In a way, as much as we love to be a big, loud rock band, the acoustic album was a lot easier to make than the rock records. I think because it was brand new territory for the band.
It is definitely much easier to feel that an album is disposable - to dismiss an album or delete the tracks you don't like or to just throw it into shuffle or whatever.
I don't really cringe over any of my albums.
My first album was me finding myself and my voice, finding how I sing. I was rolling with the punches because everything was new to me.
I would say that my peak was making my first million at the ripe age of 29, after the first album.
The only band that I can see that made changes over the years with success was The Beatles. They were able to change album to album and still be just as good or better. I didn't feel that we were able to do that. The Beatles were in a class by themselves.
I recorded this album in a windowless room in Brooklyn by myself. I think Chamber of Reflection sums the album up better than Salad Days to tell you the truth.
When I choose material for an album all these songs I grew up with pour into my head.
One of the great things about the Internet is that people are excited about music and wanna hear a random album from a band somewhere in Romania or something, and to listen to all sorts of stuff from around the world.
You've got a new Spanish-language album out now ["90 Millas," released in September of 2007], and the single ["No Llores"] is #1 on the Billboard Latin chart.
You want success on different levels. I wouldn't be honest if I said I don't look over there in the pop world and say, "Man, that's attractive - Adele selling 100,000 albums a week. A week.
I try to structure albums in a pattern, like in a way where there's a motif that runs throughout or some kind of conceit that informs it in a general way. Maybe it's in a harmonic key. I like to go metastructural sometimes, like look at more than the three-minute passage and how that interacts with other pieces. And I've been increasingly interested in false starts and fraudulent beginnings, and things that don't reach their implied conclusions. I take an album and I kind of start moving things around like Jenga.
I once lost five years listening to a Pink Floyd album.
Record the album after the tour.
I always consider every album to be a snapshot.
Some of the albums I like best in the whole world are considered psychedelic albums. A psychedelic album is an album that when you put it on, if you listen to both sides, when it's over, your perceptions have been changed and I think that our record can do that.
I would like for people to appreciate the album musically whether they knew how it was made or not.
The Blind album itself was more drum and rhythm-centric and I really enjoyed that.
I hope that the next time you go to a concert, the band doesn't play the song you wanna hear! And instead, they just play songs off their new album!
For the second album I look forward to doing a lot of serious collaboration and taking the experiences I've had over this last year, good and bad, and working it into the album.