Inside out

A lot of those details' roots seem to come from electronic music too. How has that vocabulary affected your songwriting?

It's interesting to me how little of that is on the record and all the attention it's gotten. The songs are mostly generated by all the same instruments we've played in the past. Kevin Shields [of My Bloody Valentine] did a remix for us from our last record, and when we would play it live we would try to imitate his mix. In a way, that's what we've continued to do. Most of the impact is in us trying to imitate some of the beats and some of the feel -- at least as it registers to us -- using the instruments that we play. And it did have some impact on the mixing of the record. We were particularly more open to different kinds of effects than we have been in the past. But I'm not really too clear on the definitions of electronic music. It's kind of intimidating with all its substrata.

The cover of your new record is a Gregory Crewsdon photograph that shares a similar sense of atmosphere with the music -- quietly surreal, innocent but suspicious, etc. [The photo shows a boy in a suburban setting staring skyward at a mysterious light source -- maybe a spotlight, maybe a Martian ray beam -- it's not entirely clear.] Crewsdon has a show in New York right now. How did you hook up with him?

We've known him casually for many years. In a way it sort of reminds me slightly of working with some of the jazz people we talked about. In the last year, we've really tried to expand our sphere of who we work with, like people other than friends in bands that we know in other ways. Georgia has usually done our record covers, but with Gregory we liked the idea of bringing somebody else into it. It still has a personal element that we liked, but it's also very different for us. Throughout the selection process we got increasingly brave in using a more arresting image. I think in a lot of the things we do, we err on the side of restraint. But in using somebody's images that are so strong, we were warming up to idea of using something like that.

Was it weird to see Georgia and yourself in the New York Times Magazine as the perfect picture of bohemian wedded bliss? A lot of the new songs are direct love songs between you two, but has all the attention your marriage is getting surprised you at all?

Well, we weren't really freaked out by the magazine. They never made any pretense of it being anything else. That was understood as the way we were shoehorning our way into the Times Magazine. And no, I didn't see the attention coming at all. Now, in hindsight, I kind of wonder why I didn't. But as I was saying before, we really try to remain oblivious to that stuff, and we're kind of good at it. I don't seek it out, but I don't ignore it either.

You've said some songs are pure autobiography and others are less rooted in reality. Do you and Georgia talk about your songs to each other?

When we're writing them we definitely do. This is a group, and even if I write the lyrics for a song, they are still going out with a group's name on them. I wouldn't do that without all of us reading them and thinking about them and talking about them. That goes for James as well as Georgia.

One song on the album is called "The Crying of Lot G." Are you a [Thomas] Pynchon fan?

It is a reference, but maybe not exactly out of my fandom. Lot G is an inside joke to like six people we know, a reference to the Newark Airport. We tried to restrain our tendency to lay inside jokes all over our record this time. We were largely successful, but maybe not in this case.

What about a message in the liner notes: "When in Nashville, visit Prince's Hot Chicken Shack"?

We spend a lot of time there when we're recording in Nashville. It's certainly not fast food; don't go there unless you have lots of time. And it's, um, not like anything else we've ever eaten, which is the highest praise we could ever give.

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