What’s the writing process like?
Josh: [to Ari] Let me answer this otherwise you’ll sound like you’re ego-maniacal. Ari is the, I want to say the visionary. He writes the songs and the lyrics and the music and the melody. I feel very connected and the topics Ari writes about are very near and dear to my heart, so I take a huge amount of ownership to the projects. At the same time, this is Ari’s voice and I feel kind of lucky to support that.
Ari: I’ll go down to the basement and then present that to Josh and he’ll be kind of an editor. He’ll say, ‘I don’t like this, I think you should do this.’ I’ll go back down and work on it some more. That’s kind of how the process works.
Any conflicts arise from his editing?
Ari: Oh yea, we’ve come very close to stabbing each other. We’re very, very passionate about these songs and some of them have gone through, I don’t know how many re-writes. We recorded the whole record in our basement and then we went out to the studio.
Josh: I think the best example of that, if you listen to the record and listen to the EP, we took two songs that ultimately went on the record, ‘Big Bomb’ and ‘Ladder 116.’ You can hear new bridges and new drum parts and we just, you can hear what some of that process was like.
How would you describe your sound?
Ari: One decision that we sort of made that we stuck to that can be seen throughout the whole record was we wanted something that sounded very real. Like minimalist in terms of the instrumentation and we didn’t want to rely on ProTools and effects and go into a laptop and make a record. I think it’s rare to hear a hit record that’s just two guitars, bass, drums and a piano part. I think we sort of committed to making the record sound like a band actually playing in the room with a few guys on instruments instead of using all of the tools at our facility.
What was the theme on the album in regards to topics in the lyrics?
Ari: I think that mostly comes from it being from the same honest place of my life at that time and through Josh’s editing his life at that time. I think the themes in the record are a combination of isolation, loser-dom, a sense of confusing and relativism. I think a theme that I see in the record is a sense of confusion from a ton of options, which I think is an experience that a lot of people have.
Josh: I always thought that my brother is trying to, as we all are, is figure out who he is at any given point in his life.
