Splendid: Kind of like "Mr. Grieves."

Tunde: Exactly. I think that was a way for me to figure out how to make songs and how to hear songs in my head and get them down immediately.

Splendid: And David has more of a trained musical background?

Tunde: Yeah, he can play pretty much whatever he picks up.

Splendid: What kind of background does he come out of? I know he's done some producing. (The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Fever To Tell, for instance.)

Tunde: Yeah, I think he started producing in the last five years. He's been a musician for as long as you could see, probably.

Splendid: What's his primary instrument?

Tunde: Guitar.

Splendid: And he's also a painter, as I understand it.

Tunde: Yeah, definitely. Before we started making music together, we would just -- you know, for dough -- go out and sell paintings on the street. David would always sell more than me.

Splendid: But you didn't run into each other in art school?

Tunde: No. I went to film school for a while. I don't think he ever went to art school.

Splendid: Was this NYU Film School?

Tunde: Yeah.

Splendid: That must have been a pretty interesting scene... Are you going to be involved, if you guys ever make a video? I guess you'll want to be pretty hands-on with that?

Tunde: Yeah, I would love to. That would be ideal. I'd actually like to give it to one of our friends to do, because I feel like I'm too close to the music to really want to be, like, all theatrical about it -- you know, this is my diamond-crusted-sharper-than-thou-image.

Splendid: I think there's also this thing where you write the song and the song is the art, and then video is this whole other layer of interpretation. It's almost like asking a writer to explain his book, when you should just read the book.

Tunde: Exactly.

Splendid: Anyway, could you tell me about the other people who are involved with the band, Jason and Kyp?

Tunde: Sure. Jason is Dave's brother. Dave is Jason's brother. He is also very talented in all the instrumentals. He plays guitar, bass, keyboards and drums. Initially when we started playing in Brooklyn, Jason would play with us, but then he had to go and do some other stuff. He's back playing with us live again and writing with us.

Kyp joined the band after we finished the EP. His name is in the liner notes. He's also a great guitarist and singer, so we're doing a lot of stuff now where we're trying to figure out how our voices fit together and what that's going to yield. It's pretty exciting, actually. It's very different, the songwriting process is really different, because we've got a definite venue for it to come out in, and it's just a different mindset. It's just as much fun, but we're throwing so much music together and shaving some of it away.

Splendid: I think that was one of the things that was really cool about the Young Liars EP -- that there were only a few people involved, but it's got such a rich, layered sound. Is it going to get more so?

Tunde: I can't say for sure, but it's probably going to be a bit of that. It's probably going to go in a few new directions as well.

Splendid: I've been reading your reviews and it looks like almost all the comparisons that you get -- Peter Gabriel and Stew from the Negro Problem -- it's all based on the way your voice sounds. And it completely misses what I think is the really interesting element, which is blending that very sweet, melodic vocal sound with an uneasy, anxious electronic beat. How'd you come up with that combination?

Tunde: Ahm. I don't know if there was a specific move to work on that sound. I guess it was just the natural evolution of us coming up with a tune or Dave coming up with a tune, and me coming up with the words, and just playing on top of his music, me using my voice as an instrument. I would see how I could -- as if I was playing a keyboard part and seeing how it would fit into that. A lot of what I was doing was playing off the sort of...the disturbing ...

Splendid: That's interesting, the musical underpinning would come first?

Tunde: Yeah.

Splendid: I understand that you guys use a lot of musical instruments and not all of them are what you would usually consider musical instruments?

Tunde: Well, we're singing directly into these pedals, which normally you would put a musical instrument into. And for us, it allows us at live shows to repeat, essentially to sing a line into the pedal and press a button and then you can harmonize with yourself. And you can keep doing it for as long as you want until it becomes completely unlistenable. You can speed it up and slow it down. It's kind of a combination of theremin and turntable and I don't know what, but it makes a really weird sound, like a caffeinated string section.

Splendid: It sounds amazing. Is it different every time you play? It sounds like a very improvisatory process.

Tunde: It can be. We've got a really strong blueprint for what we're going to do, because we've played the songs so much. It gets much looser when we're on stage, which is always great and interesting for us. There will always be a lot of confused and amazed looks shot back and forth between each other. Maybe that's our stage presence, that we don't really have that much stage presence, and so we just kind of stare at each other and challenge each other.

Splendid: It sounds wild. What kind of places are you playing now? I know you played with The Fall.

Tunde: Yeah, we opened for The Fall in Chicago, which was really great.

Splendid: Are you big fans?

Tunde: I have to confess that I had not heard much of their stuff. I'm just not in a lot of loops because I'm kind of a hermit. Dave and Kyp were both kind of like, holy shit, we're playing with The Fall. And I'm like, great. And then we got there and there were hundreds of people staring at us, and I was like, okay, The Fall, right. We're here, and we can't move, and that's great. The first night it was kind of nerve-wracking. The second night we pulled it off and it was a great show.

I was really happy to play out of town and be that well-received, because it would have been a long, long train ride home.

Splendid: Their fans were up for what you were doing?

Tunde: Yeah. I was taken aback. There were so many people who had no idea who we were. They were like, well, why did Touch & Go sign this band that they'd never seen live? A lot of the people who had come worked for Touch & Go. It was midway through the set when I remembered that. I think we kind of all did and got a little freaked out. But it was all right.

Splendid: I understand there's some 9/11 influence in your work. I hear it particularly in the first song, "Satellite". Do you want to talk about that? That's sort of a big event, and you guys live in Brooklyn, so you must have been really close to it when it happened. How do you incorporate an event of that magnitude into what you're doing?

Tunde: I know what happened for us is that before any of that had happened, we were already at a point where we were making stuff all the time. Sometimes we would make a little bit of money and sometimes we wouldn't. We were working towards doing something. We were working towards making, initially, a full-length album. But because we had to do different jobs, it was going very slowly. And the mindset was that we had to get this thing done because we really believed in it.

But then after that happened, and being in Brooklyn and New York in general, we really just kind of locked the doors and the outside world away. There was only so much paper-reading and TV watching you could do without wanting to end yourselves. On both sides. You had this horrible tragedy, followed by this maniacal, blind patriotism which was almost as scary. For me, after that, I saw people, whatever they could grab onto to believe in, they just did. They dove into it. Whether it was out of fear -- most of it was probably completely out of fear -- or out of a decision, to say that I'm not going to be afraid, I'm just going to apply myself. But this floor of the loft just became like a monastery or something. Okay, there's obviously nothing going on outside, so we have nothing to do but work.

Splendid: Did what you were doing musically make sense in the aftermath? Most of the people that I knew -- I knew a lot of people in New York -- felt like pretty much everything they were doing didn't matter any more. For about a week. It was like, I don't want to write any more, I don't want to...

Tunde: ...Do this or do that. Yeah, totally. There was definitely a period... I remember personally not being up for anything. But then I felt, well, what else am I going to do? I'm not going to just hang out. Everybody remembers, but after the attack, there was this period where you would here that this might happen or this was going to happen.

Splendid: It was a very strange period, and I think it's interesting how some of this stuff is now being processed by people who do creative things and have different interpretations of it. Not that what you're doing is totally driven by it, but it just seems that there's an undercurrent.

Tunde: Yeah. You couldn't help but be influenced by it. I know that when I wrote the lyrics for "Young Liars", it was about something completely and totally different, but a lot of people have said to me that it's kind of about being besieged.

Splendid: Yeah, that feeling of dread and floating anxiety.

Tunde: Sure. What do you do when you suddenly and very clearly realize that you have been lied to by the person that you've entrusted your care to? It could be the government or a girlfriend or a boyfriend. You have this feeling of being cut off. You're like, oh, what now?

Splendid: But I felt that it was the most spiritually uplifting track, the one where you came to terms with whatever it was, the anxiety, and transcended it. And I felt like the whole album followed that track, that the first song was the most edgy and uneasy and they gradually emerged out of that. But it's probably all bullshit. Anyway...can you tell me a little about "Blind", which I really like? It's got the most minimal of all the lyrics and this really creepy beat.

Tunde: Sure, that was funny because that song was written in three different places at three different times. The creepy beat -- Jason came up with that a while ago, and I guess he and Dave mixed it with some stuff that Dave had. The beat was probably made before a lot of the songs were. He put it on DAT and Dave started playing with a bit of organ on top of it. I came into it and was just listening to it for a couple of days. I had some lyrics that I had written.

This is going to totally -- not to put it in a place or anything -- but the first year I got out of school, or I had taken off from school, I was working as a ticket taker at Film Forum, and I had just broken up with someone. I hadn't seen her in forever, and it was one of those weird "who's not calling who" situations, and I saw the back of this woman's head, and just started scribbling. This should tell you that I had way too much time on my hands. And wrote that in maybe 1997. Six years ago. So I found it and put it on top of this track and it just fit really well.

Splendid: It's a great lyric that encapsulates this whole disconnectedness that a lot of people feel -- I really liked that.

Tunde: Oh, cool, thank you.

Splendid: So, you had some pretty famous people doing guest shots on your EP. You want to talk about that?

Tunde: I guess they're famous now.

Splendid: Well, they're famous to people like me. You had Nick Zinner and Brian Chase and Aaron Hemphill?

Tunde: Yeah, it's weird because Dave has known Nick from Baltimore. They both grew up there. I guess they've known each other from various places forever. Dave was roadying for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and developed the relationship further. The weirdest thing about all of that stuff was the people would just come by to ask questions about their albums, and they would hear what we were working on, and they would just ask if they could do something on it.

Splendid: Oh, that's excellent.

Tunde: Yeah, it's great. Especially like Aaron. I remember coming home one day and Aaron was on the floor with a guitar, like there were a bunch of pencils in it, and he was tapping on it. I was like, what's he doing? And Dave said (whispers), "Playing something on 'Blind'." But we're all friends and big fans of each other's music. Especially now, with Dave being as involved as he is with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Liars. Everyone's always milling about and poking into whatever anyone else is doing.

Splendid: That's great. Is Dave doing a lot of producing now or is he focusing more on TV on the Radio?

Tunde: He just finished producing the Liars album, but most of his energy is going to go into TV on the Radio until September, when we actually turn the record in, and after that we're going to be touring in November. So yeah, not to speak too much for him, but I hope it would be going towards us now and I think it is.

Splendid: Oh, I wanted to ask you about the Pixies cover. How did that happen?

Tunde: That was actually one of the four-track things that I had done a long time ago. I did a version in my bedroom to figure it out, what it would sound like, and I always thought it was a funny novelty thing. Then when we were recording the album, or recording the EP, the bass player, the guy was playing an upright bass on "Young Liars" and just hanging out. He had some time to kill, and we went into an empty room in the loft and I just layed one track down, just the basic, the root melody. We just kept going for about half an hour and I did about 20 takes.

Splendid: Is that all you singing?

Tunde: That's all me, yeah.

Splendid: Were you a big Pixies fan?

Tunde: Oh yeah, I loved the Pixies.

Splendid: Yeah, me too. I love covers. I think they're interesting because they tell a lot about the song, and also about the band that covers them. But a lot of bands just copy what's in the original. That one's so different.

Tunde: Yeah, as far as covers go, I also like it when people...a lot of people come up to me and tell me that they can't tell what it is at first, which to me is great. That's the first sign that it's working.

Splendid: But the music is all the same. It's slower and sung in a different manner with different instruments, but it's not like you changed the music or the words.

Tunde: It's nice to disguise something and have people say, oooh, that's great.

Splendid: So have you heard anything from Mr. Black?

Tunde: No. It might happen.

Splendid: What about the doo-wop? Is that something that's in your background? An old love?

Tunde: I don't know. I think half of it is just not being able to play an instrument. The other half is that I have a big affection for really old music. Knowing that you can do something without banks and banks and banks of technology is really important to me.

Splendid: Yeah, what kind of old music are you talking about?

Tunde: A lot of old blues. Any roots music, American music or Jamaican roots music, there's just such a ... I think about the time it was made in and what kind of a person Leadbelly was to write the kind of music that he did when he did. The way that it sounds and all of those conditions and those times that people went about working, it just seems more dire and important, and it's like you're moving something outside your soul and it's a healing thing. There's something that's just so mystical in all that stuff that I just fade out when I hear it. Like I'm not even here any more.

Splendid: So tell me about this new album. You're working on it now?

Tunde: I don't know how much I can say about it. We're still teasing it together. It will be a good listen.

Splendid: We'll just have to wait. So what do you guys do for fun, besides music?

Tunde: Even though it's my job, I still animate for fun. It's not as full-time as it could be. I have an animation studio that I opened because we were doing a video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, so I got to direct that, like about a month and a half ago. I had forgotten how much I loved doing that stuff. Just got a bunch of people together and built puppets and did it in a really old-fashioned way.

Splendid: You mostly do stop-motion?

Tunde: Yeah, mostly stop-motion.

Splendid: And you think you'll pursue that in tandem with the music?

Tunde: I'm going to try to. They're both kind of time-consuming, so I don't want to short-sheet either one of them. For me, it's nice to have one so that when you're taking a break from the other one... You feel like you need to... There are certain ideas that I can do in animation that I would feel kind of silly proposing to two other people in a band to carry out in a song. For me, it's gratifying to have that, to be able to say, all right, I'm going to be totally ridiculous.

Splendid: It sounds great. I wish I could see some of your animations.

Tunde: I think the Yeah Yeah Yeahs video is on NME.com. Just under their stuff. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs section of NME. It might be on the MTV.com site, too.

Splendid: Okay, well, I'll take a look. I don't have any more questions, but if there's anything you feel like I should have asked but didn't, or if there's anything else you want to talk about, I'm open to that.

Tunde: I don't know. I feel like we're being responded to so well. My prediction is that we're going to get infinitely weirder, so I hope people are going to respond as well to that.

Splendid: I think that's good, because a lot of bands, when they have a little bit of success, get very conservative, and I would hate to see that happen to you.

Tunde: I would, too.