John: I turned 31 during the walk, in Bulgaria, so when I returned to the states I was pretty sure I was too old, and had almost no expectation of working my way back into the rock scene. Harvey Danger had achieved some measure of ubiquity with "Flagpole Sitta", Death Cab was starting to be able to sell out the 300 capacity clubs around town, which felt like a big deal at the time, but I couldn't imagine any place for myself in that world anymore. Those guys are all five to seven years younger than me and I felt a little like a dinosaur, like a holdover from the "Seattle scene" that was being replaced by this new generation of "indie" bands.  

Two things happened: First, Sean Nelson, who is an incredibly smart, perceptive, and multi-faceted person, and who was completely miserable as a rock star, decided he needed a sidekick.   He believed, as I believed, that becoming a famous musician would expose him to the larger world of witty, erudite people. Instead, he found himself playing at MTV's Spring Break Beach Party, interacting almost exclusively with bottom-feeder music people. He was going nuts, completely isolated from other people, no one was getting his references, no one laughed at his jokes, and every one of his best impulses went out into the world and came back with a Miller beer logo draped over it. We only knew each other casually at that point, having played shows together back in the day, but we bumped into each other at a party and his cocktail banter, full of offhand references to Robert E. Lee, Johnny Rotten and old gags from Laugh-In, scored direct hits with me. So he basically hired me to be in his band in order to have someone as a conspirator.   He'd give a press conference and make comments that would just flop on the ground, but I'd guffaw and he'd smirk and he no longer felt like Gulliver.   

Second: Chris Walla and Ben Gibbard had a very different idea of what constituted success then I had. Almost immediately after Death Cab became popular outside Seattle, they started gathering people around them, A&Ring for Barsuk Records, trying to form a community of good bands. They brought John Vanderslice to Barsuk, and Sunset Valley and the Prom, just discovering bands right and left.   They are true music lovers, truly "into" bands, so that every week they had a new record or project they were excited about, and fortunately they had, in Josh Rosenfeld of Barsuk, a kindred spirit. So there was a moment, somewhere in 2000, when all these factors collided, when Sean Nelson started to realize that I wasn't just a funny side-kick but was an actual songwriter, and Chris Walla was searching for projects to throw himself into and still remembered all my songs, and Barsuk was first branching out, looking for artists to develop. Suddenly I was in the eye of a storm that I had almost no hand in making. I had just been strumming my guitar absentmindedly and the next thing I knew people were setting up mics around me and talking about promotion budgets.

Squid: Since "Harm" is a "watershed" album of sorts, what's your encapsulated view of When I Pretend To Fall? I see them as two very different sides of the "Long Winters Mentality" in everything from the lyrics to the album art. It's almost as though Harm is a bad breakup and "Pretend to Fall" is six months later where you're like, "To hell with her." I'm always reminded of "Prom Night at Hater High", where the narrator isn't just observing, he's telling people off. That's a far cry from the apologetic, shoulder shrugging in say, "Car Parts". Do you see that distinction as well?

John: Absolutely. They're night and day. The first record is a cry of frustration, a long string of defeats strung together in the hope that they amounted to something. There's no single story on "Harm" that offers any redemption, and most of them are blind alleys: the drugs don't work, the love doesn't work, faith is lost, plans are scrapped, but all together they testify to some flicker of hope. It's not just endurance, it's perseverance. The second record, "Pretend to Fall" is the cry of exaltation after the first thing goes right. There's a passionate, almost evangelical, message to that record that says, "Get up! Don't stop! Keep trying!" because I had the first evidence that perseverance pays off.

Squid: The John Roderick I know is a pretty driven dude. But I guess I'm interested to know if it's all been more complex than merely sallying forth to the next set of lyrics, the next venue on the tour, the next block of time in the studio. Even though The Long Winters have been, by indie standards, pretty successful, have there been times when you've been disheartened enough by the Business of Music to just out and out bail? What keeps you going?

John: That's what "Ultimatum" is, in a nutshell. I mean, the Long Winters are a labor of love for the listener. You know? There's some ear-candy that hooks people up front, but the lion's share of the music requires that you sit down with it and absorb it over time. You know the old saying, "Only a hundred people bought the first Velvet Underground record, but all hundred people formed a band."   What's "new" about the Long Winters isn't immediately obvious, we're not trying to ape Gang of Four, or drench our microphones in spit, but there's imagery in our music that's unprecedented, I think. My greatest frustration is to hear my lyrics referred to as "stream of conscious" or "non sequitur" or, particularly, "nonsense". I can handle being called surreal, although even that isn't accurate. I think anyone who spends time listening to the Long Winters loses any feeling that the lyrics aren't particular and precise, and although interpretations may vary, I can't imagine that any focused listener would fail to appreciate that every word has been labored over.  "Ultimatum" is the record I made when I was exhausted by being in a band, beaten down by the thousands of petty indignities that accompany being an entertainer. It's a dark record and there's no easy, hopeful resolution in sight.

Squid: I'm still not entirely sure I understand the motivation for releasing the EP. Was it a means to pulling yourself out of your bookworming Heart of Darkness and back into the world of music? A sense of time slipping away?

John: Well, I realized that this creeping despair was an unsuitable state of mind.   This is not where I want to be! Physician, heal thyself! I didn't want to follow up the hopeful feeling of "Pretend to Fall" with an intransigent record of disappointment, and not because I'm trying to put on a happy face for my audience. These records are very definitely a conversation with myself, and I realized halfway through making Ultimatum that I was giving far too much power to the darker voices within me and giving short shrift to all the evidence that life was good. I needed to make an even more hopeful record than "Pretend to Fall", because I need it. That's what I need to hear. So the Ultimatum EP represented a slice of that period, and some of the more literal songs on the EP are actually really broad metaphors of feeling doomed. In the last six months I've dusted myself off and am feeling more equal to life's challenges.

Squid: I listened to the Ultimatum EP to find that Mr. Singer/Songwriter had gone borderline Kraftwerk on me. Please to explain this most radical and unexpected departure. What shaped that aesthetic decision to run a delicate flurry of blips and bleeps all over a track like "Everything Is Talking"?  

John: There are three competing interests at play in the music of the Long Winters. First, there's me with a guitar strumming a song and singing. I think it would be nice to make a record that way, just the song with a minimum of instrumentation. Second, there's the rock band. I love fronting a rock band and, often, the harder rock the better. If I could be in Queens of the Stone Age I'd be very happy, except for all the pot smoke and tight pants. And third, there's just pure musical imagination that the new technologies, like Pro Tools, samplers, sequencers, etc., really allow to blossom. I can make music now without ever touching a real instrument, so former limitations of dexterity are replaced by limitations of technology comprehension. All the records we've made have slammed these three competing interests together and produced an amalgam.   There are bleeps and bloops on everything we've done, usually because I've been dinking around on some keyboard that goes "bloop" and I jump up and say, "That's exactly how I feel!"

Squid: Since we've last talked you've nearly completed the third album. Was producing it yourself as rewarding as you had hoped it would be? Or are you exhausted and nearly bi-polar with the stress of it all?

John: Both. Producing yourself is crazy, there's no doubt, but I wanted to do it and I'm very glad I did. I'd been trying to take over the production of Long Winters' records from the very first one, with growing confidence, and was butting heads more and more with my collaborators until the work was suffering.   Musicians and creative types are very sensitive, which leads to a lot of passive conversations, even if the people involved aren't passive people themselves. A lot of conversations like, "Oh, no, no I see what you're saying, and I agree, except I think that your idea, although really, really great, is almost TOO great for the track, and I just want to try this one little thing that replaces your idea with my own idea." This kind of conversation, which is supposed to protect everyone from hurt feelings and respect their contributions as artists, just slows everything down to an encounter session crawl. Really, what needs to be said is, "Nope, try again." I think you reach a certain point as a musician where your feelings aren't at stake as much, you just want to nail the best track, and you don't have the time or inclination to spackle the holes in everyone's mental masonry anymore.

Squid: What was the breakdown of contributors to this latest studio effort? (Musicians, drop-in guests, drug dealers, that sort of thing.) Or did being the producer make you more inclined to just lay down tracks yourself in the interest of time?

John: Pretty much every track was recorded by Nabil, Eric and myself. Sean Nelson came in and sang on one or two songs, Chris Funk and Chris Walla played on a track, Kurt Bloch played a guitar solo, Mike Squires contributed a guitar part on one or two songs, and there is a horn section on two or three songs, but more than half the songs are played by Nabil, Eric and I alone, which makes for a rawer feel.

Squid: I'd say the biggest testament to the braininess of your music is the cadre of nerd geniuses you've managed to gather on The Long Winters Message Board. If you had to characterize what goes on there to someone unfamiliar with its MO, what would you say?

John: The Long Winters Message Board is a curious place. I don't contribute as much to the web site as I'd like, mostly because I don't have any interest in "Blogging" my life, but the message board is, despite periods of inactivity, populated by this odd community of graduate students, scientists, writers, web-geeks and screwballs who are so esoteric it's no wonder there are hardly any breathless teenage girls on there. They all get chased away by the regular use of Latin and the penchant for arcane trivia. I couldn't be happier about this, of course, after visiting some other message boards full of screaming children and blistering sub-normals, and I'm curious to see how the community handles the growing pains the next time we release an album and a whole new cadre of fans appears looking for answers. My only complaint is that occasionally I'll post something hilariously funny on there, and it barely registers a polite smirk from the board community before they resume their conversation about giant arthropods or syntactical deviation or whatever. I'd like my humorous posts to be greeted with a little less condescension on my own goddamn message board.

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