It's hard to say how time factors into your work, because sometimes things will come to you very quickly, but it will take years for the ideas to be gestating in your mind.

I wanted to make an album where every song is kind of interacting - where you can't tell what's the string arrangement and what's the song. I guess that came out of going to college, majoring in music, studying classical music, and even as a kid, being really drawn to classical music.

Throughout college I was getting better and better at making recordings, producing songs, making different kinds of beats. I was starting to learn the signifiers of production from the '60s, the '80s. We never re-recorded anything. All the record companies that wanted to sign us - except for one - were excited about the recordings that we had done ourselves.

It's hard to say how time factors into your work, because sometimes things will come to you very quickly, but it will take years for the ideas to be gestating in your mind.

As far as the lyrics go, I think I was negotiating a moment in my life where I didn't feel happy. I think I had some existential frustration and I was wrestling with that on a few different levels. I was feeling like I wanted to change a lot of things.

Obviously it always takes longer to finish an album than you think it will. That's always going to be the case. Everything takes longer than you think it will. Occasionally things happen fast.

We've always said that our band is pretty much an open system and there's no rules governing anything... so who knows what the future will hold?