Exclusive: Interpol Explain Our Love To Admire Track By Track

Interpol are Chart's July 2007 cover artists. It's our annual artist-written issue, and also features The National talking to Arcade Fire, Bedouin Soundclash talking to Bad Brains and Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer talking about the time she saw a guy light his penis on fire in Toronto.

Interpol guitarist Daniel Kessler and bassist Carlos D gave us a little insight into the songs on their new Our Love To Admire album. Tracks one to six are explained by Kessler, while D takes over for the remaining songs.

1. "Pioneer To The Falls" — "Pioneer" was, I think, the second song we wrote for this record. 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. We came up with a lot of ideas, then kept the ones we liked, then organized them in the perspective of the song. We kept wanting to introduce new things, keep the song building and building. Sometimes that piling things on can be a bad thing, but it worked out here. It wasn't over-thought. Halfway through the writing process we talked about making it the first song on the record, so we knew before we recorded it.

2. "No I In Threesome" — I had that progression for a little while, guitar-wise. Again, that was a song that greatly benefited from keyboard arrangements. That song is unlike "Pioneer," which takes you to places you don't know. It's a pretty challenging song, "Pioneer." "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, which is kind of classic.

3. "The Scale" — I don't have favourites on the record, and "The Scale" definitely isn't my favourite, but just when it comes on it feels right. 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. In the end, it's still very different for Interpol because there's more than meets the eye. There's not a lot happening, but everything that's happening is happening for a very specific reason.

4. "The Heinrich Maneuver" — I believe that's the first song we wrote for the record. I remember Sam [Fogarino] 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.

5. "Mammoth" — I think "Mammoth" is a very definitive song for the record. I think Paul [Banks] sang the best he ever has on this record. His falsetto on this song 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. It doesn't remind me of "Not Even Jail," but it does in the sense that I think it will age well. That song was different for Antics. I think "Mammoth" is kind of the same thing for this record.

6. "Pace Is A Trick" — That was probably the third or fourth song we wrote. It's how some songs just move pretty quickly. The drums don't come in for a minute-and-a-half, so it gives the listener a bit of a breather, again, a bit of an air of mystery. Paul is 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.

7. "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.

8. "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.

9. "Who Do You Think That Is There?" — Paul and I had a long debate about that one. The guitar riff itself that 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. We both had our own different interpretations.

10. "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 verse vocal melody is very visceral. But then the rest of it is way out there.

11. "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.

Here are Interpol's Canadian dates:

Sept. 8 Toronto, ON @ Toronto Islands (Virgin Festival)
Sept. 9 Montreal, QC @ Parc Jean-Drapeau (Osheaga Festival)