Something on mainstream radio is very in your face with the vocals. I tried that, and it just doesn't feel like Washed Out. It's got to have that haziness to it.
I don't think I would change anything. I think we've done a fairly good job of remaining sane and making the right decisions.
The music is at this weird intersection of dance music and indie music. It's not quite dancey enough to do a full-blown DJ set, and it wasn't quite rock enough for a rock band. But I guess it's what makes us unique - drawing from a lot of different influences.
I'm entirely self-taught, which I think is both a blessing and a curse.
Where I grew up in the middle of Georgia, hip-hop is king, and on Friday and Saturday nights, local DJs do mixes. It's a great mix of local stuff and then some of the bigger hits and remixes of the hits, and it just has this nice flow with a dirty-South sound to everything.
Obviously, you want to honour the sound of your music, but I'm definitely open to trying new things and making myself use a different palette of sounds.
The one sound I think of when I think about dreaming is the harp glissando, which is this really atmospheric run up and down the scale that's really dreamy.
I've struggled with depression before. For me, music was always a very positive way to will myself out of that situation.
I never want to make a complete, 180 reactional record. I wanted a connection to what I've done in the past but still move forward and evolve.
The way that I sing is very mumbled-together, and so I guess I'm kind of stuck with it now.
I know of some guitar-based rock bands that refuse to record anything that they can't play live. But some of the best stuff I come up with are studio-based performances - bringing out whatever accident I had in the studio and building a song around that.
The way I work is by infinitely playing a very simple loop over and over, and then I start layering things.
I never wanted to just press play on some DJ set and let the lights do all the work. I value old-fashioned performance a little more than that.
It's a weird dynamic - I guess there is a fine line between hope and sadness. Sometimes you can be feeling both at the same time.
I personally love the record-making more than the actually performing and travelling. It's funny, the drastic shift in lifestyle that comes with it. It certainly satisfies my more adventurous side, but it leaves little time for contemplation and all of that.
I've always written pop songs. I tend to take inspiration from more experimental genres, like ambient music, but at the root of the song, it's verse-chorus-verse.
I remember at one point, with a previous release of mine, I stumbled upon a shareware site, and the total number of downloads was in the thousands, maybe the hundreds of thousands. But there's no doubt that the Internet and that kind of sharing has been a huge benefit for the band.
It's like a painter with various layers of paint. I start with a drum loop and add keyboards, and then melodies start to take shape. The vocals happen later. I've never really done therapy before, but it's a form of therapy. Everything else falls away.
There are things I can accomplish in the studio via manipulation on the computer or some kind of effect that are nearly impossible to do live. On the flip side, there are some things that happen live that can't be pulled off in the studio.
A lot of the early Washed Out material was done on a couple of synthesizers that did most of the work, but that's the great thing about synths - you can recreate sounds or make an entire record with just one piece of gear.
