And how do you strike that balance?

It's not easy. First you’ve got to hire a stylist. You can't possibly do that on your own. Denims… Okay, well, I don”t know. Since we’re just getting into festival season, we’re figuring all that out right now, actually.

Figuring out what, specifically?

Tour is a constantly evolving thing. It took us, like, 50 shows to get the show where it’s at now, so that’s why, for festivals, we’re trying to just do the exact same thing. We spent two or three days trying to figure out how to make an outdoor festival feel as much like our show as possible. Our show is based a lot on projections—not so much for projecting stuff you recognize, but more about using projectors as if they were light fixtures—so we found different projectors that are high-powered for outdoors and set them up in different angles. It’s all about dimensions, contrast, patterns, motion, lots of negative space.

We use a fabric [organza] for our regular show [as the backdrop] that we’ve really fallen in love with, because it really appears and disappears, but it’s not equipped for wind or even the outdoors, and neither is the rigging. So we ordered this different fabric [textilene, like a PVC-coated polyester] that’s made for high wind, and we demoed it. We were able to use it at the first Coachella, but not the second one because there was a windstorm. It was a little different but we were able to use all of the same cues and equipment, more or less. We felt good that it did feel like our show, but we'll learn a lot as we go on.

I imagine this trial-and-error of alternate materials and stagings has gotten easier over time.

We’ve been doing this so much, for so long, that things have grown simpler as time’s gone on. We’ve also learned what things to fight for, and to not worry too much about things. We’ve gotten way more like, “All right, so it’s too windy, we can’t use it,” or, “Something’s broken, let’s just play music as much as we can and if people like it, they’ll like it.”

Maybe with the rise of electronic music and such, festivals can almost be too dependent on visual aspects. Not to be one of those old-timers, but I kind of love when I see shows where it’s like, “Let’s just play music up here.” I'm not a huge Guns N’ Roses fan at all, and I actually didn't really know much about them, but I saw them at Coachella—the second weekend, apparently the first weekend they were terrible. I was super into how they had nothing going on, really. They had a couple lights. But I was like, “Damn, these guys just played some rock music for two and a half hours up there.” That was cool. To some degree, we’re not that worried about it. We’re just going to try to play our music the best that we can, and to make it our own.

Do you take a different approach when putting together a setlist for a festival, vs. your own show?

We definitely alter the set a little bit and make it more energetic, as much as we do “energetic.” But we still try to write a little story. We don’t just want [the setlist] to be non-sequitur. We don’t write setlists ahead of time, though. One of the things we do every day on tour is wait to see what’s happening in each place. What’s the energy like here? What are the people like? What’s the venue like? Are we in a tent, on a stage? All of that information factors heavily into what we decide to play on a given day.