I don't feel like we're setting ourselves up to be exclusive. I don't want to set up an attitude where we're telling people 'You can't listen to our music if you don't have a college degree.
It's hard for us to talk about how we disdain file-sharing when in fact it probably has been a great resource for us.
It was a nice relief to be able to work on individual songs.
I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It's an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive.
If Broadway musicals were as popular as they were in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, then people like Sufjan Stevens and Iron & Wine would be writing for Broadway, which would be amazing. As it stands, it's the worst stuff that's mired in pop music.
The jam stuff doesn't appeal to me in general. My newfound love for the Dead came from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia's songwriting, not the elaborate guitar solos. I'm a song person. Once it starts to break out of that structure and become loopy, it's uninteresting to me.
I think the music should definitely underscore the sentiment of the song, and it can work for or against it. It has just as much power in creating a kind of perpendicular sentiment in the music, creating a nice friction that also plays up some of the tension in the song.
Early on I was a lot more unsure of myself on stage. When our band The Decemberists was getting bigger audiences I was more concerned about alienating them, so I wasn't as willing to take risks and do weird stuff on stage. But once you get more accustomed to it you tend to have more fun with it and not worry about being pilloried for acting out. Whenever you play in front of 400 or 500 more people than you're used to it's always a weird, transitional period.
