Similar to what we were just talking about, this was following the huge success of _Plans_**. Did you think you had to top that?** We just wanted to do something different. Chris floated the idea of, “Let’s just make a record on tape and make it sound the way we used to.” And it was like, yeah, absolutely, let’s go for it. I’m proud of many of the things about this record, but I’m most proud that none of the decisions that were made—song selection, mixing, videos—none of it was done to compete with Plans. I think, looking back, we maybe subconsciously wanted to tone things down a bit, and make a record that was dark, sonically and lyrically, that normalized our fanbase a bit. Because when you go from being an indie band and all of a sudden your songs are on the radio everywhere, you get a lot of new fans who know the new record. They don’t know the other records. And that’s great. But when we were playing the biggest places we’d ever played for that record, none of us thought, “Oh, these are gonna be our fans now. Whenever we go to the Bay Area we’re going to sell 20,000 tickets, because these are all our fans now.” No, we realized—these people heard “Soul Meets Body” on the radio or watched The O.C. But as soon as that big campaign goes away, a lot of those people who are casual music fans are not particularly interested. They have enough music by you. They have that one record by you. They got it. So I put Narrow Stairs that high because I find it to be a really fearless record. We just went in and were like, “We’re doing this thing.” It’s a dark period in my life, and I think that’s reflected on the record, but I did a lot of writing. The three records I had the biggest and most high-quality batch of songs for were Narrow Stairs, Transatlanticism, and Thank You for Today.