Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.
Every single song on 'Torches' was a little self-contained pop song, so there wasn't any fat on the songs; there wasn't a lot to cut.
Think back to the early rock n' roll records, and the average record length in the '50s - and well into the '60s - was two and a half minutes. It's very hard to put that much songwriting into two and a half minutes.
Sometimes, I feel like my lyrics meander a little bit, and our songs are so big I need to write more words than are necessary.
We were interested in this notion of compression- a lot of the songs were really short so that you'd absorb them in memory rather than when you're actually hearing them.
As a songwriter, simplicity - what not to do, what not to play - can be the hardest thing to achieve.
It's cool that our stuff is received as it is, and our stuff is fairly long. But from a songwriter's purview as well as an exercise, I'm trying to write shorter material and find ways to condense ideas.
I'm definitely trying to make longer songs, but if it's short and good, I'm not going to do anything about it.
