J.L. SIRISUK: Have you been in rehearsals all day?

ANGEL DERADOORIAN: No, I’ve had interviews all day, but I’m leaving tomorrow to drive across the country, so I’ve been getting ready for that as well.

SIRISUK: Your tour starts in about a month. Where are you going across country? Is there a main destination coming up?

DERADOORIAN: The tour start in New York and I live in L.A., so I have to drive to the East Coast. I’m going to rehearse with my sister in Virginia, then we’re gonna start the tour in Brooklyn, and it ends there as well. [laughs] Then I have to drive back across the country.

SIRISUK: It’s been six years since Mind Raft came out and I’ve been waiting for an LP. What finally led to the LP?

DERADOORIAN: It’s just a matter of logistical reasons. I didn’t start writing this record until two years after Mind Raft came out because I was just working with Dirty Projectors so much. We were about to start up another album cycle with Dirty Projectors, and Dave [Longstreth] and I had a talk about whether or not that seemed right for me at the time, or if I had to just take a break and focus on my own stuff. So I ended up doing that and I started writing in 2011.

SIRISUK: When you started writing, did you have some kind of theme or concept in mind or did it come together organically?

DERADOORIAN: In general I just like to write music before I consider the overall theme, so eventually it took place later when I started writing more of the lyrics. I think the only concept I had was to combine certain elements sonically into songs. It was all very loose in the beginning.

SIRISUK: Were there certain things you wanted to experiment with sonically?

DERADOORIAN: There were a lot—I mean every song on the record ends up sounding pretty different from each other because I wanted to explore all these different types of sounds I like. I think what I wanted to keep prominent were vocals and the beat.

SIRISUK: From Krautrock to Middle Eastern music, there are many different influences heard on this album. What kind of music did you listen to growing up?

DERADOORIAN: I kind of discovered all that on my own later in my teenage years. I mostly grew up hearing jazz, soul, and R&B music because of my dad. In high school I had to learn who Led Zeppelin was on my own, and I never listened to The Beatles when I was a kid. It was an interesting endeavor once I finally realized I could go deeper into discovering music. I learned about a lot of stuff through friends. As a teenager I listened to Radiohead and Can. What else is there…I listened to a lot of Radiohead. [laughs]