How do you catch Craig Finn, Damian Kulash, and T. Bone Burnett all in the same day without getting overpowered by the B.O. of thousands of sweaty music-fest attendees? You put on your sport coat, grab your laptop, and head to The Future of Music Coalition's annual summit in D.C., of course. At least, that's what I did.

If the fate of an entire art form sounds like a tough topic to adequately address, it is, but the conference provides a solid platform for policymakers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and managers to talk about their latest gadgets, gripes, and tangentially related celebrity anecdotes. From what I gathered at the various panels I caught, the future of music looks a lot like the present, with slightly less downloading, a lot more streaming (especially if Spotify makes it to the States), and no way to replicate that magic era of the compact disc. Social media and digital distribution have replaced most of the traditional functions of a record label, except that coveted financial start-up capital and the still-useful curatorial stamp of approval. Business is rough but not impossible. Bands that write really great music and work really hard still have the best shot at making a living. These are not revelations, especially for the folks who follow this stuff seriously enough to go to a conference about it, but getting individual takes from panelists deep into their respective fields still makes for a stimulating discussion.

An in-depth analysis of all the panels that took place over a three-day event would be as laborious to read as it would be to write, so here are a few highlights instead:

-Amaechi Uzoigwe (of Definitive Jux) explained a massive surge in French hip-hop just developed due to a recent government mandate requiring radio stations play a minimum amount of French content. The sudden access to greater exposure for the more culturally relevant local artists was very well-received. Apparently, socialism has its benefits.

-Spott Philpott (of Merge Records) confirmed that Merge had in fact signed an artist off just a demo tape, but not in the past 12 years.

-Hank Shocklee (of The Bomb Squad) revealed his new-found love of Barry Manilow and his distaste for whatever music is the most successful at the moment.

-Craig Finn (of The Hold Steady) declared his love for the new Black Mountain record and endorsed The War on Drugs (the band from Philly, not the endless waste of taxpayer money).

-T. Bone Burnett declared mp3s should be free because they are worthless and the future of music is analog. Considering how much revenue Burnett has undoubtedly made off of CDs and mp3, it seems awfully hypocritical to suggest bands go vinyl-only, but taken simply as a reminder to the tech-obsessed crowd that music transcends the latest iPhone app, it was a welcome cage rattle.

-Former GW student Zach Pentel (of 808 Management) explained to John Strohm (of The Lemonheads, currently a lawyer) that college students today—audiophiles please cover your ears for this part—primarily use YouTube more than any other service to listen to music.

-Damian Kulash (of OK Go), a D.C. native, recalled how he got a loan from Ian MacKaye at the age of 15 to put out a few records, right around when he was going to see Nation of Ulysses play in high school cafeterias. Kulash humbly explained he just happened to be into Cheap Trick and Joan Jett in the late '90s, when other locals were heavy into more abrasive material, and that pop affinity landed him a major label deal.

-Brendan Canty (of Fugazi) discussed his desire for more well-executed, high-quality YouTube videos of unusual artists around the world, mostly because a father of four kids just can't get out as often as, say, the drummer of a touring punk band.

-Mike Mills (of R.E.M.) hopped onstage at Black Cat with Damian Kulash, Bonerama, Hank Shocklee, Jonny 5, Jean Cook, Jenny Toomey, and probably a bunch of other notable musicians I'm forgetting about, to sing Neil Young's "Ohio," talk shit about Tea Party activists, and play bass on an encore of "Down By The Riverside."

Nine years. Nine years is a long time for pretty much anything, but, apart from The Wrens, nine years between records for an intact band is not the norm. But Superchunk, who visited the 9:30 Club on Friday in support of its first full-length since 2001, Majesty Shredding, has never fallen into the "norm" category. It's long played the music game on its terms and done so quite successfully (Merge, anyone?).  Nine years has also moved all of the band's members into their 40s. "So," you may ask, "Superchunk shows used to be really energetic and amped...was Friday's show a calmer, more stated and mature affair than in years past?" Well, watching lead singer/guitarist Mac McCaughan and bassist Laura Ballance as they bounced and pogoed nonstop for 90 minutes, while drummer Jon Wurster and guitarist Jim Wilbur kept up a breakneck pace, I'd have to answer, "Uh, nope, not by a long shot."

Playing from a setlist that included many of the stand out tracks from Majesty, such as "Digging for Something," "Crossed Wires," and "Learned to Surf," as well as older favorites like "Precision Auto," "Iron On," "Hello Hawk," and the usual encore ender "Slack Motherfucker," they also went off-list a couple times with "a request from the Internet" and from a guy in the front row. However, the Sebadoh cover of "Brand New Love" was absolutely otherwordly.

NPR has the Superchunk set up for your streaming pleasure here.

Chunk brought along two openers, the influencer of all good power pop bands, Tommy Keene, and Merge's own Let's Wrestle, who put on stellar sets. Keene's retrospective record just came out and is a must-own for anyone into power pop (Keene sort of wrote the book on it if you don't know his work).

Let's Wrestle's sound is catchy and hook-filled on all levels, especially "We Are the Men You'll Grow to Love Soon"; think The Beatles going surfing. They are recording their debut full-length with Steve Albini next week in Chicago, so look for that sometime in the next year from Merge.

Additional photos from all sets can be found here.

The Clientele performs tonight at Black Cat with Vetiver.
8 pm $15
1811 14th St. NW

Washington City Paper: The last time we spoke, The Clientele had just released God Save The Clientele. You told me the record had been heavily informed by your love for The Monkees. But Bonfires on the Heath is a very different sounding record; I take it you’ve left Davy Jones behind again?

Alasdair MacLean: Well, I suppose the rediscovery of The Monkees was part of my rediscovery of pop music. But this music—it’s just another drift into miserable unpleasantness. I suppose that this record is more informed by folk music from England. We’re just getting back to the pensiveness of the other records really. God Save The Clientele was just a brief interlude when the sun broke out over The Clientele.

WCP: What brought you back down?

AM: A combination of things. I can’t even remember being happy now. I suppose that this record was just it was more of a reaching back to your roots. There’s a feeling of returning back to suburban landscapes we used to write about. That’s really what it is. It’s just going back to somber more spooky music. I’m 35 now. Writing [pop music] doesn’t seem like a dignified occupation. I’m not trying to write songs like The Monkees anymore. If anybody wants to write like The Monkees, it needs to be the younger generation.

WCP: At what point did you start to feel too old to be writing pop songs?

AM: Around the time I got the sales figures for God Save the Clientele.

WCP: From a financial standpoint, is it getting harder to do the band?

AM: I suppose it has a little bit. Three years ago we had a big publishing deal with Chrysalis. But we were dropped by that publisher and signed up with another for a little less money. I had to start working part-time.

WCP: You’ve mentioned that this might be the last Clientele record. Are you really considering breaking up the band?

AM: I think you can only really do it for a certain amount of time. The first three Clientele records, I felt like they were records I had to make–I felt like my life depended on it. The other ones have been nice bonuses. So maybe, if you don’t have that desperation to communicate with people through music, maybe you should try in a different way.

WCP: What is your part-time job?

AM: I work at a foreign office in Britain. I don’t know the equivalent is in U.S. Here it’s the government institution that deals with relationships with foreign countries.

WCP: You mentioned that you felt writing pop songs was undignified for somebody your age. Why did you feel differently about folk music?

AM: Just the idea that it goes back further. That it’s part this musical DNA that’s in you from your ancestors. And it has that spooky Wicker Man-thing.

WCP: You re-recorded “Graven Wood”—one of the first songs the band ever wrote—for Bonfires on the Heath. Why did you want to bring that one back? Just trying to come full-circle?

AM: Yeah, I guess that’s what it was. When we first started to play music we all lived together out in the suburbs. We did what all the kids in our town did—we’d take acid, get drunk, and stay in the woods until the effects wore off. The day that song was written the police chased us because we were supposed to be in school. It was stressful—[more so because] we were all on acid. But we found this glade to hide in and after that, Innes [Phillips] went and wrote that song. I thought it really magically brought that time back every time I heard it. We were embattled and entrapped, but safe. It holds up as a song even though he wrote it at 15 or 16. Stands up as well as anything we’ve done in my opinion.

Think of all the truly awesome things that Merge Records has accomplished in its 20-year existence. Not only has the label—founded in the late ’80s by Superchunk members Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan—released countless 7" singles, LPs, and at least one boxed-set by myriad worthy artists, but they've pulled off a few truly improbable feats. Merge basically invented the tolerable use of brass in indie-rock. Before Neutral Milk Hotel, the best you could get was June of 44's Fred Erskine playing balloon-on-scalp-style free jazz trumpet. The label also put out countless Lambchop records, even though Europeans were the only people who listened to them.

But most remarkably, Merge has grown into a widely successful record label in the most humble and respectable way possible—keeping their business personable, modest, and honest. Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, an oral history assembled by John Cook alongside Ballance and McCaughan, tells the label's story through countless photographs, fliers, and extensive interviews. Washington City Paper recently spoke with McCaughan, who will be reading selections from the book tonight at Crooked Beat.

Q&A after the jump:

Washington City Paper: When did you decide that Merge was finally ready for the book treatment?

Mac McCaughan: We started talking about it a year and a half ago, maybe even longer than that. It was the idea of an old friend of mine who works in publishing. He’s not even that into music, he just thought the story of the label was interesting.

We were a little skeptical, though. Being in the middle of the label it’s hard to see what the dramatic arc of a book would be. There were no dramatic moments in our history where we almost went out of business. We were never teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It’s always just been this slow steady thing. But once I read the proposal, I was a little more into it. It put the history of Merge in the context of the music business as a whole, in contrast to the major labels. That made a lot of sense then.

WCP: What made you decide to make it an oral history, instead of a more conventional narrative?

McCaughan: It didn’t start out as an oral history. I guess once John [Cook] started doing the writing and organization of the book, it became clear that it was too hard to incorporate as many quotes as he wanted into standard format. Also, I love oral histories. I love reading them.

WCP: In the beginning, Superchunk record sales basically drove Merge, sort of in the way Fugazi's sales and reputation drive Dischord. When did that start to flip-flop? When did the label become an established entity independent of your band?

McCaughan: It was a little bit of a gradual thing. It kind of happened once we started putting out full-length records. We put out the Superchunk record On the Mouth and we put out the first two Polvo albums. That changed the label in terms of perceptions in how it had to function. After that we hired our first full time employee. Another shift was putting out bands that were from outside of North Carolina—Magnetic Fields, the 3Ds.

WCP: Was that it a difficult decision to move beyond just releasing records out of the local scene?

McCaughan: That wasn’t a hard decision at all. It was exciting for us. And even before we did albums we did a 7” by The Renderers. That was really exciting, too. But once we were doing albums that opened us up. If you were Claudia [Gonson] and Stephin [Merritt, both of Magnetic Fields] you could see Merge as a legit label. But I think that really the transition came in the mid-90s. By that point Merge was a label and not just Superchunk’s label. And certainly by the time of 69 Love Songs and Neutral Milk Hotel came out, in the late ’90s.

But yeah, I don’t think that you can pinpoint a couple of big turning points or a couple of big decisions that caused it all. It was just a general approach to business and music. When we were starting out one of the things that kept us going was that we weren’t trying to have the label be our job. We were putting out records because we loved music and the label never had to be anything. Even after we started having a staff and selling more records I think we still tried to keep that approach. There were labels that started around the same time that thought, “Well, if we’re a label we need to have this kind of office and have these people working there.” To us, that seemed like a backward way of looking at it. The label was going to become what it was going to become.

Even though we’ve put out records in the last few years that have sold a lot more than we ever could have imagined selling 10 years ago and certainly 20 years ago, I still feel like we operate on a different level than a major label. When people talk to me about the music business…I kind of think that we’re in different music business than they are. If we’re putting out and Arcade Fire or a Spoon record, sure, we certainly have to do some things to keep up with that. But we try to have the flexibility to do a good job with a record that’s only going to sell 3000 copies, too.

WCP: There’s some pretty personal stuff in this book, specifically the details about your breakup with Laura [Balance, bassist of Superchunk and co-founder of Merge]—was it difficult to be forthcoming about that stuff?

McCaughan: Well, I mean, it certainly wasn’t fun to maybe talk about that or read about it. But if you’re going to write the book, tell the story. Don’t gloss over the difficult parts. I mean, if I’m reading a book I want to feel like people are being honest.

WCP: Were there things that you learned from reading other people’s interviews that you didn’t know before?

McCaughan: There’s a lot I learned about the history of some of the bands. Bands like Spoon, that had a long history before we started working with them and how close they came to breaking up or stopping all together, I didn’t know some of that stuff. I learned a lot about Jeff Mangum and his friend’s history in Ruston. Also, you learn stuff about the way other people perceive you.

WCP: There are a few bands—like Lambchop—that Merge has stuck behind for quite a few albums, even though they don’t sell very well. Has keeping them around ever been a tough call?

McCaughan: It may be hard for the bands to stick with us, but not hard for us to stick with them. Lambchop specifically–every record they make is a masterpiece. If you’re an indie label and you’re putting out a record, you must love it. So it can be frustrating when something doesn’t do as well as you think it should. But no, it’s not hard to stay with those bands. They’re still making music that we love.

Mac McCaughan reads from Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records
October 5th @ 6PM
Crooked Beat
2318 18th St. NW

I can't help but wonder if that's sort of a mixed blessing for Wye Oak. After all, if your music inspires your audience to vegetate, who will come out to your show? So, for their sake, maybe pack up a few pillows, some blankets, and take the read-in down to the Black Cat tonight to see the band perform.

Wye Oak, O'Death @ Black Cat
1811 14th St. NW
9 PM $10