The Long Winters are playing the Rhythm Room in Phoenix, Tuesday, Sept. 12, on their first headlining tour in support of their new album Putting the Days to Bed. The great third album from the Seattle-based band find John Roderick and company punching up their recipe of sharp-tongued, searing indie rock with lots of piano flourishes to compliment the great guitar work and songwriting.

Photo by Autumn de Wilde

In the past the band has toured with Death Cab For Cutie, Centro-matic and The Decemberists, among others. The supporting tours helped build The Long Winter’s fan base, but the band has been wanting to headline for some time. Touring with Eric Corson on bass, Nabil Ayers on drums and utility man Jonathan Rothman playing keyboards and guitar, The Long Winters should be able to bring the sometimes complex song arrangements to life onstage. The band will also play an instore at Stinkweeds at 5 p.m. on Tuesday.

Normally, I would drivel on about Roderick and his band but I spoke with him Sunday night for nearly an hour and spent many more trying to edit the interview without cutting out the good stuff. The guy is funny and smart, and isn’t lacking in the opinion department, which makes for plentiful great quotes. This interview, which represents less than half of the time on the phone, is still about 3,200 words and it was hard to condense it as much as I did.

There’s more if anyone wants it. Since he has a good sense of humor I’d like to suggest that they change the name of the band to The Long Winders.

AZNightBuzz: Just to start things off, you said you were in the studio earlier today. What were you guys doing?

John Roderick: We were recording a track because there’s an HBO series that is in production right now and the music supervisor is a fan of The Long Winters. She asked us to do a song that they might end up using as the theme song. It’s totally speculative and it’s a Hollywood thing. I’m sure they have a bunch of bands all submitting versions of a track for the thing.

We’ve never really done anything like that before and now we’re getting asked to do that type of stuff so I think it’s fun. We had a day off today and the idea of going into a studio and recording a song to all of us seemed like the perfect way to spend the day off in LA. What are we going to do, go to Disneyland? Really going into the studio and recording a song is like going to Disneyland.

AZNB: So was it an original composition?

JR: No, we did a cover of the Velvet Underground song “What goes on.”

AZNB: You mentioned having a day off, which you spent most of in the studio. Are you guys going to go out tonight see anyone and mess around in LA?

JR: Well, we might. We messed around a little bit this morning. The studio is in Culver City so we went and had some Machaca for breakfast and had some great cheap Mexican food. And when we were done in the studio we went down to Venice Beach and walked along the boardwalk and there was a big bonfire and a drum circle out on the beach which we got our hippy groove on to.

AZNB: You are just starting this tour with a few dates in California. How’s it going so far?

JR: This is really our first proper headlining tour, every tour we did in support of When I Pretend to Fall we opened for another band. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time because we were getting all these great tours. We opened for Nada Surf and Death Cab for Cutie and The Decemberists and the list goes on and on.

But at the end of the two years we looked around and realized “Oh shit, we’ve haven’t actually gone out and done a tour where we played just for people who come to see us.” So we took some time off and went out and did a short tour with Keane, again opening for somebody else, so this is our first headlining tour.

But true to form the first two shows in San Francisco and LA we played with Fiest. It was great. We played a show to a sold-out Fillmore in San Francisco which is something I’ve always wanted to do but it almost doesn’t feel like our tour has started yet because the first two weren’t really our shows. So anyway, tomorrow night in San Diego the first headlining show for the Long Winters on tour, outside of Seattle and Portland and so we’re very excited about it.

Plenty of bands, most bands by the time their at the stage in their career that we’re at, have done almost all their tours as headlining tours. We were kind of sheltered in that we’ve been offered all these nice tours in our history, but looking back on it I wish we’d gone out and done our own tour back in 2003. I think it would have been good for us and I think our fans would have appreciated it.

AZNB: Now you’re going to have a chance to test your mettle.

JR: That’s right. It’s going to be two-hour sets full of hippy jams and noodle-y Santana-style Latin flavored tracks.

AZNB: I’d like to talk about some of the recent things you’ve been involved in including the 826 Valencia benefit at the Bowery Ballroom in New York. (826 is the educational arm of McSweeney’s, a literary quarterly created by novelist Dave Eggers. The benefit was hosted by Jon Stewart, included music from Sufjan Stevens and David Byrne and readings from people like Sarah Vowell, among many others.)

My friend was there and said you were an unexpected highlight for him. How did you get involved with 826 Valencia and the benefit?

JR: Well, I’ve always known there was this snotty-pants mafia in the world. The smarty-pants mafia all know each other and they always have. It goes all the way back to Gore Vidal. The smarty-pants mafia is as old as time. It goes back to Oscar Wilde or before.

Coming from Alaska, growing up in the far far West, the prospect of even being invited into the Upper East Side Manhattan apartment where all those people sat around spilling martinis on each other – it never seemed very likely to me that I would ever find myself in that environment because although you can watch “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” on TV in Alaska, it’s very hard to imagine yourself in it.

And yet somehow, water seeks its own level I guess, and over the past couple of years some of the interviews I’ve given and some of the shows we’ve played – some people have come out and been like, “Well, that guy’s a smarty-pants! He’s really a know-it-all!” And little by little that has filtered out to smarty-pants in the world. I think the tipping point was when the Believer Magazine (another McSweeney’s publication) asked me to be interviewed, which was my introduction to Dave Eggers, and through Dave I came up on the radar there and I’ve technically become friends with the guys in They Might Be Giants, and they’re all mobbed up with the same crowd.

You’d be amazed at how all these people know each other. Any four-eyes you can think of that’s in the entertainment business knows every other four-eyes in the entertainment business. Because there are so few of them. Are you still there?

AZNB: Yes, I’m here. I’m just trying to mmmm…affirmative.

JR: Oh (Laughs). I guess it’s because there are so few people who are have the same kind of sense of humor and bookishness who make it in popular culture, the larger culture. Invariably those kind of people are always on the fringe of popular culture. They Might Be Giants are a radical example of a group of outsider nerds who actually had some hit records.

Little by little I was invited to come play in the sandbox and this 826 thing was a big opportunity because there was a room full of these people. Backstage my dressing room and Jon Stewart’s dressing room were right next to each other, and John Hodgeman and David Byrne and Eric Bogosian.

I was standing there asking myself how I got in the back door to make it all the way up to the fifth floor of this building.

AZNB: I’m sure that was a great experience and kind of a validation of your work. Recently you did some solo performances in Europe opening for The Undertow Orchestra. (Discussed in my recent interview with Vic Chesnutt.)

JR: We played like four or five shows. We played in Spain – Barcelona – and a few other Spanish dates at the end of a European tour I was doing and it was the first few dates of a European tour they were doing.

AZNB: I read about you sort of being their babysitter in a sense because everyone else was fucked up all the time and you no longer drink.

JR: Yeah, that Paste article kind of exaggerated that aspect of the story. I talked to the Paste interviewer for an hour about it and he kind of condensed it into a paragraph, though I have no beef against him. Dave Bazan from Pedro the Lion and I were sharing a hotel room for like five or six days on that tour, and Will Johnson and I have known each other for years and years. Centro-matic and The Long Winters have toured together since the early days. We’ve toured in Europe together and in the States many times.

Mark Eitzel spent a lot of time in Seattle so I knew him kind of peripherally. The only one that was truly new to me was Vic Chesnutt. The four of those guys really take care of each other. I offered if they did a tour and wanted me to just be their driver I would love to do it. It would be a privilege to me. Just watching the four of them interact with each other and the way they look out for each other and take care of one another was really instructive to me. I really fell in love in with it.

So my feeling was, let me be your driver, let me take care of you guys. That all got squashed a little bit.

AZNB: Vic played Tucson last weekend and I was privileged enough to be able to hang out with him a little bit.

JR: Oh my god. He’s amazing.

AZNB: For sure. Let’s get into the tour stuff a little. You hooked up with them at the end of your first solo tour. As a result of that has it changed the way you perform songs in the band context?

JR: Yeah, it has. Every new thing that I try, the main lesson that I learn is the more I’m able to let go of the tune a little while I’m playing it, the more fun I have and the better it sounds. Any musician can get up and work their way through their song, play it the way it was meant to be played, so to speak. There are plenty of musicians who are able to do that and perform their songs in the most lifeless way possible. The thing I learned on the solo tour, and what I’m learning on this new band tour, is that precision in rock music is the enemy of good times.

There are plenty of indie rock bands who would disagree vehemently with me on that premise. There are many indie rock bands where precision is the whole enchilada. They’re making very technical music. It’s very precise, things are interlocking. For me at least, that mentality is cold and harsh. As a performer myself the more potential there is to hit a wrong note, the more you’re out there on the tight rope where you should be. The more that you’re pushing the envelope, the more of a show it is. That’s hard to do every night, of course. Once you’ve played the same song 500 times, it’s hard to make it new. I am continually reminded that it’s not only about making it new, it’s also a lot more fun to do that.

AZNB: OK, let me ask you about the people you have on the road with you. Are they the same people that played on Putting the Days to Bed?

JR: Well, Eric (Corson) and Nabil (Ayers), bass and drums respectively, are the guys that that play on the record. Unlike When I Pretend to Fall, or The Worst You Can Do is Harm, we didn’t have a lot of people coming into the studio. We had some people come by and play on a track or two, but for the most part we confined the recording just to the three of us. It was a nice way to work and they’re a great band.

Now a member we’ve had since we finished the record to help us play on tour is Jonathan Rothman. He has mastered a lot of the stuff not just from this record but our previous stuff too. So he’s adding a lot.

AZNB: Are you having someone play keys a fair amount because there are a lot of keyboard parts on this record?

JR: Yeah, Jonathan plays both the keys and the guitar, so he’s covering a lot of different bases.

AZNB: Are you going to play piano yourself?

JR: I do. We bring a piano for me, and I play “Blue Diamonds” and “Delicate Hands” and “The Commander Thinks Aloud” and “Nora” – if we get to those songs, I play them on the piano.

AZNB: Depending on how the show is going?

JR: Yeah, I mean “The Commander Thinks Aloud” (from the string-infused EP Ultimatum) is always a challenge for the band to play and it’s kind of a treat for us to do, so if the crowd is really responsive and it seems like it will be rewarding to do, we will. But, that’s not a song that I want to take out and try to win over a crowd with. If you’re there and you’re totally into it then we’ll play it. In some ways I feel like that’s my signature tune and I’m not interested in floating that out to some festival crowd that’s just sitting around waiting for the beer truck.

AZNB: I understand that. I was surprised how quickly you recorded Putting the Days to Bed. I read that it was recorded in about a month.

JR: We kinda got in, got it done and got out.

AZNB: That was surprising to me. You have a reputation of being meticulous and a bit of a perfectionist. You would think those things wouldn’t work together so quickly.

JR: I think you can hear that perfectionism all over this record too, as much as you can on anything else. Whatever perfectionism I have is a perfectionism that more often than not chooses the first take of an un-rehearsed musician over the 30th take of somebody who’s practiced the song for a year. There are so many tracks on all of our records that are like, roll take, let’s see what happens. There are a lot of first takes.

But I think that can be an expression of a form of perfectionism because the attention to detail that’s going into the other stuff allows for that kind of spontaneity.

Part of what enabled me to do this record in a month was that I was producing it myself. There wasn’t a lot of time spent sitting in a room trying to communicate ideas to people who had their own ideas that they are either trying to communicate or not bothering to communicate back.

AZNB: Did you find yourself having arguments with your producer self at all?

JR: Oh yeah, but that voice is a constant friend and has been for 30 years. It like “Roderick, you’re so fucking stupid!” That guy’s been following me around since I was about 11 years old. What can you do? Make your peace with him.

AZNB: When you talk about The Long Winters, you say “we” but you’ve had so many people come in and out over the years and they are your songs, do you consider this lineup to be The Long Winters?

JR: I really do. Obviously, Eric has been through everything. Everything The Long Winters have experienced Eric has experienced. And there’s no more consummate Long Winter than Eric Corson. And when Nabil joined the band it was like he’d been with us from the beginning. His mentality, his personality fit perfectly with mine and Eric’s. In that sense it’s very different from ours. It’s an incredibly balancing counterpoint. We’ve had a lot of different personalities, sometimes people who were way out on the fringe in this band, but we haven’t had a lot of balance. There hasn’t been a lot of weight in the center that has stabilized the craft. Nabil does an incredible job of tempering people and taming their wilder impulses, and that made it a more solid operation.

The other thing about him is he can walk into a studio, sit behind a drum kit and without even warming up play a take with an incredible feel on the second or third pass on a song he’s never heard before, which is pretty amazing. So the band now, for the first time, feels less like a collective of like-minded people and more like a proper rock band.

AZNB: That’s a smart thing to recognize, the need for that balance, an important concept.

JR: It’s something where you couldn’t walk out the door and say, “I’m seeking a man who is balanced!” It’s something you recognize when you meet someone like that and you think, “This is new. This guy is not having a psychic battle with me over the salt shaker at the pizza restaurant.”

AZNB: I’d like to talk a little about the show. Your playing the Rhythm Room Tuesday. It’s been a while since you played in Phoenix. The last time I think you were in Arizona you played in Tucson at Plush opening for The Decemberists.

JR: Yeah, it’s been a long time. Oh no, let me correct that. We did an in-store at Stinkweeds last year, and we’re doing another one. We were on tour with Keane and we played with them in Nashville or St. Louis or something, and we were driving out to LA and we drove into Stinkweeds in the early afternoon sometime in September and played an in-store.

AZNB: Anything you’d like to add?

JR: Nothing really. I think you covered a lot of bases. I’m really glad to be back out on tour again and excited to play Arizona again. We always have a good time when we play there. We play Phoenix this time so it will probably be Tucson the next. When we played Stinkweeds a year ago, around the Ultimatum EP release, a great crowd of people came out. We always felt really supported in Arizona.

AZNB: This is random but you mentioned Machaca earlier. If you like Mexican food I can maybe point you to some places in town.

JR: We’ve dubbed this the Mexican food tour, which is much to everyone’s consternation because I am a fart-master. But we’re gonna eat tons of Mexican food on this trip and we’d love it if you’d point us to the Phoenix Mexican food.