We were headlining the tour, so we were doing closer to 60 or 75 minutes a night. The first round of touring we did for Bad Books in '10, we kind of had to fill out our set because the record was only 35 minutes long. They're a band that we're all fans of what they do. I really stand by both albums, and I especially feel like this one took a leap in terms of over all quality from the first one. Basically, on both records, we took about a three month break so we could go take care of our day jobs, but we came back about three months later on each album and addressed little issues we had, finished up a couple of other songs, and that's how the records have been made. There's not a whole lot of time to sit there and tease out Pet Sounds or something - we can't take a year and a half to make these records. We basically do a song and a half a day, so what you're hearing on the record is pretty much like the immediate response by the players to what the song is. So, most of the instrumental tracks are stuff that's being created in the moment, like as people are hearing the song for the first time. Typically, what happens is either I play a song I've written or Andy plays a song he's written, we cut away a little bit of structural stuff, and then basically start jumping into recording it right away. Since Bad Books records are made on kind of a limited time frame - we usually have like six to eight days because we both tour a lot and make our other records and stuff. The results were something we all really liked and we thought it was something that both could stand toe-to-toe with anything in either of our catalogs, but also separately as their own animal, and not as a collection of cast off songs. I came with about four songs I had structured, Andy had some stuff he'd been working on, and we kind of built them out into an album. So, around January of '10, we actually took the next step towards actualizing that, and we came down to Atlanta.
All that time, we were always talking about how it would be nice to actually write music together someday instead of just supplementing each other's primary projects. We went to Europe together, and I think overall, we probably played over one hundred shows with some combination of Kevin Devine and Manchester Orchestra. They were coming out and playing instruments during my set. By the middle of that trip, I was playing guitar on the Manchester Orchestra set. We did a seven-week tour, and we clicked kind of early and deeply. We were on a tour at that time with a band called Brand New, and Manchester was the first band, Kevin Devine and The God Damn Band were second, and Brand New was the headlining band. I think we're probably closer in a lot more ways than our day jobs would suggest. So, that was what we were going for with it, and that song became the obvious first single for us. A lot of the guitar sounds on that Strokes record kind of sound like cross-dressed keyboards, but they're just manipulated on guitar. When we actually did the recording, we came up with these harmonies that helped sweeten the song, and the guitar lead sounded like it either came out of a video game or kind of like that second Strokes record. this kind of weird pop music with kind of trashy drum machines. For the music, we wanted it to sound kind of like. He said something at some point about how the female character in the song is supposed to be this sort of neo-hippy - the kind of person who would marry a biker and name their kid Forest Whitaker. I think it just fell into Andy's head from the clear blue sky. I was on tour and Andy was home, and he sent me a voicemail with this super-catchy melody and this whistling kind of hook, and weird lyrics like, ".you had a baby with a biker and named him Forest Whitaker." That's kind of great, and it pops out for sure. We hadn't written a straight pop song for the record. And while we really liked this record and what we had on it so far, we kind of felt like that was the one color that was missing. From our prior record, we had a single called "You Wouldn't Have To Ask," and it was a pretty poppy song - an accessible, ear candy type of song. Usually the way we work is that either I write the basic structure of a song and we work it out from there, or Andy writes the basic structure and we do the same, and that one was an Andy song. KD: It was the last song we wrote on the record, and it's one of Andy's.
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