Garden Variety

The joke on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" went something like this: "At number one on the pop charts this week was Better Than Ezra. And at number two ... Ezra." The quip came back when Kevin Nealon was warming the SNL anchor chair and at a time when it was impossible to listen to the radio without hearing a not-too-sure and not-too-proud BTE frontman Kevin Griffin singing, "uh, huh, it was good living with you."

"So many people have seen that [episode of SNL]," Griffin remarks without saying whether or not he thought the joke was funny. When that show aired, the trio was well on its way to selling more than a million copies of its 1995 debut, Deluxe, on the strength of alterna-pop singles "Good" and "In the Blood." A year later, however, the group experienced the cliche sophomore jinx on its follow-up, Friction, Baby, which sold a respectable, if not scintillating, half-million copies. Today, Griffin tries to forget past successes, failures and Ezra for that matter -- he just wants their forthcoming album, How Does Your Garden Grow?, to be better than Better Than Ezra. Confused?

"If you look at the past ten CDs you bought and you don't have any music like your band is making, you're like, 'I don't think I'd buy my band's album,'" explains Griffin. "And I wanted to make a record that I would listen to at Tower Records and go, 'I'm gonna get this.' I buy tons of albums that way. Some of them are good, some of them suck."

Needless to say, BTE expect How Does Your Garden Grow? to stay clear of the suck pile. Produced by Malcolm Burn (Patti Smith, Iggy Pop), Griffin says the album has plenty of "guitar driven ... rhythmic" songs, though the first two tracks on the album ("Je ne m'en souviens pas" and "One More Murder") don't contain any guitars at all, and are heavy on early-David Bowie-type experimental sounds. "It's really scary to actually do something different," he says, "but we have, and it's really cool."

How Does Your Garden, recorded from mid-January to early-April in a New Orleans studio, hits stores on August 25.

BLAIR R. FISCHER
(June 23, 1998)