"Making records is a really good idea," Mitch Easter says, partway through a chat with The Second Disc. He's, of course, absolutely correct, and he would know. The Winston-Salem, North Carolina native founded the seminal Drive-In Studio in 1980, collaborating as a producer and engineer with a host of notable alternative rock acts including R.E.M., Game Theory, Pylon and others; since 2000, he's run Fidelitorium Recordings in nearby Kernersville.

But Easter is more than a whiz behind the boards. In the 1980s, he founded and fronted the jangle-pop group Let's Active. Their three albums and one EP (on which Easter was the sole consistent band member) produced a cadre of timeless power pop treasured by its fans, from the sublime "Every Word Means No" - an early staple on The Cutting Edge, an MTV block of college rock sponsored by Let's Active's label I.R.S. Records - to the modern rock hit "Every Dog Has His Day," the title track to the band's final LP.

For all the thrill of Let's Active's discography, it's been a perplexing rarity in the digital age, never available in its entirety to stream and download except for less than 10 seemingly arbitrary tracks. That all changes on Friday, November 28, when Universal Music Group, in partnership with SuperVisible Multi Media, will present the EP Afoot (1983) and albums Cypress (1984), Big Plans for Everybody (1986) and Every Dog Has His Day (1988) together from the first time on all digital music stores, featuring newly remastered audio by engineer Dave McNair and a pair of non-album bonus tracks ("Grey Scale," a track featured on U.K. pressings of Cypress, and "Two You's," a B-side to 1986's "In Little Ways"). Easter and friends will celebrate with a live set drawn from all four releases, taking place at the Gas Hill Drinking Room in Winston-Salem on Saturday, November 29.

For SuperVisible founder Timothy J. Smith, the collaboration is a true coup. "Mitch is one of those rare artists and producers whose work helped define the sound of a generation," he told The Second Disc. "His production and music were a huge part of the '80s American indie wave - and truly crafted the soundtrack of my youth. (And yes, I've still got the signed ticket stub from a 1986 Seton Hall University show to prove it.)

"Getting the chance to work with Mitch today honestly feels surreal - but it's also exactly why SuperVisible exists," he continued.
"Music like Let's Active doesn't belong buried in dusty CD bins and forgotten LP crates. In this day and age, it should be a few keystrokes and a pair of ears away from re-discovery and appreciation. We're honored to help make that happen."

Easter was kind enough to spend some time with us chatting about what fans can expect from the show, the challenges of Let's Active's music, the chances of physical reissues and the thrill of rediscovery. Read on below!

It's always interesting when go on a streaming service and say, "Hey, that thing isn't on there!" In the case of Let's Active, it's several "that thing"s.

It's funny - it would change all the time. Stuff would pop up and it would disappear. It's been like that for years.

People would write to us and ask why we don't fix that. And of course, we didn't control it. People really do think that the artists control all this stuff that they don't. But I was always flattered people actually were looking for it after all this time. So it's gonna be really good that it's all up and accessible easily.

So had the albums been up, and they just you know got lost in the shuffle? Or are these the first time that these couple albums are available? I see there's, like, eight songs up there now.

I don't really keep up with it, but I'm not sure any complete records were ever up. It would just be these random songs.

That's interesting. Obviously, a song like "Every Word Means No" is up there. But I was trying to sort of divine, like "OK, why these eight specifically?" What was the the process of getting these in order? Did Tim approached you with the idea?

Right, he just called me! I'm just surprised that this stuff exists in people's memory. I guess it's not that old, but in pop music terms, it's forever old. So that was really cool - I thought, "Okay, sure!" Because I really didn't know how to proceed with something like [getting the albums delivered].,

I'm sure that it's not often that you're re-listening to these records. But in doing so, getting these digital releases ready, was there anything that jumped out at you from an artistic perspective? I mean, you're obviously very familiar with it.

Well, yes and no. On records that I like or records that I have something to do with, some kind of affinity for, I like listening to them with big gaps of time in between. It's sort of like they're new again, you know? It's not like I don't remember them, but different things pop out. I think that's enjoyable; I like that whole process.

At the time, I knew we were sort of irreverent, in some ways, about how to do all this stuff. It's a little bit...I'm not gonna say "sloppy," but it's not real tight like classic rock-type production at all. I used to worry about that some, but when I hear it now, I think it's great, because it just doesn't really sound like any other band, exactly. It's of its time but it's got a distinctive [quality]. Rather than it being a sort of perfect, every-hair-in-place kind of thing, It's got a little bit more life to it, by virtue of its reality.

There's a couple of non-album songs here, which is nice. Were you cognizant of making sure you get those up, if you're gonna get all these albums up, too?

Partly, it was a function of [looking back] at the CDs. The Cypress record and the Afoot EP were not released on CD until a few years later, and I.R.S. put them on one disc. That's where those extra songs appear. There might be an extra song or two on the Big Plans record, too. And there are one or two other songs that don't appear anywhere that we didn't stick on there, but maybe those can pop up someday somewhere. I think record collector types sort of love the mystery, chaos factor of these extra tracks and different mixes and stuff. [laughs]

Do you have any hopes of maybe, at some point, getting these back out in physical print?

I really don't know. I'd like to get the sense that people actually want that, you know? We have already gotten messages of "Will there be CDs?" That's a whole different universe! We're doing this show to announce this streaming thing becoming available. It's sort of an excuse to have a show, but I think it will work together in a pleasant way. It makes people think about [physical reissues] and they'll ask about things like that, but...it's weird. As you well know, the whole vinyl business is so funny because some people buy those records and don't play them. And to make those things is kind of an effort. So I'd like to think that a few of them would actually get played on record players and we'd sell enough for it to make sense. Never say never, but no - no real plans.

So tell me a little more about the show: what can fans expect? These are pretty straightforward rock songs, so it's not like you have to really assemble an unusual sort of band to get these together. Unless you are rearranging them...?

What I hope to do is to play and have it sound like the records as much as we can. I don't really like stuff to get reworked, especially in this situation, since it's about this particular sort of legacy issue thing. Ideally we would have four people, and one of them would play guitar and keyboards, because we have keyboards on a lot of songs. I keep toying with adding somebody that would just play keyboards, because I kind of want to hear those sounds.

We're just starting to practice with the people that are gonna play on this and we'll have to see if that actually works. I guess what I'm getting at is that I like the idea of seeing a band that looks like - I guess because of my age - I want a band that looks like the band. In the early '70s, that thing of having the backup singers or a horn section on stage - I kind of didn't like that. Our music really doesn't have that stuff too much.

We did this thing, playing Let's Active songs about four years ago, because a museum wanted to do a show about the local indie rock scene. We did that show with a cast of thousands, and had a bunch of extra people to play the extra parts. That was cool, but I kind of don't want that vibe for this show. I want to keep it small, and yet, I want to hear those [keyboard] sounds...that just give a little tonality and a range outside of guitars.

The only thing that's weird about the Let's Active songs is that the older they get, the harder they are to play. The stuff on that EP, it's real kind of bubblegum, but it's also like math rock: these super specific riffs and specific bass parts - there's like a million notes! I can definitely hear the work of a younger person; it's kind of hyper! I had been playing for a long time when that band started, and I was really happy about the shift out of the sort of '70s mentality into that '80s thing. A lot of that had to do with songs being fast and kind of pointy. I was just sort of deliberately trying to write that way, for a three-piece band. So that's just kind of busy in this way that's kind of hard to play.

I'm having to think about this to be able to play this stuff with any kind of correctness. [laughs] There's a kind of memory to it, but I'm realizing it's gonna be a bit challenging for the other people to play this stuff. It's just not straightforward at all. But by the time we get to songs like "Every Dog Has Its Day" - that is a pretty straightforward rock song. We're gonna do the set in reverse chronological order, which was my wife's idea. I think that will actually help us pull this off, because those later songs are actually easier.

What are the things you're excited for people to hear on these albums that maybe they haven't heard in a while?

We're gonna play something off all four of those records and I think that people [will] probably like that. I've played in public enough over the years to do those songs here and there, but to hear a whole batch of them and hear stuff from every record is something we really have not done. There are songs we haven't played in a really long time, like one on the EP called "Make Up with Me." It's really fucking hard to pull off; it's like crazy skiffle, with a million notes. I'm saying we're gonna do that one, but if the rehearsals are too painful, you know, we won't! Maybe the last time I played that song on stage was in 1986 at Duke University opening for R.E.M. on my birthday.

I guess our set list is based on what I think are semi...I don't want to just cater to some notion of "Well, they always clap for this one" or anything. I just want to do something I think makes some sort of artistic sense. But I want the crowd to like it, so - not to overstate it - it'll be a mix of favorites, plus maybe ones that we never did very much.

What's exciting is that you have just a big enough body of work of work with Let's Active to get a chance for the the songs that people were probably hoping or expecting to hear, and also a couple of exciting curveballs.

Obviously, when people gear up to do a show like this, they get excited about doing more of them. So maybe we will, if this one goes well. I do like the idea of exploring the catalog.

It's always fun, especially in the alternative rock quadrant - that strange magic of streaming, how things sort of take off that you'd have no idea. Maybe you'll have a situation like that!

There's an aspect of culture that's always like "Get out of the way; here comes the kids." But It is great: this rediscovery stuff is really an interesting phenomenon. I mean, there's so much art that is rediscovered when the artist has been dead for hundreds of years. And that's what's so cool about recorded music. Streaming's accessibility and low cost is a good driver of this angle of rediscovering stuff in a new way, where the stuff that resonates with a new batch of people is not what resonated so much or wasn't even thought about at the time, as anything more than a B-side or whatever.

It's fun to sort of contemplate the change of things, and sometimes a bit hard to not be a little bit gloomy about certain aspects of it. But it finds a way, and what emerges may not be what you expected, but it can be delightful - or not! [laughs] It just depends on where you are in all of this. It's funny: right before you called, a guy that I know who is a very smart music-involved person was sort of lamenting the unbelievable quantity of songs added to streaming services every year, along with the rising quantity of AI-generated stuff. It's hard to feel like that's totally cool.

I think when people my age were listening to music, we had the sense - and of course we were wrong - but we had the sense that we knew what was going on. You sort of knew what the records were at the moment, or you thought you did. And that is absolutely impossible now, so it can be kind of threatening. But if you grow up now, it's not threatening; it's the world. They're not depressed by this; they'll do something. People always make music and people always want to hear it.

The thing for me is I just cannot believe that anybody cares about very small records like ours over a long span of time. It's really gratifying. And that's the big, good takeaway from doing this. If somebody is made happy by this, you have done your job on the planet as being a positive force. I mean - who's to say what level of positive force it is, but happiness is always in short supply, and we can always use more of it. And this stuff is definitely associated with that.