Damian Kulash: I'm good. Yourself?

My pleasure. Thanks for talking to me.

Get my gun...

Yeah.

I imagine that legally, you're probably supposed to.

Yeah, I figured. You're probably sued by people like me all the time. You know, I'm usually offended when people don't record, which is usually high school interviews and stuff, and they have, like, 700 very specific questions that they need to get through, and then they don't record your answers. So you read the thing later and it's just like, that's nothing to do with what you said.

Is that a standard cassette, like an actual cassette?

Can you still get tapes in grocery stores?

[laughs] After a couple more coffees, I could've made a good joke out of that.

Well, I may not be my wittiest right now.

But I'm honest.

Thanks.

[sighs] Well, this album I think is like disaster party rock. That's what I think it is. I think I had a really good phrase for it a couple nights ago, but I was a little less sober and I can't remember.

[laughs] Yeah, yeah, I know. It's a shame. I should carry one of those Panasonic VCU whatevers alongside. I can record my finest moments. I'm really bad at coming up with the quick label for it. The fact of the matter is, it's pretty much rock and roll. But I think the thing that is notable is the party in a shitstorm quality to it.

I'm sure we've changed some. I think the world has changed a lot. Or at least the world apparent to me has changed a lot. And while I'm sure I would have phrased it differently a couple years ago, our music still is not overtly political, I don't think. I think it's really difficult to write overtly political music that doesn't just sound trite and didactic. And right now, it seems harder to ignore our political surroundings, to me, than it did a few years ago. I guess I shouldn't even say "ignore," but this setting that our record comes from just seems a lot more dire and more fucked-up right now. You know, so it's ... oh boy, what's the matter with me this morning? I'm sorry... I think that we're more, uh, wleaaaAAAGH. Sorry. Just woke up. I tied one on a little bit last night and now I'm trying to get myself together.

No, no, no, it's fine. It's just ...I guess I don't think that our music has gotten more specifically political. Obviously I was more publicly involved in politics in this election than I was in the one before. Not that anyone would have known who I was in the one before. But I guess I don't feel like things had changed that much. I'm still not writing Bob Dylan songs referring to specific politicians. It's just that this whole record comes from more of a setting of fucked-uppitude, which is part political and part personal.

Oh, yeah.

[laughs] When Tim and I first started writing songs together years ago, at some point we had taken a week off of work and borrowed a friend's van and drove to New Hampshire, where we we wrote for a few days. And I remember at some point during this trip Ð you know, it's like an 18-hour drive or something from Chicago Ð and I remember asking him at some point if he would know if he were the devil. Or rather if he thought I would know if I were the devil. And for some reason, this song, when it was time to start writing words for it, brought out the same kind of feeling. It was just thinking about, what it would actually be like, whether the devil actually knows that he is the devil, you know? And I guess I started listening to that Stones song a lot. And it's obviously one of the best songs ever written, but I do think that it is a sort of simplistic take on the devil, that he would be causing all the evil in the universe. It seems to me that humans do a lot more than their deities ever could, you know?

Not specifically. You're not far off, I just wasn't. I actually was thinking of "Heroes"-era David Bowie. And there's... do you know the band Space Needle? I think they're also called Reservoir sometimes. The week that I recorded that demo, which actually just wound up being pretty much the recording on the record, I was listening to a lot of Space Needle. Who I know very little about. I think they're from Portland, and I think they're from like ten years ago. And their record covers were all done by the guy who did the album covers for Yes.

I don't know his name. It's like that sort of like spacey psychedelic stuff. "The House Wins" is also a pretty specific song. I guess actually those two songs do share a pretty general and similar and dour worldview.

Wow, that's obviously an enormous compliment, but now I'm gonna have to go listen to it. I had never been told that before.

[laughs] Thank you.

I think that's kinda true. I am a pretty stalwartly and unreasonably optimistic person most of the time. But I think that the universal generalizable emotion is despair and fear. I think happiness is definitely swimming upstream. And if you just had to spin the dial and hope it landed... I'm sorry. When trying to encapsulate what it's like to feel or to be or to exist, I think that there's a lot of sort of it's-all-going-to-hell-ness around us. That didn't make any sense. I'm making up nouns that are sentences right now.

[laughs] Yeah.

Yeah. We toured on that record for 18 months, and then it took basically a year to record this one. The actual recording was only three months, but our creative atrophy was so great at the end of that 18 months of touring that it took me six months to write a song I could stomach at all. So it feels like it took forever.

We finished recording in December [2004]. We remixed a couple of songs at some point after that, but the actual playing of it was done in December.

We've been doing a little touring and writing more. And setting it up, and I'm designing the record cover, and there's just a lot of work. We have a new guitarist, and he's also a computer programmer, so we're making Web toys and things like that.

I think it's easier once the record's out. People know the songs and everything. But it's so exciting when the songs are brand new and people haven't heard 'em before. They're not sick of anything yet. So I don't know, it's just different. But I guess I'd say I think the best time to be touring is about a month and a half after your record's come out, so the whole world knows it but it's not played by rote yet.

Well, right now it's station wagon/hotel/show. But there's not a lot of time. You have to make a Herculean effort to do anything except just the pure logistics of it. But yeah, on our last tour, we managed to have a half a day in the badlands, and about a month before that we were able to spend a half a day at White Sands National Monument. And we have enough friends in most places we go. There's a nice dinner or drinks after the show to be had. But we don't get a lot of time to go trolling through stores or museums.

[laughs] I'm appalled that it should need defense, but I will attempt nonetheless. "Hold The Line," it's kind of a perfect song to cover, because a) it's a great song. It's like, it's really actually a fantastic song. And b) it comes from a band that people don't really want to pay any attention to and probably didn't even then, so you're not treading upon giants. It's almost like a... well, I won't go there. I just think it's a fantastic song, and we can't be accused to ruining something that was formerly great. I mean, we did a cover of the Zombies' "This Will Be Our Year" for The Future Soundtrack For America. And I'm proud of our recording, and I think it's an incredible song. However, I realize we probably shouldn't be playing Zombies songs. I mean, those are like the greatest songs ever recorded, and who are we to touch the Zombies? On the other hand, Toto? Totally fair game, as far as I'm concerned. The only problem with covering Toto, of course, is that it sounds kind of jokey. People think it's ironic, which is kind of just distasteful and annoying. However, I think the song is so good that it's pretty hard to listen to and not get excited.

It's a fine line and a tough balance to strike, and I'm totally stupid for attempting. But I think with a lot of the things we do, we are mistaken for being ironic or pisstaking. Or we could be mistaken for that. We try not to be, 'cause there's really nothing to be gained from being snarky and annoying and poking fun at things. But I'm not a fan of the campy '80s cover. I mean, there's lots of great songs from the '80s that lots of people can cover wonderfully, but taking the one hit from the one-hit wonder and then, you know, making a pop-punk song because you think it's a funny joke... That is the depths of the cavern of poor taste, I think. And we've got this dance routine that we have been doing, and I think during the first ten seconds, people are like, "Oh, my God, they're making fun of boy bands, how completely lame is that?" And then once we're through three and a half minutes of fairly intense choreography, they're like, "They're not making fun of anything, they're just fucking doing it."

Yeah. I mean, I think a little bit of ridiculousness is fine. In fact, it is often wonderful. But you have to mean the things you do. If you're gonna make a choreographed dance and do it on stage, it better fucking be an awesome choreographed dance. So we attempt to make awesome choreographed dances. We can even defend our decisions to cover Toto here and there.

No, no, it's fine, actually. I'm glad to clear the air.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, what is your personal take on what people are allowed to cover? I'm assuming you're not going to let anyone cover "Purple Rain," right?

Yeah, I guess there's times. I sort of feel like there's a few greats who it's just like... I mean, I guess there are some people who could do it. I suppose if I heard the Pixies covering "Purple Rain," I wouldn't be complaining. But at the same time, I just don't know why they would.

Or am I gonna make you sit through my version? Which is even worse. I think there's another reason to do covers, too, which is that it's a really good training. The Beatles are the Beatles largely because they were playing someone else's music for three years, whatever it was. I think it's a great idea to sit in your practice room and learn how to play "Sweet Emotion" and "Black Dog," but I'm not sure that it's such a good idea to be playing "Black Dog" in front of people. And then when you come to the crowd's viewpoint, covers are sort of an ingenious weapon for the opener. Opening bands have just the worst position in the world. Because people came to see somebody else, they want to see somebody else, and if you are too much like the headliner, you are a ripoff. If you sound too dissimilar to the headliner, you are a fucking annoyance. It's like, "This isn't what we came to see." So you already have a hostile group of people you're dealing with when you're an opening band. And a really great way to disarm them is to just start with a song they already know and like. So, yeah, often you're dealing with a hostile group of people, and if you can disarm them with something they know and love, it's a great way to break the ice. The problem is, if it's something they know and love and you ruin it, you've completely galvanized their hatred for you. So yeah, I've thought a lot about covers. We are not playing any right now, though. Strangely. Our new guitarist doesn't even know how to play "Hold The Line." I guess we better teach him pretty quick.

Really.

You know, the pile of songs we didn't use for this record, which is probably four times the size of the pile of songs we did, about two-thirds of it is attempts to rewrite Zombies songs. The Zombies have this incredible ability to write things that sound just obvious and really simple. You're just like, "Oh, yeah, I know that song." It's exactly what you wanted. And then you try to do it, and it's impossible. There's something about the recording quality of their drums. Like, their drums always sound so heavy and so groovin', but also really small. They don't take up any space and there's nothing bash-you-in-the-face obvious about them. And then the chord progressions and the way everything fits together... It's like they're basically just really simple soul songs but they're not obvious. I don't know, once again I'm completely stammering and not making any sense. But I never would have thought of that song as being Zombies-like, but were I not more ashamed of them, I could play you 30 wannabe Zombies songs that we didn't put on this record.

Right, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

The Aughts... Yes, I wanted to write a halftime anthem. I think that our last record and this new record are pretty fundamentally different in that the first one, a lot of it was written before the band even existed, and then what we wrote... I mean, the whole record basically was a studio project. It was this gleaming, overproduced... like, we wanted the whole thing to be teeth-rottingly perfect. And because of what was happening in the larger rock world, what, three years ago, whatever, was so dour and so self-consciously masculine and sad and, I don't know, kind of like dreary and diary musicky, that we just wanted to do something that had the fun and the exuberance and excitement of the records we loved best. So that was sort of the aim of that record. And I like it, but of course I'm sick of it, it's our first record, you know? Everyone's sick of their first record. The new one is really more the sound of the band. It's not songs that we wrote in a vacuum and recorded in enormous production facilities in Los Angeles. It's songs written to the strengths of the band and recorded all in one room and one time. And I think it feels a lot more raw and energetic and rockin'. Was I answering some question or am I fucking spewing bullshit again?

Yeah, good. So yeah, anyhow, that song, "Get Over It" was definitely our sports-rock anthem.

Yeah, it did. It was on EA Sports' Madden 2002 [Madden NFL 2003, actually] or whatever it was. And we have so many sports fan rock fans now because of it. It definitely brought a lot of arena sportsters into the arena rock world.

No. I think cowbell's great.

Yeah, well, obviously that Christopher Walken thing is hilarious. But I feel basically like the larger context for that argument is, is rock and roll entirely academic at this point? Is it just a matrix of reference points to older rock songs and movies and TV shows and advertisements? The thing is, I think a well-used cowbell just makes you wanna jump on your bed and pump your fist in the air. The last record, for some reason, we got this question all the time about handclaps, 'cause like half of our songs have handclaps in them, maybe even more. And they just feel good. They sound good. They're fun to do. I think trying to decide what instrumentation you can use based on a Saturday Night Live skit, it's a bad state for rock and roll to be in.

There's definitely some T. Rex in there. There's a lot of T. Rex across the record, because actually during the time we were touring on the last album, Electric Warrior was kind of our soundtrack. So I think there's a lot of references to T. Rex all over the place. But that song, I thought it was gonna be really loud. Like, there's a highly piano-based groove for that song that I thought was going to be this really stomping, heavy, big, enormous thing, and I kept trying to record it that way, and it kept on giving me the fucking finger. You know, it was like, it wasn't right, it wasn't right, it wasn't right. And then it just sort of fell out this way. I had a whole different lyrical idea for it, and I was just gonna do a completely different song until the lyrics just sort of popped out of thin air one night Ð which has almost never happened to me Ð and sort of gave the song a direction. And I guess it is kind of T. Rex. People keep saying Prince, but to me, it's too white to be Prince. It's like, you know that falsetto-ey song on the new Spoon record ["I Turn My Camera On"]? You would never call it a soul song, really. 'Cause there's something too angular and white about it. And I sort of feel the same way about this song. So maybe it is T. Rex. Maybe you are dead-on.

Wow. You see, there's a cover I would fuckin' love to hear. Prince singing "Mambo Sun."

In the world or for us?

Boy oh boy, what's changed the most... Well, I think the world has gotten significantly more fucked up. I'm back to stammering about politics, aren't I? I think the world's gotten significantly more fucked up, and, for us, I think we have found a more comfortable place in it, in a way. I think this record is a lot more focused and has a much clearer vision to it than our first did. In general, I feel that way. I feel like I know what I'm doing a lot more now than I did three years ago. And I feel like our country knows a lot less what it's doing than it did, I don't know, I guess five years ago or something. Things have been pretty fucked up for a while, but they're definitely getting worse.

Oh, they've been great. I think we have a much more realistic view of the world. Our first record, it was just such a crazy rollercoaster ride. We were this kind of tiny indie band in Chicago, and now we're making like this huge major label record, and I think we were in the studio for six months on that record. Just like a long perfectionist spiral. And I think we know what we want a lot more, and I just think that we're a lot more focused. I don't know, we're more us than we were then.

Oh, yeah.

I'm obviously gonna have to spend most of it primping. I mean, there's another one of these coming up next year, right?

Yeah. Geez. I, uh, you know, I'm obviously terribly, terribly flattered. But I guess I demand a recount, is all I can say.

I saw it, but I forget. I remember feeling like the choices they made made me think that perhaps this whole thing was backwards. I think I was above Jude Law or something like that? I was really like, "Come on, give me a break." And if I'm not mistaken, somewhere in the top ten is that red-headed kid from Harry Potter. And it's like, in the abstract, it's wonderful to be known as the 17th cutest boy in America. But if the 6th cutest boy in America is that [tape cuts off] END