ALY COMINGORE: Obvious questions first: What made you want to leave your house this time around?

TIM PRESLEY: I think I felt like it was time for a change. I really wanted to try and do something different, shake it up a little. And Ty and I work really well together, so it just seemed like a natural thing. He’s really enthusiastic about projects, and that makes me stoked.

COMINGORE: And Ty is in L.A. now.

PRESLEY: Yeah.

COMINGORE: Who got the conversation started?

PRESLEY: After my last album came out, Cyclops Reap, we started talking about recording a White Fence record, but with his eight-track instead of my four-track. We talked about it and talked about it and finally he was getting kicked out of his place. He had just built a cool little studio in his garage, so we had a month left to do it; it was a now-or-never kind of thing. But Ty shook me out of my indifference and apathy about going into the studio. He basically got me off my ass and got me to just do it. He put a time clock on it and forced me to focus up and conceptualize it.

COMINGORE: Do you want to talk a bit about the dynamic between the two of you?

PRESLEY: We just work well together, I think. We speak the same language. It’s weird. It’s a special thing that’s hard to talk about. [laughs] I’m just kidding. But it is hard to explain. We don’t talk about stuff. It’s not like your typical musicians in the room talking about a song and how it goes and how it should go. We both trust each other, and with that trust I think you’re able to shine and do exactly what you want to do and then the other person massages it into whatever, and vice versa.

COMINGORE: Were you working with a lot of material going in?

PRESLEY: I had to choose from something like 100 songs.

COMINGORE: Is that kind of your deal, to write a lot and then whittle it down?

PRESLEY: Yeah. I write every day, every night. It’s all I do, kind of. It’s a blessing and a curse. I’ve almost become addicted to it. There have been nights where there’s an opportunity to hang out with friends or go somewhere, and I’ve said no and I ended up writing a really good song [laughs]—I mean, I impressed myself. So now I always think, “Oh man, I could have gone out and I would have never written that song.” When I write I will go and record it immediately, or I’m in there tweaking around with stuff, and I might not have got that cool sound had I gone out. Since then it’s just become my go-to response: “No, I’m busy. No, I’m busy. No, I’m busy.”