We were not goofing around anymore. We all threw everything we had into this in a way where we all found ourselves really far from home, and we were stuck with each other.
We wanted to be like R.E.M., but the reality is that 15 years after R.E.M. was putting out those records, the playing field had changed drastically as well.
When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record.
For me, a song doesn’t really take flight until it has a lyric on it. …Without a lyric that I’m happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn’t have any resonance.
You can’t please everybody all the time, but I think for the most part we tend to maintain a healthy level of self-reference to kind of make sure we continue to push things forward.
I feel like there’s a lot of beauty in the darkness of ‘Narrow Stairs,’ but that’s not really a place I’m ready to go to for a while. I’m interested in taking a different approach and having the next record be different in tone – I’m just not interested in making another dark, dark album.
The story of our band is that we were this relentless touring band in those early years. We were leaving day jobs and going off on the road and having fun and seeing the country for the first time.
We would scoff at the idea of a nice studio. “Why would you want to go to a nice studio? Oh wow, they have really expensive gear. Ooh, that’s really fancy. Well we’ve got an eight-track. We’ve got it going on here.”
Now that we have the resources, we’re like, “Oh wow, a nice studio is pretty nice! They do have nice outboards here. It’s actually a pretty good place.” It’s funny how much changes so quickly.
We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.
