Adam Duritz: 1991 and Everything After

I had been listening to "1492" a lot, and I got this idea for a record. And there was this harder music we'd been playing with while we'd been gigging during these years — but I had no words in me. I lost the ability to read. Some of the medications made it so it was hard to find words, so I couldn't write.

I needed to write a song that was really not hinting at, but truly about insanity. I had written about disillusion. I had written about disintegration. And I had written about losing faith and betrayal. There had to be something that talked about how horrifying and scary it was. Nowadays everybody says, wow, we're all crazy. Everybody's on some fuckin' pill. It's not — they're not like that, not like this was. And I needed that, a song that really said, like, this is horrible.

On the new album's sound:

Sunday Mornings was gonna be such a weird album that we had to learn how to play it. I wanted to make a folk album, but not — nowadays folk music has become just people unplugging their guitars. I wanted it to be creative, inventive. Those folk albums made during the Sixties are not acoustic records. Tapestry is not acoustic. There's electric guitar all over it, and it's distorted, acid sounding. I just wanted it to be really, really creative, the same way I was thinking about when we did This Desert Life, like the Sparklehorse records. I wanted it to be spacious and different and open and have very naturalistic sounding instruments, but not just a bunch of acoustic guitars, you know?

And we started demoing them [on Pro Tools] and then bringing them in and recording them in the studio. I looked all over iTunes and all over Allmusic.com, reading articles about bands, trying to find who's making really interesting folk music that's creative? The name that kept coming up was Brian Deck. He made that Fruit Bats album, which is so cool. I called him and got in touch, and he came and sort of sat here with us one day and we played him some of the pieces of music we had and some of the ideas we had. And he had some suggestions and went away, and we were like, that's the guy.

We [recorded] mid-January to mid-February right here and finished Saturday Nights. And then we took like three weeks off, then we did Sunday Mornings. That was fuckin' hard, hard from a musical standpoint. I was much healthier by then. Then I started to lose weight, went on a diet and was working out, and the change of medications — that changed everything. But that was hard, that fuckin' record. Man, it was just such a leap musically for us. We could always play the punk rock. We just needed to learn to orchestrate it for seven people.

On some of the new album's darker lyrics:

"We Will Come Around" is very much about you've come through all this shit and everyone's still here. So let's go play. Let's go play rock & roll. It's not about life being fine. It's just that, it's not fine, and I'm still not going anywhere. My life in the Nineties, it just didn't seem bad then. After the Millennium, things started to seem really darker to me in L.A.

Life accumulates, you know? The city stopped being a working artist city and started being about being famous. I mean, it always has been, but when I first moved there it really appealed to me. It was like everyone was a dreamer. After the millennium that all just seemed to change, the dream became so much more shallow. It's not even about being good anymore. It's just about being famous. The whole status of the city was just about being famous, just about being a star, worthless stars, just nothing. And it didn't seem to matter that I was famous.

I mean, look, I hadn't led a G-rated life by any stretch of the imagination. I don't advocate it. I wouldn't have wanted to live a G-rated life. Fuck it. I think you should have fun and get wasted and get laid and do all these things. But I just don't think you want to end up where that's all you get out of your life and you don't have no sense of yourself and no one who cares about you and no one you care about. If your dreams come true and you can't find a way to live with it, you are the biggest fuckin' loser on earth. And I have been the biggest fuckin' loser on earth. I mean, I dreamed a dream that is impossible and I got it.