Absent Sounds: Taking it back to your roots. I know that the Chris Walla who exists now is a very different person from who you were as a child. You started out playing piano, and looking back now, is there a strong connection you can trace from then to where you are today?

Chris Walla: The experiences that really shaped me were almost never piano lessons or band or any kind of formal training with rules and boxes to fit into. I didn't figure out until I was probably 30 that if somebody had just said to me, when I was sitting at the piano making up songs and melodies and just playing because it sounded cool, if somebody had just said, "That's cool, keep doing that," everything would've been so much easier. I spent so much time just trying to fit in. I had a couple of really excellent English teachers. I had a creative writing teacher who was just so special. Mrs. Drumheller was just the best. She was so cool. I think about her approach to creativity a lot, always asking questions like, "That's cool. What's that? What did you mean when you said that?" Kind of like the way a kid does: "What's that?" And you tell them, and they say, "Why?" And it just never stops. That's where the good stuff comes from. It's a continuing process, even still. Every day is about trying to stay connected to what actually matters, and what really matters is some kind of emotional connection with what you're doing. Anything that brings you closer to bursting out laughing, or closer to tears, or closer to screaming, that's all good stuff.

Chris Walla: We spend so much time teaching one another to be professional and in control, and it's just so boring. All the good stuff is in the sprawly, messy places. My last day job was working at a Starbucks in 1999, so I haven't really had to answer to anybody like that for a long time. I feel incredibly blessed that's the case. But even still, there's stuff internally that's like, "Now you should maybe try and..." you know. It's always a process.

Absent Sounds: What part of the process is the most fun? What makes you feel the most spark when you work?

Chris Walla: Working on music is still work. Some of it's really sloggy and dumb. You're just mouse-clicking through drum edits for four hours wondering when it'll end. But there's always a point in a creative process where something pops into focus, and you can actually see or hear what it is, or what it's going to become. That's why I get up in the morning. That's why I do all the mouse clicks, to get to those moments where you think, "I know what this is. I know when I'm going to put it on, and I know how it's going to make me feel a year from now when I hear it somewhere." Whether I'm reaching for it to put it on again, or I hear it in a grocery store, that's the thing.

Absent Sounds: That's interesting, that moment when you know "this is it." I know each person has their own definition of what it means to be finished with something. For us as procrastinators, it's typically whenever the deadline is. But from the outside, it seems like there's almost an endless amount you can keep adding to a single track, especially in the digital world. So how do you know when to put it down?

Chris Walla: Sometimes I don't know. There are a handful of things I've had on the drive for ten years that I don't work on all the time, but I feel like they're great and they're going to work at some point, just not now. I think half of my struggle is actually knowing when to pick things up, rather than when to put them down. The producers who are really on fire right now work fast and complete things quickly. That's never been my way, largely because of where I came from, making records on tape. With tape you can only move so fast, and because it's a limited form, there comes a point where you just can't change that much anymore. You fill up 24 tracks and it's like, well, is this what it sounds like or not? If it's not, you get another reel of tape and try again.

Chris Walla: I've gotten kind of lost in the infinite hard drive, just tweaking things forever, and I find it maddening. More and more, when I'm working with an artist, I really pay attention to when they get excited about something and let that guide me to the end. Sometimes artists aren't enthusiastic. Sometimes they're really freaked out. I can tell something's working, that they're on the right path, but they don't always know it. In that case it has to be me saying, "We have to keep going. It's not done yet. You sound great. We're gonna get there."

Absent Sounds: You mentioned that the artist you're working with might be insecure about the work. I know you build confidence with experience and time. But even at the start, when you worked on Something About Airplanes, did you ever doubt that you were good enough?

Chris Walla: No. I was just the guy with the four-track, you know? I thought, "Oh, this sounds cool. I guess this is a record. Does it sound like a record? I think so." And honestly, it's still kind of like that. That feeling never goes away completely. Every record comes out so different, no matter the genre or who's making it. I'm just really into this idea of faith, like we're sort of lost in the woods and I don't know how to get there, but let's try some stuff. Eventually we'll get out of the woods. We'll have a thing.

Chris Walla: It's all kind of a game, a kind of adventure. What sounds cool? Let's try that. I really don't know if it's going to work or if it's cool, but I am genuinely curious about it. I always want to hear what it sounds like. And eventually, hopefully, a record comes out the end of it.

Absent Sounds: How do you stay curious after working on so many different albums over such a long time? Do you ever feel tired of it?

Chris Walla: It's people. I'm intensely interested in people, in our impulses, the things we reach for, the things we pick up, what makes us light up. It's so different for everybody, and that's why the records are all different. As soon as people get boring, I'll stop doing it. But I just don't think that's going to happen. People are just insane. We're all so nuts, and that's great. It's so fun. It's really hard sometimes, because we all have feelings and preferences and personalities and egos that get in the way. But you just keep trying stuff, and eventually something cool happens.

Chris Walla: I'm kind of a radio guy. I love radio. Radio's the best. Growing up in Seattle, we had a really unique radio landscape. There was an NPR station, KOUW. A second NPR station dedicated to jazz, KPLU. A third public station, KCMU, which eventually became KEXP. So that's three public stations, all covering really different things. There was a commercial classical station, so the NPR stations never had to cover classical. And then there were all these rock, pop, and R&B stations on commercial radio.

Chris Walla: The rock stations were all really competitive with one another because of the underground presence of KCMU. The way they differentiated themselves: one station was playing Kiss, but then also Björk, then Ted Nugent, then The Cure, and The Tragically Hip. That's where I heard that band for the first time. I'm 13, hearing all these artists together in the same place, thinking, "Oh yeah, this is all the same thing. It's all music."

Absent Sounds: No concept of genres or anything.

Chris Walla: Exactly. And I just loved pop radio too. There was a station called KUBE, and I'm a massive Janet Jackson fan. Everything Jam & Lewis ever did, I'm so into. I used to mow lawns for money with a Walkman on full blast, all distorted and blown out, listening to KUBE, then flipping over to one of the rock stations, then KCMU. A lot of Canadian stuff made it over the border too. KXRX was the alt station, and KCMU was covering a ton of what was happening on the East Coast. When I was about 19, 20, KCMU was playing a ton of Halifax stuff: Thrush Hermit, Eric's Trip, Sloan, the Superfriends, The Rheostatics. All that old school CanCon rock.

Chris Walla: It was one of the best things about growing up in Seattle, the way radio worked there. You really could just spin the dial and end up somewhere you'd never been before. It's one of the things I miss most about playlist culture now. It's hard to just stumble into things. You always have to know a little bit of what you're searching for. Radio worked in conjunction with record stores that way. You never had any idea what a record store was going to have. You'd wander in, start plowing through bins, and pull out something completely unfamiliar. "What is this? I have no idea. It looks weird. It's 50 cents, I'll try it." That's still how I discover music whenever I can find an actual record store.

Chris Walla: The funny thing here is that Norway is tremendously practical as a society, and they're really just unloading all their records. If they've got Spotify, what do they need records for? So there are tons of cheap, used, weird records, a lot of Norwegian pop and accordion music, but some really cool stuff tucked in there too.

Absent Sounds: That's pretty interesting that you mentioned Janet Jackson, because it ties back into producing records. I know Michael Jackson used to have his children watch films without sound so they'd pay more attention to the actual shots rather than the story. It made us think about how, when you have to do something yourself, it sometimes takes away a little bit of the magic, because you can see behind the curtain. Do you ever feel that way too?

Chris Walla: That makes a lot of sense to me, and I do feel that sometimes. I miss that "oh my God, what is that and how did they make it?" feeling you get when you genuinely don't know how something was made. But that's part of why I'm always searching. One of the funny things about where we are in human history is that we actually just have enough music. We could just stop. None of us are ever going to get through even a fraction of it. I think about this sometimes, all right, why am I still making records? I do it because I like doing stuff with people. But one of the cool things about having such a vast wealth of music, recorded in so many different circumstances with so many different kinds of equipment by so many different people, is that there's always going to be something where you think, "How did you do that?"

Chris Walla: Whether it's the quality of the recording because of the mic preamp and tape machine setup, or the quality of playing because of the particular guitar that person had, it just sounds amazing and nobody knows why, and you'll never recreate it again. There's something so beautiful about all of that. The example about the Jacksons does point at that sense of wonder that kids have. I have done stuff in the studio where you actually take away one set of senses from somebody. If somebody plays or sings something eight or ten times, you give them a blindfold and say, "Just cover your eyes and sing it again." It's really fascinating what happens. Or you ask them to play again with nothing in their headphones. It'll be out of time, it won't match up, but you get a totally different kind of expression. Someone imagining the song in real time, thinking through it in a really fluid, linear way. Those exercises are genuinely interesting, and they work best in an environment that's really safe and open, where everyone's just trying to make something inviting and durable.

Chris Walla: The kiss of death is when you've been working on a song for five or six hours and nobody wants to be there anymore. Every time you push play, you push stop again after 30 seconds and start talking about going to get lunch. I'm so sensitive to that. You have to get to a point where everybody just wants to keep working on the song. And actually, that might be the moment when it's done, when everybody wants to keep tinkering.

Absent Sounds: So that energy, wanting to keep going, is what draws you to specific albums or artists?

Chris Walla: There are certain records that are just still so alive, even though they're fixed and set and have been that way forever. My wife Diana and I were just in Spain. She hadn't left Norway in about two years, and Norway gets really small when you don't leave for a while. We found a couple of used record stores and I bought a stack of records to bring home. One of them was The Glamorous Life, the Sheila E. record.

Chris Walla: Sheila E. comes from a super musical family. She's a slamming percussionist, one of the best Latin percussionists in the world. She caught Prince's attention right around the time of Purple Rain, which is the first record she appears on. They started writing together, and there were a handful of songs Prince was working on that didn't quite fit Purple Rain or what he was doing next. Sheila had some songs too, and they merged them together into this record called The Glamorous Life, around 1984. The single is just a 10, so amazing. But the whole record is so inspired and so alive. Every second of it is shaking, brimming with life, tumbling out of the speakers. It's made of a ton of technical skill. Sheila is such an incredible percussionist and such a cool singer, and Prince was at the top of his game. But above all, everything on it is so inviting. It just says, "Come to the party. You're invited. Just be here."

Chris Walla: That sense of invitation is something that's really infectious and not always easy to identify. We put on that record while cleaning the house the other day and just kept saying, "This record is so good." Right after, I put on a Patrice Rushen record I'd bought, one of her mid-'80s records with no real hits on it. I love Patrice Rushen. The record is really adept and genuinely good, but it just didn't have that sense of invitation. And the thing is, her best records do. They're as inviting as The Glamorous Life or Control. It was really interesting to feel the contrast, because it wasn't about ability at all. Every artist goes through periods where the work really does feel like work, and you just can't operate at full intensity forever. Something weird is happening in your life. You're trying a new producer. The label is breathing down your neck. You're going through a divorce. There's always something. That armchair psychology thing people say, everybody's fighting some huge tiger that you can't actually see, it's so true for creative work too. In the end, it really is all about that invitation: "Come hang out here. Come be a part of this record."

Absent Sounds: That's such an interesting juxtaposition with the album we wanted to talk to you about today, Songs About Leaving. Chris mentioned that there's often a lot going on behind the scenes that listeners don't always know about, and that's definitely true here. It was also a very ominous time in the world, especially in the US. Can you take us back to that period and set the stage?

Chris Walla: It's September 2001. We're three or four records into Death Cab for Cutie, depending on how you count. I'm starting to get more offers to make records with other people, and I'm starting to realize that I know how to make a record, but I'm really not doing it the way anybody else is doing it. People would come into the studio and look at me like I was an alien. "What are you doing?" "Well, we're going to record the drums last." "What? No, probably not." I was feeling pretty confident about the arc of a song and the arc of a record, how all those smaller arcs fit into one larger thing. And I was feeling confident about a particular way of encouraging people to be sensitive into a microphone.

Chris Walla: I had already made one record with Carissa's Weird. We did that really quickly, and I had a good sense of who they were. I really liked them as people. I thought they were wonderful. But I also couldn't figure them out at all. I really enjoyed that they were such a gang, really a family, leaning on one another and taking care of one another. But I also got the sense that there was some stuff going on under the hood that I still don't fully know. I loved what they were doing, loved how they were singing and writing, and when they wanted me to do another record, I said yes. We were slated to start on September 11th, 2001.

Absent Sounds: Oh.

Chris Walla: It was a beautiful day in Seattle. I went to the coffee shop to get coffee and everybody was really weird, but I couldn't figure out what was going on. I asked how they were doing, ordered my drink, and had absolutely no idea what was happening. I got in the car and put on KEXP. John Richards, John in the Morning, was playing a Low record, then Gillian Welch. Just a very down morning. He'd do a station break: "This is John. You're listening to KEXP. Here are some more tunes." Something was clearly off. It wasn't until I got to the studio and my girlfriend called me that I found out. She said I should maybe come home. We were living right at the base of the Space Needle, near Seattle Center, and it was starting to feel like that might be a target. The panic was just indescribable, even on the West Coast.

Chris Walla: So we put off the start of the Carissa's Weird record by a day and started on September 12th. We started right at the beginning, with "You Should Be Hated Here." The sound of that first song is the sound of Carissa's Weird, those people, those songs, in that moment. But it's also the emotional and spiritual overlay on the whole record. It has this tension that's like nothing else I've ever been in a room for.

Chris Walla: That carries through the whole album. It has the most unique kind of tension. Carissa's Weird are clearly so fragile and gentle, but the things they're certain about, a particular kind of sorrow, loss, misunderstanding, they're so sure about those things, about what's happening inside them and in whatever relationships they're singing about. To have that kind of clarity and certainty in song and message inside of such a fragile musical landscape, and inside of that bigger emotional and spiritual moment in time, just, woof. What a trip of a record. I've listened to it a few times in the last couple of days thinking ahead to this interview, and I really do love it. It's really imperfect, and there's a lot I would approach differently in hindsight, but there's just nothing else like it. It's not inviting in a conventional sense. The door is open just a crack, and if you happen to be in a place where you can peer in and recognize what's going on, the world is really there for you, and you are invited into it. But you have to get to their speed. You have to get to Matt's mindset, and Jen's mindset, and the way they're talking through everything they're talking through. If you can get there, it's so human and so warm and so genuine.

Chris Walla: The vocals are tucked way into the mix, really quiet, so you have to lean into it. It has this riveting quality where you turn it on and think, "Wait, what's going on?" It makes you slow down and lean forward. Working on it was kind of like that too. In so many ways this record is trying so hard just to be ignored completely. Can we turn it down more? Can we make it quieter? How quiet can we actually make it? And the answer is: pretty quiet. You can really get down there with it.

Absent Sounds: That definitely reminds me of Liz Harris and Grouper.

Chris Walla: Totally. I really love music that's just barely there. There's something about making something and releasing it where the impulse to put it out only barely outweighs the impulse not to, or not to do it publicly. I really go for that.

Absent Sounds: Another interesting thing about the record is the dates scattered throughout: "September," "Come Take This Heart Away," November 16th, March 19th. You might expect those to have some personal meaning, or to recount personal history, but I almost feel like they speak more to the fact that the record exists in a specific time and space, frozen there forever. Do you ever wonder what might have happened if the band had kept going instead of dispersing?

Chris Walla: Carissa's Weird were just a staggeringly talented group of people. They didn't keep the band going, but they all kept doing things. Matt and Ben started Band of Horses. Ben is the drummer on Songs About Leaving. I knew he could sing a little, but I had no idea he had the kind of emotional language and emotional reach that he does. Jen's work has been so many different kinds of heartbreaking, since this record and before. Matt's Grand Archives records are so cool, a real extension of this, but with him opening up and reaching out more, coming into his voice. And Sarah Standard, the violin player. God. I've put microphones in front of a fair number of really excellent string players, but Sarah's soul is just so in that instrument. She's so expressive, her melodic choices are so good, her pitch is so good, her tone is so beautiful and rounded and gentle. And she's so fluid and lyrical.

Chris Walla: Her playing does this fascinating thing for the record. Where Matt and Jen tend to hide vocally, staying really quiet, Sarah is the actual voice of the band. She's doing the kind of push that Matt and Jen might have done if they were different kinds of singers, or in a different band, or born in some different time. She's the anguish translator. She's getting out all of the sorrow. And then Jeff's piano playing is so understated. His melodies are so simple, almost nursery rhyme-like in the way he moves around the piano, but they're so sticky and indelible and beautiful. They were just great. All really special musicians with really developed personal identities and a clear sense of what they wanted to achieve.

Absent Sounds: On Absent Sounds, we love doing album playthroughs, and we wanted to take the time today to strip this record down bare with Chris Walla himself. The first track, "You Should Be Hated Here," is such a strong opening. As Chris mentioned, they recorded it literally a day after 9/11, and you can almost feel that seeping into the music. The song is so tender. Jen feels like she's whispering directly into your ear. One thing you notice about this album is that it prompts so many questions: who is Jen speaking to? What is she speaking about? The record allows space for those questions to breathe, but the answers aren't always where you expect them to be.

Chris Walla: The answers in this record are found in tone and mood and intent, in the music itself. You really don't find out why we're "only here to fall apart," or what the ten-point buck is meant to represent, or any of it. But "You Should Be Hated Here" is such a tone poem. All the images in it are so striking. And that second part, is it the chorus? I don't even know, where Jen and Matt are singing completely different words, completely different melodies, completely different stories even. The most important thing to take from the song is this sense of utter despondency and despair inside of a kind of confusion. They start in such nice harmony, and then it descends into this mess of words and melody, and then it comes together again. You get this sense of somebody sitting up straight, shoulders going back. A sense of courage coming out of it. It's all impressionistic, it's all feel. The words are there if you want to dig into them, but in a record like this, that feels secondary.

Absent Sounds: The line "I might be leaving soon" is so interesting, because they did leave. At the time you were making it, did you know it was nearing the end?

Chris Walla: No, I had no idea. They were around for a while longer after that. Sarah Cahoon joined the band, and they kept going. With Carissa's Weird I couldn't always tell what was happening. Honestly, with "So You Want to Be a Superhero," I was actually really worried about Jen. She was in pretty rough shape when we were making that record. That's a pretty desperate song. I was genuinely worried about her, but I wasn't as close with any of them as they were with one another.

Chris Walla: Vocals were tricky to record on a few of these songs. There were a couple of "I can't do this right now, I need to take a break" moments. Yes, I cried while recording it. I love crying when I'm recording records. It means it's a good song. Sometimes it freaks the artist out, but yeah. It's a real slippery slope. And this is a heartbreaker. There's some pretty rough stuff in there.

Absent Sounds: Between "September" and "Ignorant," there's this laugh right at the end, and then someone says something. It's so ironic, because this is such an emotional piece of work, and suddenly there's this off switch. Then it comes back on. The artists seem to detach themselves. How do you think they're able to do that, and how do you detach yourself as the producer?

Chris Walla: I just don't. It really does consume you. Anyone I've ever made a record with will tell you that. For better or worse, I really get into it. I care about these records deeply, which means I'm always invested. It also sometimes means I'm not making excellent decisions or working with a really clear head, and that's one of the dangers of working really emotionally. Sometimes the producer needs to be logical and clear-headed, just like, "Okay, here's the punch list. We need to get through this today. Jen, you need to do this. Sarah, you need to play these two violin parts. Let's go." That energy just isn't around if I'm crying. It's just not close at all.

Chris Walla: That segue from "September" into "Ignorant" -- "September" was pretty tough for the band to execute, and when we finally got to the end of it, Ben was just really excited. There was this "Yes! Oh my God, we got it!" energy, and that came out on tape. Given where they wanted it to sit in the running order, the segue just made sense. Carissa's Weird were pretty depressed, a sad group of people, but they were so funny. Just a goofy, ridiculous gang with insane in-jokes. I love watching that chemistry in bands. I love when little bits of it make it into the record, particularly with bands who are really self-conscious or self-serious. That's just all part of the humanity of it.

Absent Sounds: That makes me think about identity. Being in such an emotional place must make every record become a part of you. Over time, does that ever make you feel like you are the sum of your work rather than a whole person apart from it?

Chris Walla: That's such a great question, and I think about it a lot. I've actually struggled with it quite a lot since leaving Death Cab for Cutie. Those guys are like brothers, and suddenly I'm not in a band with them anymore. Leaving wasn't acrimonious, but it wasn't super pleasant either. It was pretty rough. I don't communicate with them much, and I love them and respect them a great deal, and I'd take a bullet for any of them. But it's also complicated. It's really complicated when the songs are tied up in it. You've invested in the songs and the stories and the people the songs are about. Your feelings about the records change even though the records themselves don't. It's like being in an emotional relationship with a stuffed animal in a way. I'm mad at you today, and the stuffed animal is like, "I'm the same as I was yesterday." The songs aren't people. They're not relationships. Untangling all that stuff is really tricky.

Chris Walla: With the records I love most that I've worked on, like Songs About Leaving, it's easier in a lot of ways. It's really easy to talk about, to cheerlead for, to come back and listen to and realize it's just such a weird special piece of work. There really are a lot of things I would approach differently now, but it was a time and a place, and I did everything I knew how to do at the time. The band did everything they knew how to do at the time. What more can you ask for?

Absent Sounds: That reminds me of the feeling of finding your identity in songs, self-identifying with a narrator so fully that her story becomes your story. It can be really comforting, but it can also put you in a complicated place. It made me think of Into the Wild and Christopher McCandless. I self-identified with him really strongly, and then when he died, I thought, "Is this going to be my future?"

Chris Walla: We're actually taught songs through self-identification. When you're four and learning Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the "I" is you. There's no separation. In those years between four and about ten, when your brain is the most adaptable, the most plastic, that's how we attach ourselves to music. I'm honestly kind of suspicious of people who don't self-identify with it. I can't fathom self-identifying with a Christmas song, but there are songs that, seriously, every time I hear them, I am so there. Songs that will make me burst into tears for the rest of my life. It'll never change. And that's great. What more could you ask for?

Chris Walla: Thinking through the last half of the album, "Sophisticated Princess" is another one that Jen recorded on her four-track and brought in for us to dress up in the studio. Jen is really interesting. She's all at once really economical and precise with words, and then really visceral and visual and illustrative. Really direct and really roundabout, somehow at exactly the same time. I've always loved that about her work in the Carissa's records, the S records, the Jen Champion records. And then when you pair whatever she's singing with the way she actually sings it, Jen is, bar none, one of my favorite singers. The way she communicates a story is just so amazing. She opens her mouth and I'm immediately leaning in.

Chris Walla: I remember the running order for the tail end of the record being a bit of a thing, related to the songs and their topics, and to some degree the titles. The first half of the record, through the piano song, locks together pretty well conceptually. The second half is slightly looser.

Absent Sounds: Even looking at the world outside of music, do you always view things as a story to tell?

Chris Walla: I do tend to view everything as a story of a sort, and sometimes that gets me into trouble, because sometimes there's no story. There's just a song. A great song doesn't have to be a great story. But I really do think of albums the way I think of films, in terms of timing, emotional reach, how much and when and why. There's always a story in how we got here and why we're making this together, or why you wrote something or why I'm working on it. That's not nothing.

Chris Walla: It's also nice to be able to step out of that when you need to. It took me a long time to figure that out. You can't make a punch list when you're crying. It's just a different energy, almost a different person. Being able to put on different hats is important. There's the part of the record where maybe I'm the cool crazy uncle we get to do wild stuff with, and then at some point I'm "Dad." Okay, it's time to get to work.

Absent Sounds: "March 19th, 1983, It Was Properly Green," such a beautiful closer, just soft piano and organ. It does get a little tense, and then it has this real letdown. It releases you softly from the album. The lyrics especially: "Finally I brought myself to sing these words. After the snow, you can see the leaves." The album isn't a cheery one, but it does have this encouraging quality. It lets you down softly so you're not just crash landing on your own.

Chris Walla: Yeah, absolutely.

Absent Sounds: And a good way to end. We know it can be really hard to find the words to share or be open. Which is why we appreciate you joining us so much today. My question is: how do you find the courage to be open and share your side of things?

Chris Walla: With a lot of practice. It's not an event. It's a process, unfolding in real time. Being able to reach out and be vulnerable about one thing doesn't mean the next time will feel the same, even if it's about the same thing. We are always the collected, accreted sum of everything we've ever been. I tend to get really stopped up with words in certain ways. I'm really comfortable speaking like this, having a conversation about things I believe in strongly. But I have a really hard time with lyrics. It's not because I'm not a decent writer. And I love to sing more than almost anything. But singing words I've written is a kind of vulnerability that's usually just too much, which is why I haven't put out a record full of songs since Field Manual. It's not that the songs aren't there. There are hundreds of hours of stuff just hanging out. But it's hard to prioritize my own work, partly because I recognize how hard it is for people to do that, and partly because I deeply respect that there are people in this world who are actually able to do it.

Chris Walla: One of the things about Carissa's Weird was that in every moment there was this question of: is this actually a band? Is Matt actually a singer in a band today? Is Jen actually up for this? Because it is so tentative, such a fragile, gentle record. And at that point in time, my sense was that they were pretty fragile people. Being in a room with anybody who has the wherewithal, the courage, the skill, who is in a place where they're actually able to bring that to the front and sing it into a microphone for people to hear through a pair of speakers forever, I'm just bowled over. I'm honored and a little freaked out that I get to be in a room for that, over and over and over. It's pretty amazing.

Absent Sounds: I think that's the perfect note to end on. Thank you so much for tuning into our show today, and thank you so much, Chris, for agreeing to do this interview and taking time to dive into one of our favorite records of all time.