It’s interesting because from an outside-the-band perspective, if you look at the Shellac discography, there seems to be a gradual deconstruction from the taut nature of the early singles through to the kind of widening looseness of the last several records, and this looseness carries into the live show as well.
Well, we like playing our old songs, but we don’t feel like we have to play them in a reverent fashion. We feel like, you know, they’re ours, we can do whatever the fuck we want with them. And there are ways that we can play them now that didn’t occur to us originally. And there are things that we can do as part of a set of music with a bigger vocabulary of songs, a bigger bunch of ideas attached to them. So we can keep ourselves interested in them. I see a lot of bands where it seems that once they’ve established a method for how a song goes, every time they go out on stage and that song comes up the same way every time. It’s almost like everything about that song is over with except the number of times you hear it.

So this is why bands hate their hits?
Yeah, I guess.

I mean, you’re a big Cheap Trick fan ― are they an example of that? Like Rick Neilson with the five-neck guitar during “Surrender?”
I would, except that every single time I’ve seen them, I’ve been surprised at how awesome their songs are. It must be somnambulistic for them by now, you know? But it still delivers. But you compare that with your average not-awesome band that just has a much shorter menu to draw from, for example, and I’d blow my brains out if I had to, you know, walk out on stage and play the same 15 songs every night for three weeks, you know? I’d hang myself.

There’s a band I did a record with called Bush, and their first record gradually became super-duper popular over the course of about a year and a half-two years, and by the end of their third lap or fourth lap around the United States, they had been constantly on the road, playing the same 15 songs every night for a year and a half. I don’t know how they fucking did it without gargling acid. Seriously, I don’t know how you could do it. There’s a situation, like, they’re a band where the people that came to see them play want to hear that music exactly the way they heard it on the radio, you know? Their audience had kind of a superficial appreciation of that band, so it’s not like they wanted to go and see like a mind-blowing experience, they just wanted to be reminded what it was they liked about the songs they heard on the radio. But they were pretty hemmed in, they were pretty bound by their popularity at that point. I don’t know, I couldn’t handle it. There’s no way I could handle it. I have an enormous amount of respect for them for getting through that and not killing each other or themselves.

I always picture someone at a show like that thinking “What am I doing here, what did I come here for, why did I need to see this live?”
Everyone has a different place for music in their life. Some people have a kitchen radio, and that music is playing while they’re going on with their lives and that’s enough. And every now and again they’ll be a song that they especially like ― Rick Astley, “Never Gonna Give You Up”, for example ― and eventually those people are going to want to buy a record, and what record are they going to buy? “Oh, I really like that Rick Astley song, I think I’ll buy that.” And then once a year they’ll go out to a concert, and they’ll be like “Oh, that Rick Astley that I love so much is coming, let’s go to that.” And you know, the place of music in their lives is different than the place of music in my life. So I cannot expect them to have the same relationship to the aesthetics of it that I do, or even making the same demands on it that I do.

Do you think that the demands you make on music are sane?
I know exactly what you’re saying ―

Sometimes I look at people with a more casual relationship to music and go “Why can’t I be more like that?”
Exactly. “Why does it matter to me?” Because it bums me out so much. Yeah, yeah, like I remember that ZZ Top album with the drum machine on it, and I was like “Why are you breaking my heart right now?” “Why is it not okay for me to just not give a shit about this right now?”