This album is based on Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America”. Why did you decide to make that the focus of this record?

We’d signed to Hopeless Records and they’d re-issued The Upsides, but they said, “You’ve got to make a record. We need a record that’s just for us, that we can work from the beginning, and we need it right now.” But all we’d pretty much done since finishing college in May 2009 was tour relentlessly. We were being told we needed to write a record and I was like, “What the fuck about? Holy shit! All I do is play shows.” But when I’d go home, for a while it was to a mattress on the floor of the basement in my dad’s house or his couch and then it was the mattress on the floor of my friend’s house. I’d lived in the city [Philadelphia] for years before that and now I was back in this suburb and I had no idea what the fuck I was going to write about. Josh [Martin]’s now-wife was graduating from art school and we went to her studio space she shared with all these other students and someone had written “America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing” on the wall and I was like, “Yeah, that Ginsberg poem! I love that Ginsberg poem!” So I started reading it again and it just felt like some kind of sign to me, that I’d been looking for something to unite these ideas. Now it feels so nebulous, but at the time it felt so real and so on the mark and I was like, “This is what I have to do!” Now, looking back, I barely remember the process because we were so exhausted, but I remember thinking how this poem is saying these things about America that were echoing these much smaller-scale versions that I was seeing being back in my hometown for the first time, so I decided to write a record about that town and the relationship I have with it after being gone for years and coming back and seeing it again—looking at a place I love and looking at it really critically for the first time, in a way that said, “There’s a drug problem here, the cops aren’t really doing the right things, all these business are dying. What’s wrong here?” And the poem just brought my focus back to the town and gave me this opportunity to think about it in a critical way.