caught-with-a-whack-calzone reblogged
For me, personally, on a basic level, I probably have become a bit more melancholy at this phase of my life than I was when I was 21. But I think it’s natural. When we made our first album, and when those first songs were written — and maybe this is why people connected to it — that album clearly gave off a collegiate vibe. Everything about it gives that aura, and that’s how old we were when those songs were written. In the very early days, right around the time that I started writing “Oxford Comma” and Rostam started writing “Campus,” that was all there. Like anybody, whether you’re in college or in your early twenties, doing whatever, there’s a sense that it’s an eternal springtime. And that’s also true for a band that’s making their first album. So we had that threefold: A bunch of young cats, fresh out of college, suddenly people have interest in our band! That atmosphere was in the air. And then when you do something a second time it’s still exciting, and you’re building and you start to get to the third time, and unless you’re a total craven careerist, you’re going to pause a little bit and be like, “OK, so we’re doing this for a third time. We’re now five or six years older than when we started. Is this just a job? Are we just banging out products of varying degrees of quality, based on an initial template? Or are we trying to do something different?” So that right there is an introspective question. You don’t have to ask yourself too much like, “Who am I? Who are we?” on your first two albums, because a good band usually starts and a bunch of ideas are there and you’re excited. But if we had made “Contra” Part Two it wouldn’t have worked. When “Contra” came out, to me it seemed very different from the first album, but in some ways the first album is like A and the second album is like A Prime. It’s like a lot of the same ideas taken to a new level. This album does feel a little different. And those first two were a little closer together in time, so that’s naturally going to feel a little different. But if we had made another album that was too close to the first two, I think the fans probably would have been a little bored and we would have been a little bored. You have to become a little bit more introspective to figure out why you should keep being a band. If your first batch of ideas run out of steam a little bit, you have to stop and ask what it means to be a band or a songwriter. Because it’s very easy to succumb to the pressure of just feeling like, “Time to make an album…” Sometimes that could produce something that’s good and casual and quick, but that wouldn’t have worked for us this time. Maybe in the future. I don’t want to spend every three years of my life obsessing over this. –Ezra Koenig
