Corvair was founded in Portland, Oregon in 2019 by husband-and-wife duo Brian Naubert (Ruston Mire, Tube Top, Pop Sickle) and Heather Larimer (Eux Autres). 

The band threads together 70s pop, 80s synth rock, and 90s indie rock — with a soft spot for bands that start with the letter B, from Berlin-era Bowie to Blondie, to Blur, to The Beatles, to The Breeders — into a sound that feels both familiar and bracingly new.

The band’s music has always carried a love letter to the great creative cities of the West Coast. For the first two records, drums were tracked in Seattle while everything else was recorded in Portland; mixing was handled by Martin Feveyear (Brandi Carlile, Mark Lanegan, The Presidents of the United States of America) on Vashon Island and Beau Sorenson (Bob Mould, Death Cab for Cutie, Taylor Swift) in Oakland.

Naubert began his usual process of writing the music for a new Corvair record when Larimer’s sudden departure ended the band’s original lineup. He found himself caught in waves of inspiration. The result was a plethora of creations, more than a single record could hold — the current work on a double album, shaped almost entirely by his loss, and writing his way back out.

Naubert’s earliest sketches took shape at home in Portland then later on the Oregon Coast, in a cliffside 1979 house with a fireplace, a dog, and dramatic winter ocean views. Lyrics mostly began on the coast and were finished later, the bulk of them written across the 13 countries Naubert crossed while auditioning new home bases.

Drums for the new record were tracked in a converted barn on Vashon Island, WA, with Martin Feveyear returning for a third Corvair drum-tracking session. Also returning on drums for his second Corvair record is Mike Musburger (The Posies, The Fastbacks, Duff McKagan) — the two have played together since 1996, across six full-length records now. The rest of the tracking was split between Vashon and Seattle. Aside from the drums, Naubert played every instrument, wrote every lyric, engineered, and produced the record himself — and is handling all of its artwork and photography as well. He will finish keyboards and then mix the record in Bali in the near future.

True to its scope as a double album, the record breaks from conventional song structure — short vignettes sit alongside fully developed songs, and several tracks circle back to earlier ones, returning to a talismanic key signature. Some songs shift tempo and mood within themselves, more suite than single idea. The melancholy, slower-burning quality was always there in flashes on the first two records — it’s just no longer balanced by the pull toward pop hooks that used to hold it in check. What’s left is quieter, more midtempo, more dreamlike than anything Corvair’s made before.

Corvair’s first two records earned KEXP Song of the Day honors and were featured in NPR New Music playlists, Spin, Bandcamp’s notable new music, and American Songwriter, with wide college and alternative radio play.

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