Each Pinback album has a distinct feel to it. Are there any things that influenced you on this one that may not have influenced you before?

If there are, they are all subconscious. You know? When we write an album, we try not to set any certain borders or boundaries. We just hope that it’s different than the last album and that there’s something new to offer. Maybe one of the differences is that we added live drums this time. It kind of gives it a more aggressive sound. Since we can already do the slow, quiet music pretty easily, it was fun to do that.

Did you find that you guys pushed yourselves more to have that live sound when you were recording?

Well, the songs just sort of called for it. Actually, the drums weren’t recorded “live” with the rest of the music. We would write the songs with a drum machine and then we had our drummer, Chris Prescott come in and play the parts that Rob and I had already programmed. He would play after the songs were already written. It’s kind of backwards, but that’s just how we did it.

When you are writing songs, do they come together from just jamming out and seeing what happens, or do you have a specific process?

You know, it changes for each song, so it’s never the same. The only thing that I can say for sure is that there’s never a song that only one of us writes, like “here’s a song… it’s done.” We always collaborate in different degrees. Basically, it’s just two guys in a home studio being pretty mellow, coming up with different elements. Many times, we’ll record a part, put it aside for a month, work on other songs and then come back and go “oh let’s add some more!” We tend to write the songs as we record, which is maybe different than a band going in and recording 10 songs that they already know.

Do you feel that you guys are more comfortable to experiment and do things of that nature in the home studio setting as opposed to renting a studio the traditional way?

The only difference is that you get to go at your own pace. Sometimes the home studio is like a chore though. You’ve got to set up the microphone, or this, or that and sometimes you wish you could just record. If I could go at my own pace in a nice studio, that would be great! We’ve thought about doing that and it’d be fun. But it wouldn’t work for us, because we don’t have complete songs when we’re ready to record.

The art direction on your new album is very interesting. I even noticed that your website has a game for the album.

Yeah. That wasn’t by us. [Laughs] that’s just Sutfin gone wild! For the last couple of releases, we’ve had a good friend of ours Mike Sutfin do the artwork. So, we asked him do this one as well. It was really fun to step back and not have to worry about that aspect so much. He would send ideas and we’d tell him what we wanted, then he would draw it up. So that’s probably why it’s more unified, because we got a real visual artist to do it this time.

Did you start off with a vision, or just let him interpret the music and run with it?

Well, we told him what we were looking for. Basically, we wanted to do an angel theme. Its been done a million times before, but that’s just what we were feeling. We knew what the title was, so we went off that. We told him that we wanted something in the spectrum of fall colors and something to do with angels and we just kept going back and forth. He was gracious enough to just stick with it. Artists don’t usually like it when you tell them “Hey, can you maybe change that?” But he was great about it.

How did the title “Autumn of the Seraphs” come about?

Rob had that title in his head for a little while. It’s not necessarily meant to correspond to the previous album. But, it is sort of a ying-yang to the whole “Summer in Abadon” title. When he brought it up, it just sounded and felt right for the music, so we went with it. Hopefully, we won’t do spring and winter albums.

[Laughter]

Yeah, I was going to say it might lead people to believe that you guys are setting up to do two more albums of that theme.

Hopefully we’re smart enough to let it go. It’s like “Okay, why do we have to do that?” You know? We can just move on.

I think the first two albums had a similar feel and these past two have a similar theme going on, with the titles and imagery. So, hopefully the next couple of albums will be their own things that are totally different too