The New Loose: A Conversation With Woods
by Lauren BeckPage 2 of 6
The L: You were touring then?JT: We were in between tours. We kind of just record a lot, whenever. Me and Kevin, our bass player, live together, and Jeremy used to live with us but he has a house upstate now, so we've been going up there to record stuff too. We record stuff for a year or so, and then when we're feeling a little itchy to put something out, we go through it. We're not on the road all the time, so we just have fun listening to records, getting inspired, setting up some mics. Sometimes we're practicing, and then we'll just start writing something. A couple songs we had been playing on tour for a while before we actually sat down to record them.
The L: So you have a lot of material to choose from.
JT: Yeah, usually. I mean, not all of it's good, but I definitely had what I thought was At Echo Lake on my iPod a year ago. It' very different from what it actually ended up being.
The L: How did it change?
JT: There were songs that just didn't get finished. Songs that were better. Songs that just didn't fit.
The L: It definitely seems to have a more structured, less improvised feel to it. You think that's fair to say?
JT: It's a little more to the point... that was intentional. It's our fifth album, so it was like, "Let's try this." Before, I think with touring, we were getting comfortable with being loose. Now we're trying to find a "new loose," you know? We've done the old kind of loose.
The L: Did you feel any pressure going into it after getting so much buzz from the last album?
JT: No, not really. I mean, I guess kind of we did, but being that we don't really set out to say, "We're going to write this album. We have to write this album this month," we feel pressures but it just didn't really come up. When inspiration hit, we recorded a song, except the last few we recorded maybe the week before we finished the album. It was kind of like, "We don't have a song like this yet. Let's make one."
