You mentioned in an interview that he helped the band move past some of the restrictions that come with being a duo. Could you expand on that?

There’s limitations or restrictions with just having two main instruments. They’ve always, I thought, pushed us to play our respective instruments in ways that we otherwise wouldn’t. It’s kind of compensating for any instrument that might bridge our two instruments. So I tend to play guitar with a much more rhythm, or at least I try to, kind of a lower end rhythmic style in some ways. Tyson tends to play drums with a bit more melodic style. And then we, in a way, sort of play each of each other’s parts. When it’s going well we find a nice bridge between. The limitations are challenging and we’ve embraced the challenge, is what I’m trying to say.

What was the most challenging song on the album to write?

The title track on the album, the first song. I think it’s the song we’ve been playing the longest so it’s the oldest song. But I didn’t write the lyrics for it right up until we recorded it. It just never really seemed to make sense to me. I couldn’t put my finger on the song. It wasn’t really revealing itself to me at the time what it wanted to be about. So that was a bit nerve-wrecking because up until the very end I didn’t really know where I was going to go.

You’ve known each other most of your lives. Could you talk about how your music chemistry with each other has developed over the years?

I think we have the really the good fortunate of having gone through most of our respective development musically. We’ve done it together, like almost every step of the way. We both started playing music when we were around 12 and have pretty much have been playing with each other every since.

I think that’s helped us adapt to each other’s respective changes in the way we’re doing things. But when we started this band I think the both of us were…it goes without saying that we were pretty young and naive and following along and holding onto whatever was happening. We didn’t even know we were starting a band when we first started. There were only two of us and that didn’t seem like a feasible thing to do.

But then we kept on getting offered shows so we kept on playing. And when we started playing, Tyson had just started playing drums and I had pretty much started writing songs. So a lot of it was new to us. There was a lot of discovery at the beginning for us and the excitement of it can fade a little bit after awhile. So we’ve been following whatever impulse we have to change the way we do things and change our style, to keep it alive for us. But at the same time we try not to think about it too much. It’s not my favorite thing to dwell on.

Were there any revelations in regard to your chemistry with this new album?

I can’t say there were any revelations for us or me personally. If anything, it kind of reinforced a lot of opinions that I already held. I think we already knew how not to treat a recording experience as too much of a different experience than performing live. With a lot of technology these days, it’s really easy to want to do away with all the flaws on the record and clean them all up. You can lose track of the performance that way and deprive it of whatever life it had before. So it’s something I always believed in but it’s hard to do it sometimes. You can get lost in the process of making a record. And I think with this album we stuck with it pretty well and I think it sounds live and I think that’s what we were hoping for.

How has coming from San Francisco influenced the band?

Well, from the start, having both grown up in the city, it was a pretty natural thing to play music and I guess do something a little different. It wasn’t some kind of defiant act, even though our parents didn’t necessarily approve it at first. On a bigger scale, with growing up in the city there were a lot of people just doing a lot of interesting stuff. There was a lot of music everywhere and a lot of art everywhere. And there still is, though far less and far less cultural relevant. It was a very encouraging place to play music and write regardless of what may come out of it. We were pretty lucky to grow up in the city, probably influenced me as much as any of the other factors in my life.

It seems like a pretty diverse scene.

Yeah. It’s all over the place now. It’s hard to really put your finger on it, like it used to be. When we first started playing there were a lot of bands in the punk scene that we got associated with because we would play with them. We played any show we could. We played a lot of free shows and street shows and a lot of house shows. A lot of weird and interesting bands playing together all the time. That scene has been thoroughly eradicated from the city unfortunately. To me there isn’t quite as much of a vibrant scene as there used to be. Mostly because there are far fewer opportunities to play in San Francisco.

The band’s been on a few labels (Alive Records, Saddle Creek, ATO Records) over the past dozen-plus years. What are some of the biggest things you learned through being on different labels?

We’ve been fortunate to have a pretty close relationship with the people at each of the labels we’ve been on. I think that’s an essential thing. Not to just have a close relationship but then see eye-to-eye and know that they genuinely respect your music and what you’re doing and are engaged and interested in what you’re doing and not just popping out records. I think that’s far more important than getting a big advance or something like that.

What are you looking forward to most this year?

I’m just looking forward to going on tour again. It’s been awhile since we’ve done a full tour so I’m just excited to get out and play music every night. You can lose appreciation for what you do out there when you don’t play music every night and having people come out and see you and hopefully get something out of it. Pretty fortunate circumstances to find oneself in.

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