Tommy Orange’s 2018 novel There There

CB: There There is one of my favorite books of the last couple years. It’s brilliant and beautiful and troubling. It demystifies a lot of false narratives that America has about indigenous people, and I was really drawn to his mode of storytelling: Multiple characters are getting ready for a pow wow, and you learn their histories, and you slowly realize they’re all connected. The culmination is devastating. I was inspired by that kind of slow horror, the creeping reveal that all of these people were headed towards the same chaos. It got me thinking about this idea that everything is moving towards a single event—or, with our record, this idea of the center not holding, and all of the songs circling around it.

I reminded myself that, in comparison to the loudness of culture right now, the vernacular of specificity and the personal is worth telling. That the act of three middle-aged women making a record together is its own act of protest, that I wanted to tell stories that affected people in their hearts and not necessarily in their minds. There have been times when my storytelling can veer too much towards the cerebral. But right now, we wanted the sound to be huge, but the stories to feel almost introspective.

We tried something new for us and took our verses as journeys of loneliness—a narrator on the edge of chaos, depression, grasping at corrosiveness and not knowing what to do with this brutality they’ve suddenly sunk their teeth into. But then you get to the chorus, and these narrators are joined by multiple voices, and the isolation disappears. We were playing with notions of the singular and the plural within the song, which is something I took away from the books I was reading.

Depeche Mode’s concert at the Moda Center in Portland, Oregon on October 23, 2017

CT: There’s one upside to all the new people in Portland: getting a big Depeche Mode show. I had never seen them, even though I was a fan from high school. There were always Depeche Mode songs on mixtapes then: “Hey, you’re such a pret-ty boy,” you know, kind of silly but also amazing. And I thought their last album [Spirit] was a great response to Brexit and Trump.

Dave Gahan is an incredible performer. He’s in his late 50s but he looked like a teenager on stage. He was bold and cheeky and sexy and wild and obviously loved what he was doing. I was inspired by the way he moved, by the way they just owned everything, by the dark, gender-bending characters they’ve always had. I loved seeing a band that has had such a long career. They really seemed to enjoy the show, and I enjoyed it, too.

They also always blended guitars and synthesizers in a really interesting way, which was inspiring for our band since we were writing with more synthesizers. For this album, Carrie and I were writing in GarageBand or Logic and trading files back and forth. We wrote plenty of things on guitar but we also started to write with synthesizers, just the most basic things they have in GarageBand. In the past, we’ve thought, We’ll transpose it to guitar, of course. But this time we were like, We could actually use a version of this in the recording. We were into the idea of doing something different.