McCaughey breaks down every track off his new album about the stroke that nearly ended his life as a musician

When Scott McCaughey entered the hospital after suffering a major stroke in November 2017, a doctor told Mary Winzig, his wife, that Scott would never play music again. The doctor’s advice on how to cope with the situation?: “Get used to it.”

McCaughey almost immediately proved the doctor’s prediction wrong when he started playing chords on a guitar that his longtime friend Peter Buck brought to the hospital. As soon as three days after his stroke, he began jotting down thoughts that passed through his mind while still in the ICU. After months of rehabilitation, he has performed a series of “Therapy Sessions” concerts with The Minus 5, toured internationally with Filthy Friends and reunited with the Young Fresh Fellows. Now, he has turned many of those notebook pages into Stroke Manor, his 13th official release with The Minus 5, which is available Friday from Yep Roc Records after an initial Record Store Day pressing.

He recorded Stroke Manor in his basement, which he lovingly calls the “Dungeon of Horror.” Every wall is either hidden by shelves of carefully organized records, guitar cases or obscured by wads of backstage passes dangling from the ceiling. Baseball memorabilia is scattered throughout, along with boxes full of effects pedals and vintage microphones. With a group of friends including Buck, Jeff Tweedy (Wilco), Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney), Decemberists John Moen and Jenny Conlee-Drizos, Joe Adragna, Linda Pitmon and more making up the Minus 5, McCaughey brought these lyrics to life.

Stroke Manor is one of the most compelling tributes to the power of music in existence. When a doctor gave him zero hope to play music again, his friends, family and favorite bands gave him a reason to keep strumming the guitar and writing. The record bounces between being strangely beautiful, haunting, confusing and cathartic, but it is an endless source of inspiration for anyone looking to overcome hardship — medical or otherwise. It is a harrowing time capsule of his experience in the hospital; it is a collection of incoherent thoughts tracked with strange, Auto-Tuned vocals; it is an ode to perseverance against all odds; most importantly it’s a love letter to life, rock ’n’ roll and Rip Torn. After a four-decade career, the album he began while in ICU may be his most important to date and among McCaughey’s very best.

We spoke with McCaughey back in September about his incredible journey back to music and how his “Therapy Sessions” concerts allowed him to readapt into the music world. He let us into the “Dungeon” to discuss Stroke Manor track by track, the headspace he was in while recovering from the stroke and how this stream of consciousness record came into being when the speech center in his brain was damaged.

Revisit our September feature in which McCaughey discusses his stroke, recovery and “Therapy Sessions”

Split Tooth Media: Last time we spoke you mentioned that you began writing Stroke Manor songs about three days after the stroke. Why do you think you started writing so soon?

Scott McCaughey: I don’t know. I felt like if I wrote thoughts down, that it might help. I wasn’t really trying to write anything that would be used to a higher purpose. I just wanted to make my brain work and try to put it on a page — just to see if I could, basically. That’s it.

I started writing stuff down because Mary or the nurse would write something to me and I’d go, ‘Oh that’s what you said?’ It was a necessary communication tool. So I started scribbling so I could try to be clear because I wasn’t saying what I was actually trying to say. My brain wasn’t transferring the actual words. I started writing a list of Beatles songs, but I didn’t get that far. There’s a whole page of me writing ‘the capital of ___ is ___.’ All 50 states. I don’t know why.

I couldn’t say what I wanted, so I just put whatever words down that I could.

When did you realize these could be songs?

A couple months later I thought I should do something with them. I didn’t know how it would work, but I thought I could try. It was fun putting the music to them because once I started strumming guitar or playing piano it was good to have them as raw material. I’d change it some, but most of them were pretty much exact. I didn’t know if it was going to be a record. There were coincidentally enough songs for an album, one or two I did a little later. I like the music. It came really easily for me. I thought there must be something in these songs, the lyrics, because the music was coming in really interesting, felt really good to me.

So you mainly revised just for function rather than meaning?

Yeah. There were some where there were words I just didn’t like. Like in “Beatles Forever” there’s some line about broccoli and I was like, ‘What the fuck? I don’t want to sing broccoli!’ So I just changed it to ‘lime,’ for unknown reasons that felt better to sing. There was a bit of that. I couldn’t really change meaning. That was a losing cause. On the back of the LP I scanned all these pages. If you listen to the record and looked at those you’ll notice there will be a few different things, but not a whole lot.

What role do the lyrics play in this album?

They’re the reason for the album. They were there and they’re me trying to communicate something, or to find out if I could communicate with something, if I could still write. The words are crucial to it even though they’re not going to speak to everyone. Well, I don’t think they will, but I just had to say it anyway.

Do you feel like the lyrics took you somewhere different because they were kind of an interpretation of something that maybe you didn’t fully write?

Yeah. It is like that. I got into putting weird sounds on my voice. I did the super obvious Auto-Tune, which is something I would never, ever have done, but suddenly it just totally spoke to me. It sounded like another person, maybe trying to get in touch with the real me, when I wrote those words. So it felt really right to me.

The first thing that came to mind was [Neil Young’s] Trans.

Of course! I think he used a vocoder, so I knew it could have a little bit of that effect. But not quite as heavily as he did it. I wanted to still be a voice, but I wanted it to be obvious that I was using the Auto-Tune. I just liked it. And I hope it’s not one of those things where years from now I think, ‘Why did I use that stupid thing on my voice?’ But I don’t think I will. I think I’m OK with it (laughs).

Do you feel the effects are disguising your voice?

Yeah, but not throughout. Just for some of the songs.

Why do that then?

I don’t know. I made the decision going in that I was going to fuck with my voice. It just felt right. I didn’t want to labor over the vocals. I wanted to spit them out pretty basically, and I thought when I listened back to them with unusual effects on them, they sounded good to me and without me going and worrying if every word was perfectly in pitch or anything like that. It felt really good to not have to labor over them, the voices. I did them really quickly.

If there’s an album to try some weird things on, this is probably the one.

Yeah, right?

“Plascent Folk”

So I had to look up “Plascent Folk” and I found few results.

I had to look it up too because it’s not a word (laughs). I think I wrote it at the top of the page that that would be the name of the song. I thought it was a word, but it wasn’t (laughs). I don’t know what I was thinking of, but right from the start that’s what it was called.

It’s a fitting intro to the album.

Yeah. It’s one of those songs that you think should be the last song on the album, but I just love this song so much I wanted it to be the beginning. It brings you into this world.

Do you think the Auto-Tune matches the lyrical content?

I felt like it fit really well on this. I did this in one day. I think this was one of the later songs I did. The words were written in the hospital, but I just recorded it and sang it and played piano and guitar and when I put that effect on, I just loved it. I almost didn’t put anything else on it. It didn’t have a drum track or anything. Then I thought maybe Peter [Buck] could put some sort of atmospheric, EBow guitar on it. Then I wanted Jenny [Conlee-Drizos] to sing on it. And maybe accordion too. That’s all that’s on it. But yeah, I don’t know what the word means or where it came from. It just came.

“My Collection”

Is the collection in reference to anything in particular?

I think part of it was thinking about my records and books, and how I always want everything to be complete. I’m kind of a weirdo like that. If I find somebody’s books, or their records, I want to have all of them. I’m kinda realizing that it’s futile because I’m not going to live long enough to listen to all of them, or read all the books, if I get them. It’s kinda like, ‘Give it up because you’re not going to last that long.’ It’s realizing I’m gonna die, and it’s not going to be finished. That’s kind of how I measure time in a weird way.

Did facing death make you reevaluate possessions in general?

Yes. And honestly I was doing that a little bit pre-stroke, too. I’m not a young man anymore. I’d started thinking, ‘Why am I buying all these records? I’m never going to have time to listen to them all.’ But I don’t really want to give up and stop listening to new music or just be resigned to my fate. Maybe I’m trying to temper it a little bit, but I still want to listen to new stuff and hear what people are doing.

Does listening back to these now bring back any memories?

Some of them do. Not this one. This one came later. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be good enough to make the record, but then at the last second it seemed like the best song and I don’t know how it happened. There’s not very much on it. It’s very basic. I sing it in a different kind of voice that I’ve never sang in before. Maybe I was thinking of Bowie or something. Not that I could ever dream to sound like Bowie! It’s a different character for me. Although the lyrics almost make a bit of sense. This one, it just pushed its way up to the top of the record.

“Beacon From RKO”

RKO was a record label, right?

It was a movie studio. Kind of an independent competition against the big studios. It was an outsider. I think Howard Hughes owned it at one point. It’s based on, when I was back here after the hospital, I was watching Turner Classic Movies all the time. And we figured out how to put on the closed captions. I was just watching movies and reading the dialog because it was hard for me to get it from listening — the words were going by too fast for me. So I was watching lots and lots of old movies. I was immersed in them. RKO has this really cool intro to their movies where they have this giant antennae coming out of the world and it’s like it’s sending out a transmission to me, from these movies. I was just so into it, just the language, and trying to soak them in. It was like a message from the past, and the future, at the same time.

“Bleach Boys and Beach Girls”

This one I have no idea what I’m singing about. No idea (laughs).

“The world is one big towel” is the only line that makes any sense, and it’s not in the notebook. I added that later. I was like, ‘That’s actually good, I’ll put that in there.’ John Moen played drums on it and he’s like, ‘What are you singing at the end?’ ‘Slim Jays!’ What the hell is that? I don’t know! ‘Bleach boys! Slim Jays!’ ‘Saint Race!’ He thought that was so funny.

“My Master Bull”

You included a little hospital audio snippet about blood pressure in the intro. Was that something you considered adding more of?

I put that thing on last minute. I got it off a Sound Effects record. They had some hospital sounds in there but that was the one little bit that I put in. I’d never taken my own blood pressure before and we had to get a machine when we got back to Portland. I had to take it constantly and keep a chart. So when I found that snippet, ‘How’s your blood pressure?’ and I don’t know if you can hear what the woman says, she goes, ‘Not good’ (laughs).

I don’t know what’s going on with this song. It was written in the hospital on a computer. But I love this song. Musically it’s not like anything I’ve ever done and I think it sounds really cool. I thought a little bit of M. Ward. It was the one thing that reminded me a little of something he’d done. I got Alia Farah, who toured with Matt, to get those kind of Doo-Wop vocals that he likes. It’s a little bit of a nod to him.

“Beatles Forever”

This is the first one I wrote. That’s Jeff [Tweedy] on bass. I just had to change that line about the broccoli. [‘So the tired wan broccoli / Drip cast beer butter’] It was just too weird to sing (laughs). And I’m sure when I wrote it I wanted to write something else but my brain couldn’t manage it.

Is that a problem you normally have?

Now I have it all the time. I can’t think of words all the time. It’s really unfortunate (laughs).

Are you still writing a lot?

I haven’t been. That’s why it was great to have these words because I didn’t have to think about [lyrics]. I could write music without trying to think of words because these existed somehow. I found it really easy to come up with music — I used the first tunes that came to my head. I haven’t written a whole song by myself since the stroke. I haven’t written any new songs where I wrote the lyrics or anything yet. That’s something I’ve gotta do at some point and see how it works.

Peter gave you a Beatles playlist in the hospital. Were there any specific songs or albums that helped carry you through your time in the hospital?

Not so much. It was the whole catalog on shuffle, I think. I remember a lot of early ones that mystified me, like “Do You Want To Know A Secret” — I couldn’t think of the title without getting it all messed up. A couple days later I kept watching two things on YouTube over and over: the “video” for “Strawberry Fields Forever” which pretty well described my mind at that point; and a clip from the movie Imagine where John and the band are learning “How Do You Sleep?” That was the first song I sort of tried to play on guitar, though that was probably a week or so later.

How do you feel music impacted your recovery?

Music rubbed in the fact that my memory was fucked because all the songs were gone. And yet that gave me all the impetus I needed to fight to get it back. It started with just one song — I spent the entire last week in the hospital just trying to get the words down to “Robert Ryan Is Among Us.” Unsuccessfully, really. My poor speech therapist! But of course, music has meant everything to my recovery. It figures in both mental and physical recovery — it’s the center of my continued attempt to get back what I’ve lost.

“Message of Mother”

This might have been one of the first ones I recorded. Joe Adragna did a lot on this. I think I sent him the piano and drum machine and voice. And he added drums and guitars from his studio outside New Orleans. Really cool guitars, really great.

This one I was writing to my mom about my mom. I don’t know why. She had died about a year before the stroke. I guess I was thinking about her somehow, in a weird way, maybe because my family was around me. We were in San Francisco where I grew up. I’m not sure what I was saying, but I was trying to say something to her. Maybe I don’t really need to know.

Have you tried to go back and interpret many of these lyrics yet?

Not so much. I probably will at some point. I just kinda decided to take them as they were. Then when I go back to try to figure out what I was trying to say, it’s not necessarily going to be forthcoming.

I was trying to describe this album to a friend and I said it’s a stream of consciousness after a stroke had destroyed the speech center in his brain.

Yeah, after I had no stream of consciousness (laughs)!

“Well In Fact She Said”

This one I wrote on the computer in the hospital too. I don’t know what I was going after. But I love the chorus. The words are totally strange words, but the way I spit them out, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really good! But what am I trying to say?’ Who knows!

Do you worry at all about how the album will be received?

No. I don’t ever worry about that because nobody pays that much attention to me anyway (laughs). I feel like I’m lucky that I can kind of do what I want. Yep Roc is just really supportive of me and they’re awesome. I’m really lucky I have a place where I can go and put out a record like this. I was recording it with no preconceived notions if they would choose to find it worth the investment of time and money. If they didn’t, then I’d probably have just made a couple copies and let it find its way to those who care. Whatever the lyrics say, it’s still going to be a good record.

Hopefully it’s a cool record that people will find interesting, or touching, or mysterious, or joyous. The people who like me, I think, will probably like it. It would be a bummer if the people who used to like me really hated this. That would be sad. I get the sympathy! People have to like it because they have to feel sorry for me (laughs)!

“MRI”

It’s pretty obvious that I was waiting to go in for an MRI when I wrote this. And I was scared. Apparently — I’ve blacked this out — I had already had one at the first hospital and it didn’t go well. I went insane, crawling out of the tube. That’s the polite way of putting it.

The N Judah is a street car in San Francisco — not sure why I mentioned it. Maybe because it goes through a tunnel — like an MRI? — that was near Stroke Manor, as I refer to ‘my’ hospital. And there was a brand new Giants baseball cap that Alejandro Escovedo brought me in the ICU, that was sitting sadly on a shelf. I somehow changed it to Cap Peterson, who was a (somewhat insignificant) Giants outfielder when I was a kid.

“Pink Bag For Rip Torn”

There has to be a story behind this one.

This came a little later. It was something Linda [Pitmon] said at some point. It could have been when I was in the hospital, or later — I thought I heard her say ‘Pink bag for Rip Torn.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ She had said something totally different. But I was like, that should be a song!

So I wanted her to be on it. I said you don’t even have to go into a recording studio or anything, just say some stuff on your phone and send it to me. Then I had her do it on “Scar Crow” too. She sent some files to me and they sounded terrible, but I used them anyway (laughs), as one would.

“Scar Crow”

That’s Peter doing the guitar. I think it sounds kinda George Harrison-y, late period Beatles, like Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, White Album, kind of a cool sound. We used his Jext Telez White Pedal, which is made for just that purpose. We used it everywhere on this record.

I wrote this when I was watching The Wizard of Oz in the hospital. I think it was on Thanksgiving. I was watching it with Peter and just going, ‘This movie is so fucking weird!’ I was just freaking out! And I know that’s what I was writing about, but it’s hard to tell from the lyrics. There’s bits I could pick out, like the “calico stable girl,” I know that’s Judy Garland. I remember that much. I think she was like standing out in the farm and had a calico dress, I guess, or I thought it was (laughs). I don’t know where I was going with it, or what I was trying to say, but I was just hypnotized by it. Peter said I just kept going, ‘It’s weird! It’s just too weird!’ Like I was really alarmed by it. Not like I haven’t seen it 400 times before.

But never like this!

It was like seeing it with new eyes, which was really disturbing.

I wish I could tell you more about the lyrics, but there’s only so much I can say.

What was it like to record these lyrics? Did you read them directly off the notepad?

I read them off my notebook, if I could. A lot of them I did because when I went back to look for them in the computer, I couldn’t find them, so I know I read them straight off of my nasty scrawl. I eventually typed them all later so I could have finished versions.

What was it like revisiting these lyrics?

It was just bizarre. It was really hard. That’s why I had to change a few words for phrasing and things like that, but it’s really tough even when I read them now. Very difficult to enunciate. They’re tongue twisters. I changed some that I couldn’t say because they are just physically impossible to spit them out. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to memorize them. So far I haven’t been able to at all, even the easier ones.

“Goodbye Braverman”

This was the first song you released from this collection. Why that one?

At the time it must have felt the most finished, so I let it out just to see what would happen. As it turned out, it was the least completed one. Joe did the drums, redid the drums, three times since that version came out, so it obviously wasn’t finished. But I guess I thought it sounded good and I just didn’t think about it. It was spur of the moment and I’d let people get a glance at what I was brewing up.

The Braverman, is that you talking to your pre-stroke self?

No, that was probably the last one that came to me. It was maybe a month after the hospital. The lyrics still sound like I’m totally in the throes of a stroke, so I felt it belonged. I got the idea from a movie on TCM, Bye Bye Braverman, which was an odd, minor movie and I just started writing stuff down, not really about the movie, but it just sparked something in my brain. It was just like when I was writing in the hospital. Just total stream of consciousness that fit as part of the collection.

“Top Venom”

I like this song. I didn’t put any bass on it. I just thought it didn’t need bass. Jeff [Tweedy] was here and he played a bunch of weird, crazy guitar. He said, ‘You could put a synthesizer bass,’ and I thought about doing that, but I like the space in it. The low end is a Wurlitzer electric piano through the ‘White Album’ pedal. I think I did a clean one, then a fuzzed one. And “Scar Crow” is like that too, though there’s a six-string bass that only comes in at the end on that one.

The lyrics I took off of something that was in the hospital, a weird laminated card in the room. It’s like a thing for people who are in the hospital to say what they are going through, I guess. The first verse is taken right off of there, so it’s like, ‘Oh! Here’s words that make sense! How did that happen?’ Then I remembered I copied some of the lines verbatim. ‘I’m out of breath.’ It’s things you might want to tell your nurse or something. ‘I’m in pain. I’m choking. I’m feeling sick.’ Then I made up the rest. I just went from there.

Listening to the album again, what are your immediate thoughts?

I love the record. I love it. I think it captures the feeling, the moment, somehow. It’s true to the process. I did what I wanted to. I took something that I didn’t really know I was doing at the time and I took it the full distance, not knowing whether it would work or not, but I do feel it did work.

Part of me was thinking maybe if the songs turn out really good, I could go back and write real words to them, but then I just put that out of my mind. These are really good songs and it would defeat the purpose. These are the words that made the music be what it is. The words spoke to me, to write the music to these songs, and I wouldn’t have written that music to any other words. I feel like it’s a gift that I did it, or that I was moved to try so hard to write words. And I wasn’t thinking of them as songs necessarily; I was just writing stuff down — maybe poems, maybe whatever.

I’m not saying I wish it hadn’t happened (laughs), but at least I got something out of it. I feel like it’s my experience — for better or for worse.

Do you feel like this one has a weighted importance because it was such a process to realize?

I think all my records are important to me. I really put everything into them. I love records so much that I think a record should reflect that somebody really did their best to make a great record. You don’t just go, ‘This song isn’t very good, but I’m going to put it on the record anyway.’ I don’t think you should do that and I don’t think you want to do that. I think you want to make a record be something special and be great, that you can stand by. I think this one totally fits in in my history of making music. I think it’s everything that it should be. I made it be what it should be.

The Minus 5 will perform at the Doug Fir Lounge on Saturday night. Stroke Manor is available to order from Yep Roc Records.

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