raidonentebbe2 asked: Is your setlist theory different for festival sets than it is for live shows, since the bulk of the festival audience probably isn't all the familiar with your music/probably hasn't listened to the new album?

kinda, I mean like…people looking to hear deep-catalogue lo-fi* days deep cuts should be able to understand that it’s neither cute nor cool to show up at the festival, where a huge % of the crowd has no idea who we are, and play a bunch of stuff that only appeals to a very small number of people. at the same time, that didn’t stop me from doing a three-song solo set in the middle of our Lollapalooza appearance in front of however many thousands of people that was and just blazing my way through Alpha Incipiens, and it didn’t stop us as a band from premiering “Animal Mask” at the Newport Folk Festival a year-plus before the album came out, and at the Osheaga Festival we used Discordance Axis as our entrance music and then opened with Wild Sage, which takes about five minutes to do live and is pretty much the opposite of what setlist theory says about how to open a festival set. but in all those cases, we made those choices because we thought: this will make the best set. if people are gonna dig the set, they’ll be able to climb out on this limb a little and enjoy the weirder air out there. so we do tend to make sure we’re being true to ourselves whether we’re playing to friends we know or friends we haven’t met yet. we trust that our love of what we do will translate.

a band that’s playing music it isn’t excited about is a boring and horrible band, so we write a set list that reflects what we’re excited to play. at a festival, it’s gonna tilt heavily toward the stuff that people like to jump up and down about, for sure – that’ll be the most fun, for everybody. but it’s still gotta have some element of risk, some ledge to step out on somehow, something to make sure everybody knows this isn’t about just showing up and punching the clock for us: it’s our passion, it comes from our hearts, it reflects who we are in some way and that’s a big part of what we’re there to show.

*always asterisk this meaningless term