Jonathan Meiburg quotes:

One of our very favorite shows of 2008 was our Slowtrain instore. We drove straight from San Francisco, pulled up to the back of the store, dragged our entire setup inside and played our new album, Rook, start-to-finish - and they let us get away with it.

It may be a product of me being raised in episcopal church, but I have a love for ritual and theater and the significance of doing the exact same thing over and over. So I really love knowing every little thing I'm going to do during a show.

I don't feel [the] excitement you have when you first walk into a recording studio. It now feels like a tool.

It's not like I'm narrating stories with music behind them. It's all kind of one thing. You hope you can provoke a specific emotional reaction, but in ways that aren't quite plain.

I like having some things very clear while other things are obscured...so that it kind of keeps coming into and out of focus.

The nice thing about being a band that nobody knows about is that you can do whatever you want.

I certainly think there are things that impressed me as a child about the church. The smells and the sounds and the pagaentry of it remained with me. The aesthetic I really love. I think a lot of my sense of melody comes from singing those hymns and doing the renaissance music and stuff.

I don't consider myself a very religious person.

I just like dealing with scientists for awhile and then going over and dealing with musicians for awhile. They both have qualities that kind of counterbalance each other.

When you make a record, you probably are not going to hit exactly what you were aiming for. You also have to let go at a certain point, and just trust it.

I get more excited about like, "How nice is the piano?" or "How does the room sound?" I don't really see the gear so much anymore.

When I was writing some of songs for the record in Galapagos it was the feeling of being there I wanted to evoke more than anything. I remember hearing all the parts of the songs in my mind when I was walking around over the lava fields.