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Puyallup native and Great Grandpa guitarist Dylan Seawright doesn’t need long to remember his first Bumbershoot experience. “I went once in high school,” he answers quickly, recalling the 35-mile journey as a teenager. “I remember seeing Death Cab.”
His memory, as recounted over the phone from his Tacoma home, is clear enough to remember the exact year—and in doing so, to date himself. “I guess I’ve technically been going to Bumbershoot for 17 years.”
Based on whatever span of time you pick—Seawright’s first attendance as a fan in 2008, or the first and only time he and Great Grandpa played on a Bumbershoot stage in 2018—a lot has changed. After exploding onto the national scene with 2017’s Plastic Cough, Great Grandpa spent the following years falling into a more acoustic and tuneful groove that doesn’t immediately resemble that breakout album.
Seawright says that span of time, marked by a “hiatus” and bookended by two very different album recording sessions, inadvertently proved the perfect way to keep the band intact… and happier than ever.
In some ways, Great Grandpa’s sonic evolution dates back to the recording process for 2019’s Four of Arrows, an album that saw the band take a conscientious effort to reevaluate itself. “What happens when we don’t just play the songs as a live band?” Seawright recalls the five members asking themselves during those sessions. “What if we strip them down to the very core, then build them back up in the studio? And not even think about the live versions?”
With guidance from producer Mike Vernon Davis and engineer Samuel Rosson, the band found its way through “the next level of making a record,” as far as imbuing more acoustic and even symphonic elements through their signature, soft-then-loud marriage of tuneful inspirations like Built to Spill and the Beatles.
Seawright admits that the 2019 recording process was “a flash” and “a sort of chaotic thing,” which he was able to reflect on as he became a full-time recording engineer in the wake of the band’s COVID-timed hiatus. During their hiatus, change became paramount for everyone: Two members started a family. Most members moved to new cities (or, temporarily, continents). And lead singer Al Menne has been public about singing and rearranging songs after undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy.
By the time every band member returned to the West Coast—most in Washington State, with Menne now calling LA home—the members found ways to strip down to their individual cores, then build back up in the selective times they could be together.
“All the missing out on each other’s lives explodes into this fun time with my friends,” Seawright says. “We really sink into our [respective] lives, and that’s a big part of this new era of Great Grandpa. We decided in coming back, like, hey, music is tough. Whatever we need to do to make it sustainable—like letting it take a backseat to our own personal lives to survive—that’s the most important thing. We’ve taken that to heart, and we don’t let this business rule us. We sink into our lives, then we come back together to practice, to write, and it’s like no time has passed, and we’re back to being best friends.”
Seawright has an immediate response to the suggestion that the band sounds more cohesive than ever on 2025’s Patience, Moonbeam. “After going into our own lives, and figuring out what’s important to us, our priorities, and [each member] exploring way different music, a six-year gap will do that to anybody! Everybody’s more solid in their tastes and inspirations, and settled into their musical confluence of tastes.”
As lead producer and engineer, Seawright points to a larger sense of collaboration this time around, making sure that “all of our hands really touched this thing,” as opposed to letting an outside producer take ownership and decisions away from a just-band-members vote. Seawright is proudest of the “happy accident” that this album’s songs can be more directly replicated in a live setting—fewer ornate background sounds that need to be played back on a click track, and more “woody, organic, and acoustic” treatments for the quintet to handle with their core instruments.
The album constantly returns to a theme of leaving, returning, and finding more comfort than ever, like in standout single “Task,” where Menne bluntly opens with a sweet affirmation: “Saw you at the party, we called you by your new name / you had changed, oo-oo-ooh, but the heart of you was still the same.” To that end, Seawright points to an operating principle for the Patience, Moonbeam sessions.
“It feels like we made this record just for our fans,” he says. “We have a really loyal fan base, and they have stuck with us, and they stick around. My mindset was, ‘if we don’t make a single new fan, if the people that hear this record are just the people that have been waiting for another one or six years, I’m so happy with that.’”
Even so, Seawright remembers being a teenage Bumbershoot first-timer in 2008, and imagining other young people coming to this year’s fest—who knows, maybe from a town like Puyallup—and having a similar moment. He wants to be clear: Come as you are to Great Grandpa.
“I remember being a kid who was scared to talk to this band member I’d idolized or whatever. You know, you do it: ‘Hey, great show. I love you guys. I’m obsessed. Like, bye.’ And that’ll happen to us! It’s those moments that make what we do really special. It gives that perspective. You can’t take it for granted. Someone is having a formative moment in their life, whether or not they even love your band, they’re just at a different stage. They’re learning and they’re growing. I think we all are very grateful to be a part of that.”
Bumbershoot is Saturday, August 30 & Sunday, August 31 at the Seattle Center. Tickets are available at bumbershoot.com. We’re counting down to Bumbershoot 2025 by featuring a different participating musician or artist every day for the two weeks leading up to the festival—see all our picks here.
