How do you manage to combine a young, childish feel while still creating enjoyable music?

That’s just my personality popping out in the music, I work with children and senior citizens on a daily basis and that sensibility tends to take over the brain whether you want it to or not. Most of the melodies and some of the lyrics are inspired by just absorbing the strangeness that is happening in the room, and if you tweak your thoughts enough you can tap into what others find amusing as well. Children also tend to be a good test group for some of our tamer tunes, as children’s reactions and critiques tend to be pretty instanteous. While some of the friendlier senior citizens inspire tracks with gravy and wisdom. Hopefully, the melodies and lyrics will tap into the recessive memories of everyone and inspire some festive toe tapping / thumb-twiddling.

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An Idea Of a Horse is sometimes staggeringly hard, and sometimes flowing and ambient-like. How did you manage to combine your influences to make something with such variety?

Too much coffee! That’s the secret behind all of the madness! Seriously though, I think it was half really concerted effort and half complete hair-brained chance and experimentation. Both Shannon and I draw inspiration and influence from more sources than we could even name, many of them in the realm of literature and various visual media, and we simply tried to create an amalgamate from all of the noise floating around in our informational spheres that accurately reflected where we were at those specific moments in which we created the songs. Does that even make any sense? It sounds a little hippie-tastic to me… It’s really hard to describe the sonic stew that “…Horse” came out of.

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What were your reactions upon discovering that Broom was in the top 200 CMJ? Were you at all surprised?

Well, the promotion company thought it would chart…but we were still surprised. I think we’re still surprised when someone REALLY likes us. There are lot of things to like in the world…in general. So that, alone, tends to help us out. I mean, you can like anything you want.

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Do you have a favorite track on Newborn?

Each song does something different for me. There’s something about “Warm Blooded” that I can’t quite describe. When I finished that song, it seemed to live and breathe on its own. Something bigger than the individual words and sounds I put in. It is also one of the strongest songs live.

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A lot of the songs on the Our Home Is Gone are acoustic; what made you decide to switch from that style to a full instrumentation?

Meg and I have always liked the sounds of drums and bass…and all other instruments for that matter: piano, cello,etc. However, in a lot of our songs, Meg still plays the electric/acoustic, so we are sticking to our roots.

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What are your major musical influences?

I think some of my more obvious influences would be Casiotone for the Painfully Alone (for awhile I was unsure whether I was being overly derivative of his style until I began writing a few folksier songs), as well as Beat Happening, Daniel Johnston, Kimya Dawson (whom I’ve met a few times and is an absolutely delightful person), David-Ivar Herman D?ne’s solo ukulele stuff is just wonderful, and I know he’s influenced me some. Plan-It-X Records, Friends and Relatives Records, and all those kids in Bloomington, IN are just so inspiring that I think going to a house show up there would make anyone want to be a musician. Matty Pop Chart and Dennis Driscoll would probably be my two hugest influences lately. I like musicians who aren’t out to save the world with their music. (more…)