Miles Zuniga is trying not to jinx it, but Fastball might actually be in a groove again. “We got some momentum,” he tells me. “And when you’ve got the circus up and running, you don’t shut it down.” Especially not when it’s taken the better part of a decade to haul the tents out of storage.
Fastball’s new album The Help Machine is a surprise in more ways than one. It’s not just that it showed up a mere two years after their previous LP (Step Into Light, a quick turnaround by Fastball standards), but that it sounds like a band throwing out their playbook and finding the weirdest, coolest ways to keep it interesting.
The title track was born in Marfa, Texas, a town of 2,500 and exactly one functioning recording studio. “I didn’t even know what I was going to record,” Miles says. “And then Andy Stack from Wye Oak walks in, and I ask, ‘Wanna play on something?’ And he’s like, ‘When?’ And I go, ‘Now.’” Stack hopped behind the drum kit, Zuniga hit a stray Juno keyboard, and suddenly Fastball had a first single that sounded less like a band of ’90s alt-pop survivors and more like a meditation tape recorded inside a lava lamp.
“It’s like a drugged-out ‘Row Row Row Your Boat,’” Miles grins. “I recorded it a few times before, but that day in Marfa, it just clicked.” Add in bassist Bruce Hughes, an accidental sample of a street preacher in San Diego, and a mess of serendipity, and The Help Machine was off and running. “Bruce didn’t even remember playing bass on it. He heard it later and was like, ‘I could do that better.’ I told him, ‘That was you.’”
The album feels like a band daring itself not to play it safe. Legendary Austin guitarist Charlie Sexton shows up for a solo on “Girl You Pretended to Be” that Zuniga now has to fake live. “He had a bender guitar. I don’t. I’m not Rick Nielsen—I don’t bring 70 guitars on the road.” Songs like “Surprise Surprise” have Miles channeling Neil Young with gloriously gnarly solos. “It was one or two takes. That’s why I love it.”
Even the more subdued songs are full of stories. “Never Say Never” was written entirely because of a weird guitar tuning Zuniga used to cover Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” “It’s such a pain in the ass to tune that way,” he says. “So I figured I better get another song out of it.”
And then there’s the title: The Help Machine. What does it mean? Zuniga has no idea. “It’s just something that came out,” he says. “A longing for some kind of answer where there isn’t one. I try not to get in the way of a song. I’ve ruined songs before by overthinking them. It’s like a perfect piece of wood—if you cut it wrong, it’s gone.”
Which might explain why Fastball never tried to be anything other than Fastball. Even when things bottomed out—like on 2009’s Little White Lies, an album Zuniga calls “the lowest point” of the band—they still kept writing. “Nobody heard it,” he says. “But I’m proud we kept going.”
Turns out a few people did hear it. “Mono to Stereo” still gets played on WFPK, much to Miles’ surprise. “That’s great to hear,” he says. “I didn’t even know it was up on Spotify for a while.”
The band’s origin story feels equally surreal in hindsight. In another part of the interview, Zuniga recounts the making of their 1998 breakthrough All the Pain Money Can Buy, a record that survived label politics, a label head getting fired, and almost no budget. The hit? “The Way,” a song so strange and timeless that it accidentally became a late-’90s radio staple. “We were just using a different bucket of paint,” Zuniga says. “We were thinking more Johnny Rivers than Stone Temple Pilots.”
The fame that followed came with all the cliché trimmings. “I ended up in a strip club sitting between David Lee Roth and Dennis Rodman,” he recalls. “Roth was reciting some internal monologue, and then Mark McGrath convinced him to sing a line of ‘Fire Escape.’ He did. Night made.”
These days, Fastball plays fewer strip clubs but more shows on their own terms. And Zuniga is okay with the circus being a little scrappier. “People aren’t gonna like everything you do,” he says. “That’s not the point. The universe rewards you more when you just follow your path.”
And if that path leads to a Mellotron once owned by Jack Bruce, all the better.
