I saw you guys in June, and I was impressed how much your fans appreciated and welcomed Foxy Shazam. They’re not immediately accessible, and I thought it was a testament to the type of people who come to your shows.
I was really excited about that, too. It was a band we were fans of for quite awhile. We just love the guys in the band, their stage performance and the music so much that on tour, it was like, “Well, we don’t really care what anybody else thinks, because we think they’re great, and they absolutely deserve to be on stage.” I just thought they were so good live, it would be a little odd to me if it didn’t translate to some people. That’s the best thing about having them as an opener—I feel like we’ve got an unfair advantage on the tour, because we have this opening band that’s putting on just as good a show as any headlining band I’ve seen in quite a while. It makes the show that much better for everybody.

Now that Vices And Virtues has been out for awhile, and you’ve played the songs live and they’ve had a chance to grow, what’s your take on the music on the record?
We have a weird perspective on it, because we were working on it for quite a while, and some of the ideas came from demos that were two years old—and then there are a couple songs that were written within the last few weeks of recording. [The album] seems to me like a good representation of what it actually was—which was two, two-and-a-half years of trying to figure out what we wanted the band to be, post-splitting with Ryan [Ross] and Jon [Walker]. Read the full article »