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The last time we spoke, you said you felt that for the very first time you're singing or speaking or even playing to ears younger than your own. How did that affect the writing process and the way you look not only at yourself but your youth as well?

It helped me recalibrate my whole rhetorical strategy in pursuit of a real good audience-to-artist understanding. I guess I’m sharing what I consider wisdom. Some people who try to share their wisdom are strapped to their beds, so I guess I’m lucky on that.

Do you feel like your relationship with people or say, listeners of your own age, has changed in recent years?

Tell me if you think this sounds crazy but I think people around my age and a little older and are maybe too cynical and cold-hearted to like the Silver Jews in strong numbers. 

The new album has a lot of fresh air in it, as though a fairly pure reflection of your recent psychic geography. What was its inception like?

After the 45 shows in 2006 I had the money to get myself out of debt. I wrote the songs while my eye was healing from a cornea transplant. I was seeing well for the first time in years. 2007 was a calm year, the calmest in my life. I wrote during the day in the sunny dining room.

What kind of effect do you think touring has had on the studio sound?

The songs lock in really fast. Peyton and William could talk out what they were going to do on guitars. Because they had already been doing that with the older songs.

The last time we spoke you also said some very interesting things about young bands becoming more and more like the jocks that maybe rock and rollers were, at some point, trying to combat, likening them to the more furry variety of high school mascots. Why?

Indie rock is very feminized compared to seventies rock (which was a parody of femininity). I think the bands are trying for a heartthrob effect, and can’t risk a sweaty redheaded meatball on drums. Even small bands can upload hundreds of nice color photos. They don’t want to look like slobs.

It's sort of weird: I went through this really long phase in which all I could really hear were lyrics. And then something happened and everything got flipped upside down— I divorced myself completely from them and songs started existing in my head as collections of sounds instead of words. Recently it's sort of evened out. Have you ever experienced that?

I read a lot so if there’s going to be music on it’s better to be wordless.  When I listen to WSM (wsmonline.com) the words are what I follow and I may consider the music from a craft perspective almost. It’s just there to support a story.  I guess if a person listens to rock music and doesn’t consider or avoids the words, I’d say they were probably starving their mind, as rock music as music is a small set of stuff combined and recombined. That puts you in a remedial art world like fingerpainting compared to those who listen to jazz and classical. There is the physical aspect of liking rock, which doesn’t need a mind to really pay attention, but I think a focus on culture with that little information in it probably atrophies the brain. 

 Having said before that people don't care about lyrics, do you think it makes your job harder when sitting down and trying to write?

 Relevance gets to be a vaguer and vaguer concept. As far as writing, I wouldn’t have imagined there’d be so few new twists here in the future. People aren’t trying very hard is all it is.  The advertising and magazine worlds won’t tell the truth about a product that’s for sale anymore. Or very selectively. And they all pick the same winners at the end of the year. The whole deal: music is completely mediated by mercantile interests now.

Are there lines you've written that still sort of knock you back once they're on paper?

Maybe if it’s something I’d forgotten. I don’t know. It’s weird with old things you wrote that are good. They seem outside you. And that’s a good place for them to be.

Sounds Like: Townes Van Zandt, Pavement, Will Oldham

Download: Silver Jews - Strange Victory, Strange Defeat

Stream: Silver Jews - Candy Jail

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