Braid Reminisce on 25 Years of 'Frame & Canvas' as Album Released as Anniversary Reissue

Twenty-five years ago, Champaign, Illinois rockers Braid would record their third studio album Frame & Canvas and would help to mold the signature Midwest emo sound spreading across the country.

Fast forward to 2021 — Inner Ear Studios, where the album was originally recorded, was slated for eviction and the original master tapes from the Frame & Canvas recording were salvaged and made their way back to original engineer, J. Robbins, and the band. The original recording of the record had been a rushed process — but now, with the original recordings in hand, J. could patiently remix the 12 songs and bring a new life to this seminal album.

PEOPLE sat down with guitarists and vocalists Bob Nanna and Chris Broach to talk about revisiting Frame & Canvas, taking the album back on tour and their influence on the emo genre as a whole.

How was the process of revisiting these songs after 25 years?

Bob Nanna: It felt really great because it's not only a reissue, but it got remixed and remastered. So it's a little different than a regular sort of anniversary reissue, at least for us, because it sounds new, even though it's 25 years old. The parts of the album that sound refreshingly new make me very excited to play the songs again live and for people to hear them, because maybe they'll be hearing new things as well.

Chris Broach: To revisit it in and of itself is one thing, but man, it's awesome. It's exciting. We rehearsed last weekend at my place out here and it was just awesome. It's awesome to play. Play the songs, we're getting ready for a tour this summer, so it's fun.

So during the process of this new remixing and mastering this, did you guys notice any points that triggered any memories or emotions for you?

CB: Yeah, for sure. J. took some liberties with it — not liberties in a broad sense, but we asked him to mix it how he would mix a record today. That's how he took it. And then we gave notes on it. So he'd send us the mixes, we'd give notes. There were some fun things — we had this false start on a song where, I didn't remember it until Jay sent over the mix, and had this false start on the song where Bob starts singing and then we restarted the song 10 seconds later. It was just super fun, super fun to listen to. So there were a lot of memories associated with that stuff. Like, "Oh yeah, I totally forgot we did that." It's just funny. And he's laughing in it. I'm laughing. You hear the fun part of doing the record as well.

BN: Yeah, absolutely. And we did a lot of cool, interesting, wacky things. We recorded a radio playing for a while and then someone walked in and turned it off and then at one point J.'s playing drums at the end of "Breathe In." We had a lot of fun with the first two records that we did in Champaign — we had a lot of freedom to do fun things.

It was our friends that were doing the recording and I think we brought some of that playfulness, for lack of a better word, to Inner Ear when we were doing this record. And thankfully J. was on board and a full-time collaborator on some of the production choices. So hearing the songs again and hearing certain parts clearly, a little more clearly, definitely brought back some good memories.

Did you ever feel like that playfulness was lost on the original recording here?

BN: No, not really. Revisiting it again and hearing certain things. Actually, there's some percussion that I think might have not even made it to the final mix that is there now that I remember doing. I didn't think it was missing that sort of element to it. It really has a bit of a frenetic vibe and we did the record so fast in five, I believe six days, recorded it and mixed it. We were drinking a lot of coffee.

So the original, that pace of recording so quickly back then, was that a general limitation of the studios and your schedules and whatnot?

CB: I think it was a limitation of budget really. We had a budget at the time from Polyvinyl, I think. He worked it out with J. J. was going to do the production and the recording and this is how much he had to spend. And I think we were like, "Yeah, five days, that's enough. That's more than enough, right?" We just thought that'll be great. We'll get there.

I don't know how we thought about it at the time, because the previous two records, we had had really all the time in the world to work on them because we were recording at a friend's house who lived down the street from us and we could just drop in whenever we wanted to, work on stuff, come back. We had a lot more experience going into other studios and recording for a day. We'd record two songs in a day, or sometimes three or four songs in a day or day and a half. So we're doing 12 songs or whatever it is in five days, of course we've got time. And plus, we're going to this big studio. It's going to be awesome. It's this Inner Ear being Inner Ear, being where all these awesome DC bands recorded and this whole scene came up around that we were super into.

I don't think we even thought like, "It's not enough time or anything." We just went, killed it and left. That was it. And we were used to that frenetic pace, though we were touring so much, we were playing so much. We knew the songs very well. We had already been playing those songs a lot. So it didn't feel rushed, but maybe it was when we were there, but we just kind of went through the songs in a day, got the drums down. I think we did some overdubs with bass and guitar and by the time we knew it, we're doing vocals and we're mixing and it's like the fourth day and then we're almost done. It was a whirlwind.

Can you tell me a bit about how these masters were rescued from InnerEar?

CB: Inner Ear was around for a long time and was going to close down. Don Zientara owned the studio, he called up J., I think, and said, "Hey J., I've got some stuff. We're closing down. Do you want to come check it out? See if there's anything here that you want that you've left here?" And J. found the Braid tapes there because Inner Ear was going to close. That stuff was going to be lost. That stuff was going to be done.

How would that have felt though? Knowing the original versions of your work might have been destroyed?

BN: I would hate that. I have a blessing and a curse of just keeping a lot of stuff. I'm not a hoarder, but I like to keep track of things and especially raw tapes, raw audio, raw tracks and stuff. Now that we did that on Real, Real surreal. So J. being able to do the sort of mixing and mastering and redoing and stuff that he was unable to do back then, maybe because of technology or just his knowledge, it's pretty amazing that we actually have these tapes, the original tapes to do that with. First two records, we don't, they're gone.

CB: I was going to say that actually happened to our first two records. The first two records we recorded on ADAT tape, which were old VHS tapes that you put into an ADAT machine, and there were eight tracks per VHS. Those have since been lost and recorded over and sold or something. I remember asking the guy who owned that studio, "Hey, do you have these tapes? Because it'd be great to revisit it and remix them."

Are you guys looking to kind of develop a newer audience or really just pique the interest of the old hardcore fans?

BN: I would hope that there is going to be a bit of a new audience that's going to learn of us for the first time. We talked a lot recently about why people gravitated towards Frame & Canvas or hold it in such high regard. And I would joke and not really joke but say, "it's probably because we broke up," kind of like American football or something like that. You can't see the band because they're not around anymore.

Then the style of music that we were playing got a little more popular. And so bands that either were peers of ours or influenced by us were getting big and maybe recommending Braid or saying that Braid had been somewhat important to them, which is amazing. Even when we did the 15-year — we did a few shows for the 15-year anniversary and then we put out a new record in 2014 that was definitely for new people to hear us.

CB: From my perspective, when I think about it, I don't know that any of us have a goal of, "Oh, let's hope we get new fans." I think it's just like Polyvinyl had the idea to reissue. J. sent a text to Bob saying, "Hey, I've got these masters that I found at Inner Ear that were going to be destroyed. Hey, should I?" Jokingly, I think, he asked you if we should remix them. And we started talking about it. We're like, "Absolutely, we should." So this all just started happening with Polyvinyl, and Polyvinyl was like, "Yeah, we can totally do that. We should totally do that because we were talking about the 25-year anniversary of the record, and are we going to do something?"

We're going to go out and tour and maybe some new people will come, maybe not. We're all older now, and I've got friends who are my age, who have kids who are like 15, 16, and even older or younger. I've got kids, but this old friend from high school, he's like, "Man, I saw you're playing in this area. I'm going to bring my daughter to your show because she's really into old-school emo, and she's into the band." And she's like 15, so she's going to come see us with my friend who came on tour with us back in 1996 as a roadie, 1995 or something.

Of course there's going to be some new people, but I'm guessing there's going to be a lot of old heads there like us who are going to rebuy it too. "Oh man, this is a new version of it." I'm satisfied either way. If people come back to it or people discover it, it's going to be awesome either way.

And we have a tendency to get excited when we start hanging around together and playing together. So it can lead to us deciding to like, "Oh, maybe we should write some new stuff." We haven't decided to do that yet, but that may happen. We play together, we get excited and we decide, "Maybe we should do some more stuff again." We take a little time to do our own stuff and then come back together once in a while.

Kind of a general question, but do you guys feel this work was an influence on what people are calling 'emo' now?

CB: I find it pretty interesting that it's thrown around quite a bit. There's emo rap now and stuff like that, and I'm just like, "What?" It's confusing to me, but it's awesome. It's cool. But I don't know is there a philosophy that you subscribe to if you're emo? No. There was a Midwest emo scene that we were forerunners of with a lot of our peers — Promise Ring and Get Up Kids and bands like that.

But there's been three or four waves since then of this, right? And it died down a little bit, in 2010, 2011 for a while. Then came back and now it's back strong. And so it's interesting the liberal way that it's thrown around because I hear it, but you also hear these people doing ... a lot of the new bands, Bob will show me something or I'll just hear something in passing or something gets thrown up in my "things you might like" on Spotify or whatever, and I check it out. And you hear the emo, you hear the influence of stuff we were doing or stuff that our peer group was doing. But you also hear new stuff too. You hear it mixed in with, there might be some drum machines thrown in or some synths or some other stuff that we weren't using back then, or other things.

It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool to see that it's continuing. I didn't expect that back in, I'll say the late '90s.

So with this upcoming tour, are you guys planning out playing Frame & Canvas start to finish? I know that's super popular right now to give fans all the deep cuts they might not normally hear played live

CB: We're going to do the whole album start to finish. And the songs are awesome to play. Some of them don't usually make it to setlist, they're fun to play those. But there'll be some additional songs we play after, probably.

The Frame & Canvas 25th Anniversary re-issue is out Friday.