From left: Jason Caddell, Travis Morrison, Eric Axelson, Joe Easley. Photo by Shervin Lainez.

At some point in our two-and-a-half hour conversation, Travis Morrison compares listening to an early Dismemberment Plan song to being hit with “a confetti cannon of words,” which, coincidentally, is also what it feels like to have a two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Travis Morrison. Before I even get a chance to ask him about Uncanney Valley, the reunited Plan’s first new album in over a decade, we’ve ambled down a leisurely path of other pressing topics: animal husbandry, Yeezus, Noel Gallagher, the gentrification of his (and my) former home of Washington, D.C., and Morrison’s lifelong fear of snapping turtles ("They're basically like zombies. They don't have a mind.") The first pause comes about an hour in, and his publicist, who’s been looking on the whole time as she does work on the other side of the café (“it’s like an Orthodox Jewish date,” Morrison jokes at the beginning of the interview), assumes, very incorrectly, that we must be finishing up. She walks up just as Morrison asks me, with a laugh, “So, I think you have some questions?”

The fact that Morrison likes to talk will come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever heard a single Dismemberment Plan song, all of which are anchored by his vivid language and chatty, spitfire delivery. The Plan emerged from D.C.’s punk scene in the mid-90s, but they sounded like nobody else in town (or anywhere else on the planet, for that matter), merging spazzy funk grooves courtesy of one of indie rock’s all-time most inventive rhythm sections (bassist Eric Axelson and drummer Joe Easley), Jason Caddell’s jittery guitar riffs, and Morrison’s anxious, empathic poetry. Their music-- which by my measure includes two legitimate masterpieces, the much-beloved twentysomething survival manual Emergency & I and the more mature though equally evocative Change-- hit a near-impossible bull’s-eye: jammy but with a knack for pop concision, at times jarringly compassionate but never sentimental, sometimes funny but always after something deeper than a punch line.

The Dismemberment Plan broke up in 2003 but got back together in 2011, ostensibly to play a few shows celebrating the reissue of Emergency & I. But things went even better than planned. Thanks to a new, internet-savvy generation of listeners who’d belatedly fallen in love with their back catalog, the Plan were playing to the biggest audiences of their career, winning over new fans as they went (including a certain high-profile bandleader), and prompting a frenzy of nostalgia in old ones. (Full disclosure: like most of the other people in the front row, I was compelled to climb onto the stage at one of these shows and scream myself hoarse when the band played fan favorite “Ice of Boston”.)

Morrison says Uncanney Valley wasn’t planned as much as it just happened, but the finished product reflects a newfound confidence, cohesion, and openness in the band. “It’s a step I wish we would have taken a long time ago,” Morrison says. “A lot of it has to do with the songwriting sharpening and getting off of the confetti-cannon approach and being more confident in what I have to say.” Of course, the Dismemberment Plan still sound like nobody else, but this time around they're also aiming for something a little more universal. “With the new record, I find myself dreaming of people actually covering our songs,” he says. “Our old songs weren’t very coverable. They were kind of yoked to us. Which is fine, I mean, you can’t cover a John Coltrane performance either.”

"There’s a lot of color to the new album. I thought the old

stuff could be a little dry, like we were a little afraid of

music. We sounded like very worried young men."

Pitchfork: Did you always want to be a frontman?

Travis Morrison: I wanted to be a writer when I was a little kid. Then I wanted to be Pete Townshend-- the songwriting guitarist who occasionally sang. The first six months [after forming Dismemberment Plan], I was trying to find another singer. The original idea was that we’d have some pretty boy, and I’d occasionally do the “Feeeel meee, touchhhh meeee.” Then, when we were about 20, [bassist] Eric [Axelson] sat me down and said, “I know you’re not very good at it, but you’re going to have to sing.” [laughs] And look what happened.

Pitchfork: Back then, did you ever think you'd still be together 20 years later?

TM: Yeah. You know, it was a different era. Now, expectations are more muted, but at the time, you would think, “I want to be Sonic Youth. I want to do it.” You would think of it as a career. So we had dreams about being a fairly long-lived band. When we broke up, I was like, “Oh, we only got to [album] four.”

There are bands, like R.E.M., who want to have 17 records, and some are terrible and some are great. I don’t know if people think like that anymore. Things are more atomized now. I’m fascinated with the attitude of younger rock bands, even ones that are making money at it. I don’t ever hear them talk about it as a “career.” It almost makes me think there isn’t even a music industry anymore, like an atom bomb fell and it was just eradicated forever. But at certain point, you realize it’s easy to play music for the rest of your life: just don’t sell your guitar. Maybe you get a day job, but as long as you have a guitar, you can play.

Pitchfork: You guys broke up in 2003, went on with your lives, and then reunited for some shows in 2011. Did you know you’d make another album?

TM: I can’t speak for the other guys, but for me: no expectations. No plans. No vision.

Pitchfork: So how did the record come about?

TM: I changed my mind. [laughs] As we rehearsed for those shows, we started getting jams. We were always a very collaborative band. People tend to have a perception that I was the songwriter and the music leader, but not really. All our jams were generally like the Led Zeppelin model: collective creation. So as we rehearsed, improvisational nuggets came out. That really is the lifeline of any band. If a band isn’t coming up with two to four of those when they pick up their instruments, then they have problems-- even if none of them turn into a song. If that’s not happening in a band, it’s time for therapy or breaking up.

So those things started happening, and by the time we broke camp after the shows were over, there was a lot of them. It was intense. So we made the decision. But it took some willpower to stay in that [improvised] mode as opposed to, “And now we’re making a record!” It was more like: We’ll keep getting together, make a bunch of weird noises-- not try to write an album, not try to write new songs-- but keep that formlessness going and see what comes out of it. Maybe it’ll dry up. So we did it one month at a time and songs started to come out that we really liked. And then we had a record. [laughs]

Pitchfork: At what point in the writing process are you working on lyrics?

TM: I’m weird about that. I don’t have a set working style. Some lyrics come really slow, others come in 10 minutes while I'm watching basketball. They're always a surprise to me.

Pitchfork: So you haven’t developed any kind of writing rituals over time?

TM: Well, yeah. I like to write early in the morning, like, 5 a.m. If I’m really on my game, I don’t have any coffee or stimulants. I’m kind of in a dream state. I try to be patient. I feel like the point of art is to go down within yourself and to pop up into other people. If you’re lucky, all of a sudden you’re like, “whoop!” You’re in other people.

It doesn’t always work, though, so I’m a total ho for any writing workshop, any technique from anyone. I saw an interview with Jay-Z where he said he didn’t write down any of his lyrics, so I tried that on Change. I’ll do anything. Langston Hughes would write a poem and put it in a drawer and forget about it. And then once a week he would look through the drawer-- it was almost like the poems were written by somebody else. Sometimes [when you’re writing] you get excited and think, “That’s the best!” It’s not. [laughs] So I sometimes try a variance of the drawer trick-- [I write it] and then come back to it and see if it blows. Your ego gets activated real quick, you really want to impress yourself. But when you come back to it, sometimes you’re like, “Yeah, this part? I don’t know. This guy needs a lot of help.”

"I saw an interview with Jay-Z where he said he didn’t

write down any of his lyrics, so I tried that on Change."

Pitchfork: Does Uncanney Valley feel like a big departure?

TM: I’m very proud of it. We did a lot of things we’ve never done before without making a big show of it. We used to be very uptight emotionally. Really, really uptight. I don’t know what our problem was. Well, I do, but... [laughs] Just going through our old stuff, I thought we were extremely clenched, which is OK, but there’s an openness to the new record that is a real achievement for us. I don’t think it’s unrigorous or sloppy, but when I actually listened to it next to our older stuff, I was like, “Whoa!” That was satisfying. There’s a lot of color to it. I thought the old stuff could be a little dry, like we were a little afraid of music. We sounded like very worried young men.

Pitchfork: I made it out to three of the reunion shows, and the energy was insane. It seemed like you were playing for much larger crowds than before. What were those shows like for you?

TM: It was crazy. I guess [what happened in the past decade] was there’s an infrastructure now for discovering [older music]. It’s really peculiar. The rules are so different now.

Pitchfork: What was the biggest change you noticed?

TM: When you wrote a song way back in the day, you were writing material to play live. Some of the songs we wrote for shows actually were pretty terrible songs, but they would have a certain impact live. And you would buy the CD at the shows if you like the show. You may not listen to the CD, you might just throw it in the back of your car and let it warp in the sun. The main thing was you saw the song at the show.

Now, by and large, people are recording material to put on YouTube. I have a theory that YouTube is, in the end, the #1 media for musicians. Which is strange, because there’s a visual associated with it. Maybe Soundcloud and Spotify are up there, too. But you’re writing music for internet delivery, not shows. I think that affects artists sometimes. Like, there’s a lot of griping and groaning about wanting to play half-baked new songs live, but you don’t want it to just end up on YouTube with like 74 thumbs down: “This is the worst!” But [at the reunion shows] we just did it like we used to, just played our half-baked songs live anyway, and some of them have changed a lot since then.

I also feel like bands make much better-sounding and well-put-together records now. There was no indie rock band in the 90s at the level of, like, Grizzly Bear. I listen to their records and it’s crazy how good they sound. That really freaks me out. And it's actually kind of appealing. It’s a challenge. It's like, "Well, you’ve got to get your shit together."

Pitchfork: How do you feel about bands banning cell phones at their shows?

TM: I’d like to do that, but come on. I’m a grown-ass man. I can’t be, like, ordering people to put down their phones. I saw Elliott Smith play solo years ago at a bar. It was really loud, and then it started getting louder because all these people started howling like raging freaks to be quiet-- “shut up motherfucker!”-- which made it louder. And Elliott Smith was like, “Yo...” Well, he didn’t say “Yo, baby, it’s cool.” Elliott Smith did not say that. But he was like, “Listen, in a bar, people will buy alcohol and talk loudly and it’d be nice if everyone was quieter, but that’s not how it is. There’s not a whole lot you can do about it.” And everyone was just like [blank stare]. It was the craziest Jedi mind trick I’ve ever seen. Both sides were like, “He’s right,” and then just watched the show.

I like to go play shows just to see people, so I’m not in the game of like, “You’re at my show, you’re gonna listen to it like this, blah blah blah.” Then you just end up with a clip on YouTube of you ranting about putting away your phone. I like being a musician that’s also a fly on the wall. I like people coming in the room and doing what they do and then leaving. I like attention, but it actually gives me a little less to work with as a performer if people are editing themselves and not being them.

Pitchfork: Do you have any advice for bands just starting out?

TM: I don’t know. Advice is not really very useful. People gave me terrible advice, and I guess I was just smart enough to ignore some of it. Like, we just did the first Dismemberment Plan release independently, and some of the DC punk rock people were like, “Why are you putting it on cassette, those things won't sell. Just do a 7”.” But we were playing in, like, Virginia, and nobody had a turntable anymore. Everybody’s got a cassette deck in their Ford Focus or whatever, their Ford Escalade. And it was good we didn’t listen to that, even though it came from very smart people who knew exactly what they were talking about. So if I had any advice for young musicians, it would be to use your own ears, your own common fucking sense, and pay attention to what’s going on around you before you listen to douchebags like me.