Alisa Ali: When we began playing your music, I thought that your band’s name was an old-time expression. Is it?

Justin Ringle: It’s synonymous with nonsense or rubbish. It was originally something I heard my grandfather used and I just liked the antique sound of it.

Alisa: Do you actually use it when you’re speaking?

Justin: I don’t (laughs).

Nathan Crocket: If you say something ridiculous during this interview we’ll make a point of retorting thus.

Alisa: I will likely say something ridiculous during this interview. [“Horse Feathers”] is also a Marx Brothers movie.

Justin: Yeah, I’ve become painfully aware of that since I’ve had the name. I didn’t know that there was a Marx Brothers movie when I began playing under that name, but a lot of people think that was the genesis of the name. But it’s not. I’ve never actually seen the movie, but in mood, it’s about as far away as possible from what we’re doing, so it’s kind of confusing.

Alisa: From your name, I was expecting something different, like a hipster, ironic, indie band. But when I started researching you, I saw all of these Americana labels pop up which is probably due to the fact that your first album [Words Are Dead] was nominated as Americana album of the year for the Plug Awards. What do you feel about the Americana label?

Justin: I think it’s more fitting than a lot of other labels that people try to affix to what we do. Only because it’s even more open-ended in a way. In the indie community, they always want to label things contextually to other bands. But in the Americana world, it’s kind of like, well, Americana.

Alisa: I’d love to know the genesis of the band because there have been some lineup changes.

Justin: Well, I moved to Portland in 2004 and I started writing songs, right before I’d moved from Idaho. I started playing open mics and just kind of messing around with music, but then I began to take it more seriously. Eventually I met the first instrumentalist that I began working with, Peter Broderick, and did Words Are Dead with him. Then we enlisted his sister to play cello on the next album and we did House With No Home with me, Peter and Heather. Then they got involved with other projects and [Nathan, Catherine and Sam] began to filter in during various times and we’ve been playing in this arrangement for about a year and a half. There’s been other people involved in the past too, playing live. This is the first time I’ve actually been able to tour with the band that I recorded with on the record.

Nathan: The original instrumentalist, Peter Broderick, is an old childhood friend of mine and when he went on to other projects, he suggested me as a replacement. Sam and I began playing with Horse Feathers at that time.

Justin: Which is funny because Peter and Nathan grew up together, literally 400 yards apart, in rural Oregon. [Nathan’s] mom was their violin instructor and orchestra teacher.

Nathan: I started playing violin when I was about five.

Sam Cooper: I like to tell people that Nathan began playing when he was an embryo.

Nathan: In some ways I was studying at that point. When I was really young, I really wanted to play the violin. But as I started getting into the depths of classical training, I definitely had several years where I was not enjoying it. I’m very glad I stuck with it because I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Catherine Odell: I met Justin through the Portland Cello Project. I used to play with them and they collaborate with local musicians. Horse Feathers was one of the bands they collaborated with.

Justin: I could tell that she had better intonation than most.

Catherine: He stalked me.

Justin: I did, actually (all laugh). I watched all of the YouTube clips she was in. At the time she was playing with another band called Sea Wolf from Los Angeles and watched those clips with the utmost scrutiny.

Nathan: I remember chatting with Justin about this when we were recruiting Catherine and he was like, “I think she’s going to do okay. I was watching videos of her all last night!” (all laugh).

Sam: The technical term for what Justin did is “headhunting.”

Catherine: He came to one of my shows with another band in a really small venue. After that show, he asked if I had any interest on joining him on tour. I was a little offended at first.

Alisa: You were? Why?

Catherine: I was doing my own thing, so the gall of this man to ask me to leave what I was pursuing to go join his efforts! (she laughs).

Justin: You never told me that!

Catherine: I didn’t? (laughs). What better time to reveal it than now?

Justin: Now you have all this.

Catherine: Living the dream.

Alisa: How did you break up with your old band?

Catherine: It didn’t happen immediately. I actually think I got kicked out of my own band when I was gone for too long.

Justin: It was my fault.

Alisa Ali: You have a lot of heavyweights involved on [this album] - pun intended. Jim Abbiss (Arctic Monkeys, Editors, Sneaker Pimps) produced this for you. How did he become involved?

Spencer Page: That was kind of a weird one. We thought it would be a good idea from the start and then found out that he'd been doing the Noisettes record as well so it's kind of a weird approach to him just before it and then it all happened at the same time. The Noisettes spoke to him a bit and it's through that, basically, but he'd loved what he'd heard and wanted to get involved.

Alisa: Did you learn anything from him?

Chris Ellul: Nah, he's rubbish (all laugh).

Kelvin Swaby was just fantastic. He plumbed the house, basically.

Dan Taylor: He kind of cleaned it up for us.

Spencer: There's a lot of sonic stuff, sounds.

Dan: He made it audible whereas we usually make it as inaudible as possible.

Swaby: Yeah, we try to go as rough as possible, so we still wanted the grittiness in there, and the dirt in there but it's kind of up to him to make it sonically so it works for radio.

Alisa: You have a notable sample on the album of Screaming Jay Hawkins' ["I Put A Spell On You" in the song "Sixteen"]. What made you decide to use that?

Swaby: It's not a sample, but ["Sixteen"] is completely influenced by that track. It's actually us playing everything. It kind of sounds heavier in his version.

Dan: We wrote it first and he sampled us!

Swaby: Yeah, crazy! I don't know how that works ....

Alisa: That song also has a weird carnival vibe mixed with a 60s girl group sound. Who [was] the guest vocalist on there?

Swaby: Actually it's Shingai Shoniwa of the Noisettes. She kind of came in and joined in the party. We only wanted her on one song originally and then she ended up doing three so it was great. She's a good girl. She gives good neck massages.

Alisa: I did not know that about her!

Swaby: You do now!

Alisa: Are you a fan of the Noisettes?

Dan: We had a mutual friend, somebody who was doing our sound who knew them and worked with them and he suggested it would be a great hookup and he was absolutely correct.

Alisa Ali: You guys holed yourselves up in a converted church in upstate New York [to record this album]?

Victoria Legrand: We went for a month and we stayed in a house and we continued the intense focus process that we'd been doing in Baltimore. And it was a church but it didn't feel very religious at all.

Alisa: What did it look like?

Victoria: it was a beautiful wooden room with stained glass, high ceilings, but no religious iconography anywhere.

Alex Scally I thought it was more barn-like than church-like.

Alisa: Was that experience different from how you recorded in the past?

Victoria: It was longer.

Alex: Every other time time we've recorded it's been about getting it done as quickly as humanely possible because we had a few days to do everything. This time, we had a ton of time. Three weeks, but that seemed like an eternity. We were able to take our time and focus.

Alisa: People have been saying you have a very consistent sound, but to me, you sound more confident.

Victoria: I think we've definitely gotten stronger, but that's what happens when you tour constantly. You live and breathe the music that you make.

Alex: I think we still have a lot of the same musical interests but I think there's definitely been a natural drive towards sophistication. I don't think anyone wants to make the same record twice and you tire of the old things. I think we're tired of those low fi sounds, they're limiting and have one dimension.

Victoria: We just tried something a little different, but not too different.

Alex: It's like getting a new Lazy-Boy chair!

Victoria: We might go back to the Lazy-Boy. You never know what might happen four months from now. You never know how you're going to feel about songs because when you play them live you learn so much about [them] and what you loved you might not like. It's a crazy cycle.

Alisa: When you play the songs, have you found that you're favoring particular songs to play live?

Victoria: We've been playing some of the new songs for a little bit but then there's a whole other half of the record that we've yet to really perform every night. So, we've had fun playing "Walk in the Park" and it's always really fun when you play the new songs because Devotion is definitely played out for us. We want more from [Devotion songs]. It feels old but it also feels strange in your body.

Alex: It's like hooking up with your ex-girlfriend and it's horrible. You know you shouldn't be doing it and it's not right.

Victoria: And you're trying to capture how it felt when you dated ....

Alex (finishing her sentence): But it's not going to happen. It's gross.

Alisa: So these songs are basically your girlfriends?

Victoria: Every record.

Alex: Polygamy!

Alisa: I like that analogy. So the new album is Teen Dream. What does that mean to you?

Victoria: It's something that came out of a burst of energy. When we found the words, we instantly knew it was the title of the record. I think we had four songs at that point and it gave us this incredible light at the end of the tunnel. It's really just an abstracted sense of freedom, passion, obsession, whatever you'd make of it as well. It felt very classic to us.

Alex: It was an instinctual blurt as many things are for us.

Victoria:: It's not about our teen past, though I'm sure most people would say that we are giant teenagers.

Alex: We didn't name the album 'The Dream You Experience During Your Teenaged Years' because it's not specific.

Victoria: It seemed like the proper point for a record that, for us, felt epic on certain levels. A lot of imagination, a lot of movement, so it really seemed like the proper sail for this very swift creature that grew up out of waves. And that's literally what the record felt like, making it, and so when that happened it did feel like something bursting through.

Alex: The Germans did not understand the Teen Dream title. They wanted specifics. They wouldn't just let it be. They were like 'but what does it mean?'