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When we spoke to you for Wilder Mind, you told us the band was listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen and Radiohead to influence the sound. What were you taking cues from when you recorded Delta?

Certainly more urban music influenced us. There’s a guy named Jai Paul in the U.K., who I particularly love. But we were really listening to everything this time. Blake Mills, Maggie Rogers, Waylon Jennings, Talk Talk… the influences were kind of endless.

I saw you guys with U2 in Vancouver last year. What did you learn from doing those handful of stadium shows with them?

I probably learned more in those three shows than the 100 we played before that. We hadn’t played a support slot in seven years. We did it because that record — The Joshua Tree — was important to us and we hadn’t played stadiums before and we wanted to try that. It felt pretty good, and it was a reminder that when you’re playing the opening slot you’ve got to grab people’s attention. You’ve got to fight for it. But it was fun. Watching the way they work and the way they rehearse was very inspiring to me. We certainly felt coming off those shows more ambitious and encouraged to work harder on our live shows. … U2 has a desire to keep getting better and better and that was so inspiring to me.

You’ve been together for a decade. How did your dreams of being a rock star measure up to the reality of where you are today?

I never thought of myself as a professional-level musician, and it’s something I still have trouble believing. But what we wanted in the early days was to set up our band so that if we wanted to, we could be a band for as long as possible. We were surrounded by other bands that were breaking up and we didn’t want to go that way. We wanted to make sure that our relationships with one another were always healthy and that we were fair on business and shared everything. We took the long view. I’ve always thought, you’re really not a band until you release five records. We’ve released four — and an EP — so I think we’re getting there. We’re adding to the narrative. We never want to stick to one thing and that ambition is being achieved, I think, right now with this new record.