How about the Friday Night Lights soundtrack? Did that require any change in the writing process?
It was pretty easy, actually. You are writing background music, and it wasn’t so much like, ‘This piece of music has to stand on its own as a song.’ When we write records and songs for ourselves it’s completely the opposite. Every moment has to be engaging in some way because we don’t want it to sound like background music. But obviously when writing a soundtrack, you’re writing background music. That was sort of a fluke in how we write. It was definitely interesting and fun, but I don’t know if it really informed how we write.
Your music does have a very cinematic quality to it. Have you guys discussed doing any more soundtrack work?
We would love to. We’ve done little bits and pieces and movies will license songs of ours, but we would love to score another movie.
That is something we would like to do more, particularly in a few years from now when we’re getting older and maybe not want to tour so much. I think that would be an interesting thing to put more energy and time into.
It hasn’t come up yet though. It’s up to someone else other than us whether or not that happens.
Do you see a lot of parallels between music and literature, like the parallel between music and filmmaking?
We do like our music to have that narrative arc, almost like a little story. We do look at our songs in that way and we try and put them together to not just have one sort of tone the whole time. We like to move in and out of different feelings and sounds like a story or a movie or something. We connect to those things in that way. We do look at these songs as little narratives. But I don’t know what they’re about.
