I started having these weird skin things. I went to a dermatologist and they told me it was scabies. Eventually, that went away and things settled down a little bit. I got back together with my girlfriend. And then within a few months of that, the skin thing came back super intensely, and it was clear that this was not scabies. That’s when I was diagnosed with cancer. At that point, I no longer felt insane. It had all manifested in my body as cancer. I mean, this is my story—or at least the way I think about it.
This may be weird to ask, then, but when you did finally get diagnosed, was there a relief in that?
CRAIG: You know what? Weirdly, yes. Totally. I was always dimly aware, or even acutely aware sometimes, of the shit I needed to work on: Drink less. Sleep more. Exercise. Calm the fuck down. Stop beating yourself up. Whatever it is. In this case, it was the pushing and pushing and perfectionism and beating myself up and comparing myself to other people—which is something we all struggle with to some degree or another, but that was particularly intense for me in my teens and twenties. So I needed to work on it, and when I got diagnosed, it was just a forced time-out. And there was relief in that. I knew I had to deal with it now, because otherwise, I could die.
How did that episode affect the trajectory of the band—as it started moving its way towards 50,000 B.C. and then, the band’s eventual ending?
CRAIG: Very, very radically. You know, I think it had a very positive effect. It brought us all together. We’ve always been very familial, and we love each other very much. Nathan is absolutely one of my number-one soul brothers since the day we met when we were fifteen. Obviously, we were going through some tough stuff back then, but [my illness] just brought us all back down to earth for a second and reminded us of that. I suppose it’s stating the obvious, but it reminded us of our priorities, which is that we love each other and we wanted to make music together and we were extremely fortunate to be alive and to be having the opportunities that were, quite frankly, being heaped upon us at the time.
The fact that Pony Express didn’t do as well as the label needed it to, and as the whole band wanted it to do, meant that I started writing differently for 50,000 B.C.—to appeal to Nathan and Stuart [Hill], really. I was excited to do that. It wasn’t a problem or something. I love an assignment and I love knowing who my audience is, and that’s why I’m good at [composing for] movies and TV shows. So I was writing 50,000 B.C. while I was going through chemotherapy. Actually, we were recording it by that time, too.
Which is inconceivable to me after seeing this Polaroid picture of you at that time, where you’re laying in bed…
CRAIG: …with a dachshund!
Yes! You know I love dachshunds [laughs]. But for real, you did not look good! I cannot imagine how you could go to the studio like that.
CRAIG: I wasn’t doing so good. I had all the time in the world, though. And I couldn’t do much. It was bad. I mean, by that point, when I had no eyebrows and I was basically green or yellow, we were full into recording that album. We all just really banded together after my diagnosis. It was very beautiful. I still fucking love that record. If anything, it’s the one I listen to most. I know it’s not as cohesive as some of the others; we’re clearly kind of trying things out, like it’s a little bit of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle on the breakfast table. But we felt really great about it. We made a more commercial, but still totally weirdly Shudder to Think record that really doesn’t sound like anything else.
I remember on the last day of recording, I was being radiated on my chest and neck—my heart and my voice. I mean, come on. The metaphors never cease! [laughs] Anyway, I was so dry. I didn’t have any saliva because it would get radiated, so all that was left was mucus. It was just globby and not great for singing. So I would supplement it with fucking gallons of water in the vocal booth. We were just so determined and so on fire, and we were a team. So we were in New York, recording vocals, and I just had to be surrounded by gallons of water in between every line so that I had enough lubrication. I would just go glug glug glug glug, and then sing. Glug glug glug glug, and then sing. And then whoever the Pro-Tools engineer was, after we were done recording, would have to go through all my vocal takes and have to remove all the glugs [laughs]. I weirdly remember that as kind of a wonderful time for the band. My having cancer just got us over a lot of our ego bullshit.
I feel like I remember your first show back being at Tramps [in New York City]. Or at least in my memory, you were talking about being in remission, and I feel like you maybe even cried at one point…
CRAIG: I don’t doubt it.
I just remember the feeling in the room, and even the feeling on stage, felt so different from when I saw you playing for Pony Express. It was almost as if a heaviness had been lifted.
CRAIG: I think that’s right. I don’t know that it was a conscious thing, but it just naturally happened. At that point, we were probably starting to work on movies, too, so things were just starting to loosen up. But the damage had been done interpersonally.
Not to jump ahead too far, but you also had a heart attack in 2018.
CRAIG: Yes. A massive one.
There had to have been a point where you were just like, “Oh come on, what the fuck.”
CRAIG: Of course, because at this point I am legitimately really healthy and fairly mature and not trying to be a fucking rock star “dawg” [laughs]. It’s so interesting, you know, the stories we tell ourselves about illness. That was the cancer one. The heart attack one, though, is so much simpler for me: I fucking got radiated, in my heart, in my mid-twenties! One of the things they tell you is: “Listen. This treatment does a bang-up job of getting rid of cancer, but it can lead to long-term tissue damage.” So I really just think it’s as simple as my mom’s side of the family having heart issues and crazy cholesterol things. My doctors had told me I had really high cholesterol, and that we were going to have to deal with that at some point, but because I was so healthy in other ways, they were like, “We don’t need to rush into it.” Cut to: me having a heart attack. That’s really just what it is. I mean, I could tell bigger stories about it, but it’s just never occurred to me that having a heart attack was much more than that.
There were certain things that I was happy to change, though. I was working really fucking hard for a lot of years—just building up the business, providing for our son, and being a daddy-provider guy, which is something I love. I love having that purpose and mission. But it wasn’t like when you hear about somebody working so hard that they have a heart attack. It wasn’t like that at all. That said, it was a “widowmaker” heart attack that could have easily killed me—and it didn’t, for which I’m very grateful.
There’s one more thing that 26-year-old Craig said that I wanted to bring up here, which I love. He said, “Change, growth, and evolution have become almost an obsession of mine. I see so many musicians just repeating themselves over and over, and it becomes stagnant and dull. It’s not their fault. It’s really easy when somebody pats you on the head with approval.” Reading this and thinking about our conversation today, it really strikes me that your present life—which you love—is totally contingent on the fact that Pony Express was not a commercial success.
CRAIG: Absolutely.
You didn’t get that pat on the head—or at least not in the way that you were maybe thinking you would. Did that experience change your relationship with these concepts of “success” and “failure?”
CRAIG: It’s interesting. You asking that question makes me realize that I’ve been thinking about that lately, but not in those exact terms. Because, now, it’s no longer an obsession. It’s an ingrained, imprinted, in-my-DNA thing that I couldn’t possibly not do a thousand different kinds of music. I love it. Like, right now I’m deep in [composing for] Yellowjackets. But on Saturday my friend and I did an eight-hour improvised musical accompaniment for a psychedelic plant medicine ceremony, where we were just doing sound support using modular synths and vocal looping and some guitars and whatever else came up. And right now I’m about to go up to band practice with Middle Aged Dad Jam Band, where the set list is basically the same songs that we used to do in my cover bands in Cleveland when I was twelve. It’s just such a joy-sport to do all of it. To continually just explore for exploration’s sake. It doesn’t feel obsessive; it just feels like, how could I possibly limit myself to any one of these wonderful things?
The fact that it’s been a lifetime of this has taught me that there is always so much more to discover than what’s been discovered. I wonder what would have happened if Pony Express Record had been the hit that we were so certain that it was destined to be. But I see friends of mine who have had inordinate success, and it’s not easy. I’m sure I could be happier somehow? But I can’t imagine what that would look like. Things happen the way they need to happen. To say I have no regrets—like, I don’t buy that for a minute, I have a billion regrets. But that doesn’t mean I would change anything.
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“Well, if we’re going to make any kind of move, we’d better really show them what they’re signing.”
I remember when Pony Express Record came out, I realized they'd gotten signed to a major label, and my inirial reaction was "what were they thinking? This is not mass-appeal music." Not in a gatekeepy way, just recognizing that Shudder To Think could be sort of an acquired taste, and a lot of bands got swept up in that post-Nevermind signing frenzy that were never going to translate to wider appeal. It did seem llike a record that was 110% Shudder To Think.
But looking back, a lot of really interesting stuff came out of DC post-Revolution Summer. Fire Party, Lungfish, Shudder To Think, Rites of Spring...stuff with hardcore energy in musical forms that were increasingly further from hardcore.
norm, please interview Gi (Fugazzi)