Even though it's been fourteen years since his last release, Television frontman Tom Verlaine feels little has changed. Well, except for his famous pipes -- just a little.

"I have to tune the guitar lower just to make the notes," he jokes of the effect of aging on his sound. After all, the landmark Marquee Moon, which had a marked influence on more recent New York bands such as the Strokes and Interpol, was released in 1977. "I guess my voice has gotten deeper. The older you...

Throughout television's two albums, there was high drama and a mesmerizing lyricism, most of it contributed by lead guitarist-song-writer-singer Tom Verlame. What Television rarely displayed was any sense of playfulness. Indeed, playfulness seemed beside or beyond the band's point, which was to make intricate commonplaces take on the intensity of heroic gestures.

Thus the most surprising aspect of...

I used to have such sweet dreams," sang Tom Verlaine with poisoned flippancy in "Careful," a song from the second and last Television album, Adventure. "Now it's more like an air raid."

Indeed, Verlaine has always written compositions about close emotional encounters of the phantasmagorial kind – of lovers and loners (Verlaine principal among them) populating a fourth dimension of cold, gray...