In those early Columbia days, was there ever a sense that they wanted you to be more of a commercial pop act?

CP: There definitely was a tug of war at first. They wanted an album full of “Bruises,” and we wanted to become a new band.

PW: But once we turned in Something, nobody fought us. They went with it.

CP: That was our first time working with the amazing Maureen Kenny, who signed us to Columbia. She had a much more pragmatic outlook than we did. As we were still in the writing phase, she was very matter-of-fact about saying, “Keep writing.” We wrote about 40 songs for that record, and at one point she gave me a Bruce Springsteen documentary about how he wrote 300 songs for Darkness at the Edge of Town and that he would play them until he figured out which ones were the best. At the time, coming from music just being a hobby, being told to keep writing was a brutal thing. It’s funny because now that seems not only par for the course, but I think we should have written more. Both of us have a new appreciation for the process of writing—it’s actually my favorite part of the whole album life cycle now.

What’s something you wish you’d known when Chairlift started?

CP: I’ve got two things, and they’re sort of opposites of each other. One is to not be precious about your music within your own world. Try everything you want to try; just because it exists doesn’t mean it’s done. But also: Don’t say yes to everything. Learn how to say no, because people respect a no. We were surrounded by people who were telling us, “This is how it works—you just say yes to things and you do the things.” I look back on the first album cycle and I’m proud of the music we made but, man, there was a whole trail of garbage generated by promo stuff we did that I would never do now. There’s a garbage machine out there, and you can say no to it, and it will be OK. Because that’s not what’s going to make your career—your music and your good ideas are what make your career.

PW: And you have to trust yourself when the answer is no. Because there’s often somebody very close to you telling you the opposite.

CP: Yeah, you have to remember that you are the artist, and the people around you are not the artist. I’ll keep expecting managers or labels to be like, “OK, I’ve got this good idea about how to frame who you are,” but no one is going to do that for you. It’s intense and scary, but that’s the real shit right there—when you realize that the good ideas are going to come from you. No one else is in your dream world.

Was there ever anything you said no to that you regret now?

CP: No.

PW: No.

What’s something you said yes to that you wish you hadn’t?

CP: All sorts of things, but they’re all on the same level of inconsequential small shit. It’s just the ground hum of it. Video interviews. Branded stuff. Over-playing to the point that we were exhausted and couldn’t do a good show. Wearing stupid clothes for stupid magazines.

Hopefully I can be someone’s big sister and be like, “You don’t have to do that.” I wish I’d had a mentor. Especially for women in the music industry, there’s a lack of mentorship.

In the time since you started Chairlift, do you think the sense of community among women musicians has grown?

CP: Well, we’ve always been really lucky that we had a close community, but it keeps shifting for many reasons. People drop in and out of music, in and out of New York City. It’s just natural. In a lot of ways, I credit Chairlift’s success—if you could call it that—to the community we’ve been part of. That’s been a really important thing for us too—giving artists that we believe in a hand up, collaborating and sharing shows, swapping demos. That’s why we came to this city. Patrick’s even more that way than I am—he’s extremely loyal to his crew.

PW: I stayed very close to the MGMT guys ever since we shared a rehearsal space with them in 2008. They were the first ones to have us open for them, and now I’m working with them on their fourth record.

Besides community, how do you think being in New York changed the band?

PW: That first year that I was in the band [in 2007], we were such hustlers. Once we decided to take the band seriously, all three of us were working so hard and booking our own tours. There was a certain grind that I don’t know would have happened anywhere else.

CP: It affected us more in terms of motivation than musically, but it definitely fed the sense of mania in the music, too. When Aaron and I were living in Colorado, I was part of a small DIY noise scene there—we were in a place that was so calm and wholesome, you would really seek out violence in the music. I remember going to shows with the hopes that there would be something really physical about it—even just moshing—because in a place so spread out, that’s what you look for in a scene. But then in New York I was so physically overwhelmed by the crowds in the subways and just how much it takes out of you that I started listening to new age music and really soft pop. You would have thought moving to a city like this would make you make harsher music, but actually it did the opposite.

At the same time, New York is a place where you can have so many identities. You know how some trees have those ear mushrooms that just grow off, and you could live on one of those mushrooms and not realize that there was stacks and stacks of others? That’s how I describe music scenes in New York. That’s one of the trippiest things about living here—just how many parallel universes there are that you can be completely unaware of. That definitely fanned the flames of our collage-y tendencies. I think if we lived in a place like Paris or London or Berlin, we’d feel more like we needed to define ourselves with a monolithic sound.

Can you think of a New York moment that changed the music Chairlift was making?

PW: I went to see Das Racist for the first time, at Galapagos [in Brooklyn], and heard them play that song “Combination Pizza Hut Taco Bell,” and I was like, “You guys gotta come over to my studio this weekend and record it.” I had never worked with rappers before, so I went and bought an MPC and spent the next day learning how to make beats. And that became a huge part of my production—just from that one show.