Content
Songwriting
Greg Graffin: "It was all about how you have to challenge the structure of science and art to make progress."[1]
Bobby Schayer: "Against the Grain was where the harmonies really started to take off. It was a good album, more experimental, and showed the potential the band had songwriting-wise. It brought out a lot of Greg and Brett's own sound and style".
Greg Graffin (in 2004): "...if you listen to an album like Against The Grain, that was almost the opposite approach---where I didn’t care about concision at all, and I really just wanted to try to get as many vocabulary words as possible in a song." [2]
Recording
Against The Grain was the third record recorded at the original Westbeach Recorders location on Vista del Mar. This is where they also started to expand their recording techniques a little bit.
Brett: "As were Suffer and No Control, we put that record through my old Soundcraft 2400 console, which had a great sound for guitars and drums. I had these little compressors called Dynamites that I used for the snare and the kick drum and lots of 57s and 87s and a dozen microphones. At least I’d throw the guitars in a little (...) coat closet with dampening foam. (...) It gave a really tight close guitar sound."[3]
According to Jay, Against The Grain was the record that took the longest time to make: "Just a LOT of second guessing on that album."[4]
Sales & reception
Against The Grain was released on November 23 1990. It was the first 100,000 seller, and showed how quickly they were growing. By 1992, already about 90,000 copies were sold.[5]
The album most consistently voted best BR album by their fans. In 1998 it was number 30 in Alternative Press' Top 90 of the 90's.
Demos
Several demos exist; some of them are just Greg and others are recorded together with Brett:
- Operation Rescue
- Modern Man
- Walk Away
- God Song
- 21st Century (Digital Boy)
- Quality Or Quantity
- Faith Alone
- Against The Grain
- Get Off
Artwork
The cover artwork was done by Joy Aoki. She was also responsible for the artwork for The Offspring's Ignition album and Down By Law's s/t album.
The original painting used to hang on a wall at Epitaph (and can be seen in the background of an interview with Greg Hetson done by Pandora in early 2009), but per April 2023 it's part of The Punk Rock Museum.
Re-releasing the album
After the album was released Roy Bittain (keyboard player for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band) walked into Epitaph headquarters and told Jay and Brett that they should re-release the album and he would produce it and re-write the songs.[6]