That’s very interesting. So, the new album is called Loyalty To Loyalty. Can you explain what the title means?
Yeah, it’s a phrase coined by Josiah Royce, a writer from the early 1900s. We started writing Loyalty To Loyalty as a reaction to [his writings]—kind of how man should not rise above one another, but instead be a support to each other, and a lot of the songs are sort of in-between these different philosophies.
Where did you record the album, and did it take awhile?
We recorded in a few different rooms in L.A., some of the bigger named studios in the area. But we’re a very frugal band in that we don’t want to allow ourselves too much time in the studio.
Because the approach is, ‘Let’s knock this out on the first take because that’s the freshest and most organic,’ is it just about economics? Or, is it a mixture of both?
It’s a mixture of both. We do a few takes and then put it to rest—trying to be as live as possible.
So, you cut a lot of tracks live?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
And most of those takes made it to Loyalty To Loyalty?
Yeah.
You can definitely hear that on tracks like ‘Against Privacy,’ which has a very open-room feel to it—it’s almost feels like your sitting in a concert hall while listening to that song. So, did you guys have set objectives going into the sessions for this album, or even when you were writing the record?
You know, we don’t necessarily know how to describe what it is that we do, so we try to not even be super- aware of what a record is going to be like, or how it is different from the last record. We try to be unaware while we know that, ultimately, we wanna go in and write more songs. I think it’s important for bands—or at least us, anyway—to approach it naturally.
