New York Times, november 2007
[Interview with Jonny]
This interview was made for a feature in the
New York Times, which was published in print on december 9th 2007. This is a transcript from two of five mp3s that were made available along with the online edition of the article on the magazine's website on december 8th 2007. The other mp3s had excerpts from the interviews with
Thom and
Philip.
[On the production]
Jonny: "Just being in a room with loud music generates all this white noise and it's quite intense which you lose as soon as you try record a song like that. It's the old cliché of - band sound great in a room, why don't you just go and record it like that, but you can't because you lose this thing that happens to your ears. So what I always carry through with me, while we're working on that song is – how amazing it was at the end of that song when all this chaos kick up and you could just hear Thom singing through it, and that was just very clinical. And so that's how we did, we generated that by having the strings play every single note in the scale, so you just get this full sort of noise."
[On the recording process]
Jonny: "I realized ever since we were kids we would record ourselves and then listen to ourselves obsessively and over and over again, like of 4-track recordings, stuff done in bedrooms and it's still a bit like that, I suppose. I think when you work on something over and over again, you sort of – it's got to good enough to be worth working on and if it survives that process, it usually good enough to release. And it's not usually about working on fractions of seconds, it just about listening to all the songs over and over again and making sure that it's, you know, it's doing the right thing."