By the time most bands reach their fourth album, they’re already talking about “eras,” reinventions and anniversary shows. Guided By Voicesare about to release their44th. At this point, the number barely registers as strange – it just feels like the natural outcome of a universe powered byRobert Pollard’s bottomless songwriting and a band that’s built to keep up.
On the other end of a Monday connection – afternoon in New York, evening here in the UK –Doug Gillardtalks about that universe with the calm of someone who lives inside it every day. He’s the guitarist, arranger, songwriter and quietly crucial presence in Guided By Voices, and has been in and out of Pollard’s orbit for years.
The new album,Crawlspace Of The Pantheon, isn’t positioned as a grand summation or a farewell. For Gillard, that’s exactly what makes it feel so true to what Guided By Voices are.“It’s also without a sense of finality,” he tells me. “It’s just another record that we’re doing, and we have another one that we’re going to work on after this. So it’s definitely not any kind of final statement or anything.”In a culture obsessed with ‘definitive’ albums and neat narrative arcs, GBV are doing something far stranger and, in its own way, more radical: they justkeep going.
Guided By Voices
Crawlspace Of The Pantheon: Memory Without the Farewell Tour
What sets Crawlspace Of The Pantheon apart, even among the dozens of Guided By Voices releases, is its subtle relationship with the band’s own history. Some of its songs are, as Gillard puts it, not confessional diary entries, but songs that nod back at previous eras and titles in wry, sideways ways.“More than one of these songs is sort of loosely autobiographical,” he explains. “He [Robert/Bob Pollard] kind of recaps points in his career, or kind of mentions other Guided By Voices song names from the past, or, you know, touchstones in the band’s career, which I think is pretty cool.”
It’s very much a Pollard way of looking back: not stopping to stage a museum exhibit, but throwing in references almost as if they’re just more images to play with. Basically, the past is there, but it’s being reused, repurposed and folded into what’s happening right now.
Musically, the record is driven by the current core trio around Pollard: Kevin March on drums, Mark Shue on bass, and Gillard on guitar. That trio, Gillard says, has become a tightly wired engine.“This record’s great, and we’ve got Kevin March on drums, Mark Shue on bass and myself,” he says. “Only one song [was] needing any guitar overdubs per Bob’s wishes.”
The way the band works is straightforward, but there’s a lot of craft within that simplicity.“We did recordbthe basics, the same way,” Gillard explains. “And then I went back in and overdubbed some guitar… and then we always do the vocals later. We drive to Dayton and we get Bob and Bobby on the vocals.” On this one, the band returned more consciously to layered sonics and playful experimentation.“This one was kind of back to the approach of layered sounds and [being] a little more experimental with sounds,” he says.
If you’ve heard ‘We Outlast Them All’, you can feel that tension between focus and openness. In the album’s press notes, Pollard joked that the track could be their version of ‘We Are The Champions’, and that line clearly amused Gillard. There’s humour there, but also something quietly dead-on: this is a band that, against all logic, really have outlasted most of their peers.
Pollard’s Notes and the Hit Mindset
In the Guided By Voices ecosystem, even the smallest songs are given a strange sort of importance. That’s partly down to Pollard’s famously prolific writing, but also the way he frames his own material when he passes it to the band. Referencing Pollard’s handwritten instruction sheets – always revealing notes that accompany the songs they’re working up. Gillard states: “Per his notes and instructions that we usually get for the records, he thinks a lot of them are smash hits,” Gillard smiles. “He’ll put at the top of an instruction sheet ‘big hit,’ or there was one on this one, I think, said ‘big – this will be a big hit in Australia.’” There’s some sarcasm there, of course. “He knows that we’re not on iHeartRadio in the grocery stores here or anything like that,” Gillard says. “But it’s also a nice way of thinking – that you are making a hit, or making a single.”
That mindset doesn’t mean Guided By Voices suddenly sound like radio pop. Instead, it means they approach even their most esoteric or noisy pieces as if they deserve that same level of care and immediacy.“Some [of these tracks] are decidedly experimental, and obviously so when you hear them,” Gillard adds. “But that kind of [hit-writing] mindset goes for a lot of these songs.”
It’s an odd combination: absurd humour, self-awareness and genuine belief in the power of the song. That mix is one of the reasons GBV’s catalogue is so deep – and why people are still digging into it decades on.
The GBV School of Songwriting: Short, Sharp, Melodic
Spending so long inside Pollard’s universe hasn’t just filled Gillard’s calendar; it’s sharpened his own approach as a writer. The biggest imprint Guided By Voices has left on him, he says, is about economy. “Song-wise, through all the experience, I think I’ve ended up with the notion it’s a good idea to keep songs shorter and more concise when I’m writing,” he reflects.
He thinks back to his 90s band Gem, where his younger self had different instincts. “I listen back to some of that stuff now, and I… wasn’t really exercising economy in the writing too much,” he admits. “The intro is too long. You don’t need 16 bars before you get to a verse.”
Working on Guided By Voices albums, where Pollard’s song fragments and mini-epics are shuffled together into these dense, strange albums, has reinforced a different kind of discipline. “Not all those songs are short, but there’s not a lot of waste,” Gillard says. “Every part sort of has a point, has a direction that it’s going into.” It’s a principle he’s carried into his other worlds – including his time in Nada Surf, a band known for precisely crafted indie anthems. “Nada Surf had very, very nice crafted songs and great bridges and melodies,” he says. “Guided By Voices always had great melodies. I’ve always kind of gone towards the melodic side of things.”
Those experiences have converged into something quietly powerful: Gillard has become the kind of guitarist and songwriter who can drop a melodic line that feels huge, then get out of the way before it overstays its welcome.
Doug Gillard
Guitar Hero, Reluctantly
In a previous interview, he was quoted saying he didn’t really care about being “a guitar player of note” anymore – that he’d rather just make songs and good music. When I bring that up, he laughs. “I don’t know what made me say that at the time, or what question had prompted it,” he says. “I kind of do care about being [a] guitar player of note. But I’m not, you know, I’m not here to be the notable lead guitar player, I guess you could say. It is my role, though, so I want to do the best I can at it.”
On his latest solo album,Parallel Stride, he actually had to be nudged by his engineer, Tom, to lean harder into what people already love about his playing. “I didn’t think, ‘The song needs a solo, got to put a solo here,’” he recalls. “Tom said, ‘Why don’t you, on the tail fade-out of the song, put a lick or something on there?’ I said, ‘Well, I didn’t think about it…’ So I did. And he was right, because why not? That is kind of what I’m known for, so I should kind of lean into it a little more sometimes.”
The tension between restraint and flair is part of what makes his work in Guided By Voices so compelling. When he hears a new Pollard demo, it isn’t just riffs that come to mind. “Catchy lines run through my head all the time,” he says. “I’ll hear someone else’s bed of music or song or demo or something, and I’ve always got things that come to mind, whether on guitar or maybe it’s a string part or horn part or something.”
Lessons from Pollard: Don’t Worship the Record
Talk to Gillard long enough and you realise that what he’s learned from Pollard isn’t just about chord changes or tracklists; it’s about how to think about being an artist over the long haul. “I’ve learned things from being with him, as far as songs and music and just kind of getting to it and putting stuff out,” he says. “Not thinking that this record – just because it’s a record of yours – is so precious.”
He remembers that instinct, especially early on, to overbuild everything around a release. “You put out your first one, and it’s so special, and it’s great, and it’s very elaborate,” he says. “You have to print out all the lyrics, and ‘I need these pictures in there.’”
Guided By Voices work differently: they treat albums as part of an ongoing flow, not singular monuments. “There’s always going to be another one, and you can just put it out,” Gillard says. “Sometimes you just kind of need to get to it, and not hem and haw so much over the cover or the content.”
Importantly, that doesn’t mean they don’t care. Pollard, he notes, is incredibly serious about the visual side of his records. “Bob works – he cares about his album covers, and he works on the art,” Gillard points out. “He does the art, he does the collages. He works on that and cares about that a lot. So he doesn’t just dash something off or find something that, ‘Oh, this will do.’” The difference is that theyrefuse to stall. There’s no waiting for perfect conditions, no decade-long silences. The work comes out, the work continues.
There’s Always Another Record
That philosophy shapes Gillard’s actual day-to-day life. “Every four or five months, we’re working on a Guided By Voices album,” he says. “So there’s a lot of prepping for that.”
In between those cycles, he’s doing session work, home recording for other artists, arranging for side projects like the wonderfully strange Cash Rivers And The Sinners on the band’s own Rockathon Records, and looking after the everyday stuff: “I take care of our cat, and, you know, do some things for the house,” he says. “Everyday chores, and, yeah, playing and charting out songs.”
Even when he’s not “working,” music is there as both a habit and a form of emotional processing. “It’s definitely an emotional connection,” he says of simply sitting down with a guitar. “I know that if I pick up a guitar, I will definitely shortly be turning on the voice memo, because there’s an idea for a chord progression that sounds fresh to me, and I’ll have to just document it somehow.”
Those ideas stack up – short melodic shapes, chord movements, sung basslines recorded in transit – waiting for him to come back and turn them into something more. “I have a lot of voice memos, snippets of ideas that I need to marry together or revisit, and that’s kind of what I’m bad at,” he admits. “But then when I do, I’m surprised… ‘Wow, that’s pretty good idea,’ or, ‘That one’s not very good – what was I thinking?’”
Parallel Stride: Loss, Momentum and the Solo Space
Parallel Stride, Gillard’s aforementioned latest solo outing, releases just ahead of the new Guided By Voices record. If GBV is a sprawling shared universe, his solo work is where he zooms in on his own interior landscape – even if he’s quick to underline that not every song is directly autobiographical. “Loss is sort of a theme in the record,” he says. “Every song isn’t necessarily autobiographical, and lyrics are sort of the last thing that I throw on a song. It’s the music first, for sure – the chord progression first, melody.”
The album has been quietly brewing for years. One track,“New Vista,” is over a decade old. Others emerged from compilations released during the pandemic by his publishing company. Eventually, Gillard decided it was time to stop tinkering. “I figured, well, I just need to get something out. It’s been about 10 years since my last solo record,” he says. “That’s actually really too long. I should have had a couple more by now, just to keep the momentum going.”
“A Sense of Community”: The Guided By Voices World
If there’s one part of the conversation where Gillard speaks straight from the heart, it’s when he talks about the community that has formed around Guided By Voices. “There’s a very enthusiastic fan base that always shows up for the shows, and always shows up for the gatherings and any event having to do with the band,” he says. “You become very grateful for that, and you become friends with some of the fans.”
Over time, that has turned into something that feels far bigger than a standard band-audience relationship. “There’s a sense of community with the whole fan base and the family of the fan base and the band,” Gillard explains. “We have a lot of chemistry, so we work together very well, and along with our engineer and producer, Travis [Harrison] – he’s part of the family as well.”
That chemistry extends outwards, too. Gillard talks about howNada Surffans would show up at Guided By Voices gigs and vice versa, and how those overlapping circles of listeners have created their own networks and friendships, independent of the band.
Ask Doug directly what Guided By Voices’ legacy is, and he still shies away. “That is a really, really tough one for me,” he says. “I’m too close to the project, the band, too close to the experience. Our fans could probably answer that better than I could.”
But then he describes them in a way that feels, in itself, like an answer. “I think you hit on it when you said the band does what it wants to do when it wants to do it,” he agrees. “It’s very willful. It’s not beholden to any label demands or anything like that. So, yeah, it’s very intentional.”
A prolific, willful band, doing exactly what it wants for decades, long enough for a real community to grow around it. A songwriter who never stops delivering. A guitarist quietly binding everything together, album after album.
Somewhere in a pre-war building in Queens, dealing with leaks and landlords and a stack of half-sung voice memos, Doug Gillard is already thinking about the next record. In the world of Guided By Voices, there’s always another one coming – and that might be their greatest statement.