Interpol Explain Our Love To Admire Track By Track

06/25/09 11:49am

Daniel Kessler and Carlos D. explain all the songs on Interpol's Our Love To Admire album...

Daniel Kessler
"Pioneer To The Falls"
It's a pretty complicated song, but it came out pretty naturally. I wrote the main guitar bit at home and then the band wrote everything else around it. We wrote keys as a prominent member of the band, so with that in mind, while we were writing "Pioneer," keyboards played a great role in the genesis of the song.

"No I In Threesome"
"No I In Threesome" is a bit more of a classic tune. It's definitely got a verse-chorus-verse-chorus kind of feel. But the atmosphere we had around it gave it sort of a different vibe to the chord progression.

"The Scale"
There's a really slow groove to the whole thing, and it's a really non-traditional song where it kind of stays on the same keel and then changes keys three-quarters of the way through. There's a really ambitious breakdown. I don't know if we pulled it all off, and in fact, we made that song one way and then went back and remixed it.

"The Heinrich Maneuver"
I believe that's the first song we wrote for the record. I remember Sam and I jamming that song before we started writing the others and it felt pretty good just bouncing around. It's definitely one of the songs that when we play live has the most energy. You can really just feel Interpol charging forward.

"Mammoth"
"Mammoth" is a very definitive song for the record. I think Paul sang the best he ever has on this record. He does a falsetto on this song and I think it fits very naturally. That was one of the songs that you're writing, and you have disagreements and treaties and amnesties and so forth. At a certain point you're like, "I'm committed to this, but I don't know what it is." And then you look back and you go, "That song's pretty good." Those are the best kinds of songs.

"Pace Is The Trick"
Paul's right at the front of the track. I think with a lot of the songs he sounds different from track to track. That one, as much as it doesn't seem like it would be too complicated and I had the progressions done for a while, it took us to some spots where we were like, "Uh, how are we gonna get out of this?" This song definitely had a lot of "do we really need this or that?" and those are important conversations to have. When you get out of those conundrums, you feel very validated.

Carlos D.
"All Fired Up"
It's a song that had been on the back burner for a long time because it was like a different aesthetic right off the bat. There was Daniel's rockabilly-ish kind of riff, and we always wondered how we were going to Interpol-ize this thing. It was quite a challenge for us. We waited a long time and then finally it clicked one day and became what it is now. It's weird.

"Rest My Chemistry"
That song kind of wrote itself. Some songs are stubborn. Others kind of go with the flow. That one really went with the flow. It's a pretty straightforward song, wears its heart on its sleeve.

"Who Do You Think"
Paul and I had a long debate about that one. The guitar riff itself served as the genesis of the song. Because of the way Daniel plays it, it's not exactly obvious right away that the riff begins at a certain point. So there was contention among the band members as to what the actual nature of this guitar riff was, and it took
a long time to resolve this.

"Wrecking Ball"
It has kind of a Brian Eno vibe to it. And then at the end it shifts into this orchestral, symphonic thing. It's quite an immediate song because the verse vocal melody is very visceral. But then the rest of it is way out there.

"The Lighthouse"
We knew from the moment Daniel brought that riff in that this song was going to be a different beast from anything we've done before. So that in particular was a challenge. I mean, the rockabilly thing was a challenge, but at least we knew there was going to be drums and bass. But with this one we were like, all bets are off. We were very happy with the outcome.

The following feature is from the July 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. You can purchase the issue at the Chart Shop.