MLP: So what exactly is the concept behind the Ideal Home Music Library?

Mike:  It’s a historical fiction; a bunch of stories about people that you’ve never heard of--not necessarily amateur musicians, but obscure composers--and it’s framed in a clear historical context. The story starts with this older gentleman, a janitor at the American Institute of Musicology, who finds a book of songs from various times in the 20th century. He has a PhD in Musicology so he gets really excited about it, but nobody takes him seriously. Eventually he becomes friends with me and my little rag tag pop band, and we collaborate on a musical project featuring new recordings of the songs. He researches the history of each tune, and we recreate the music.

MLP: That’s a pretty involved back story you’ve got going there. Is there an overarching premise to all of this?

Mike:  It’s about making music no matter what, and all these people you’ve never heard of who were doing it with whatever means they had. It allowed me to explore a more conceptual approach, almost like an art piece. This made for a more neutral artistic endeavor, a way to get away from writing songs about my feelings and my experiences and take myself out of it, but not completely. I had to come up with a little story to keep myself involved.

MLP: The stuff you’ve done prior to this has been pretty introspective and autobiographical. I didn’t hear that so much with this one, but you seem to be saying it’s in there somewhere.

Mike:  Well, some of the stories are based on my experiences, but they aren’t directly connected to me. I did that for a reason. When you pick up a record by a songwriter, you expect it’s going to be about that person’s experiences, so it’s always pleasantly surprising when it isn’t. Not that I have anything against confessionals and stuff like that, I just got a little tired of it.

MLP: What prompted the shift in subject matter?

Mike:  Well, when I was living in New York a couple years ago, I started listening to The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs album. That was also when I first heard Belle and Sebastian. I had always been into musical songs, or show tunes, but had never really thought about writing them myself. Listening to those groups and hearing that stuff in a pop context got me excited. I realized you can use that style as a venue to write stories, instead of just talking about yourself. So I guess I sort of took it to the extreme.

MLP: So in some ways it’s almost an escapist record. I mean, all of these little stories and lives you’ve created, they’re all totally detached from reality. Do you think this was a reaction to the escalating international crises--the war in Iraq, terrorism, etc--taking place during the creation of this album?

Mike:  Maybe. I was in New York when I came up with this idea, and I definitely needed to escape that place. I don’t think I had that big picture world view in mind when I was getting into it, but I think it probably contributed to my wanting to escape into something. I felt pretty alienated, for many reasons, whether it was world events or just the craziness of the city… But maybe it had some tie-in.

MLP: Do you agree that this is an escapist record?

Mike:  Pretty much. It kind of demands that you sit down and look at it, because there’s a big old booklet, and there’s all these words. You’ll either look at it and go “ehhh” or you’re going to actually get into it. There’s nothing on it that says I wrote the songs and there’s nothing that tells you that it’s not real, so it kind of invites you to buy into the whole thing. For example, I gave the album to a professor of mine, and he came back to me and said, “Wait a minute, I thought that song was yours, but it’s a standard!” He thought it was real, and he’s a professor! It’s not like I was trying to fool him, or anybody else, but in order to really escape into it you have to believe that it’s actually real. To look at it and take it as truth, that was what I was trying to do. I just wanted it to be convincing.

MLP: What’s interesting is that the music that you’re dealing with is supposed to be traditional popular music, and the way you’ve approached it is completely anti popular music. To actually have to sit down and read a booklet is--

Mike:  --not so popular, I know! I mean, nobody in popular music these days writes songs down and here we’ve included the sheet music! So it’s kind of subversive. The fact that we framed this kind of pretentious background around it is kind of a slap in the face, and sometimes it veers into the realm of parody. Not of the music itself, but of some of the concepts we surround music with. For example, the idea that our picture isn’t even on the cover; most albums have the band, and they look really good, and really cute, and they make good music, but there’s that extra thing in there. We didn’t want to do that.

MLP: The idea being that you’re turning away from the pop music’s fixation on image-based celebrity, right?

Mike:  Not so much the celebrity thing, because we’re definitely not celebrities! (Laughs) But look at Belle and Sebastian: they don’t have pictures of themselves, they have random pictures of other people, and in a way it draws your attention towards what they made, instead of towards them. Magnetic Fields is that way too. Same with the Decemberists wearing gypsy costumes in their press photos. I guess it’s just been going around in the last couple of years.

MLP: Where do you think this album fits into the Reclinerland catalog?

Mike:  I think it fits in nicely, because we don’t want to stick to any one thing. If you listen to our other albums, they’ve always had lots of flavor and variety, and I think The Ideal Home Music Library is just an extension of that approach. This album is me shooting for something new, and now we’ll probably pull back. I mean, we’re probably not going to do show tunes for the rest of our lives. But I wanted to start writing songs with stories and narratives, so I did it, and I’ll probably continue to write songs with narratives, because I know how to do it now and it feels good.

MLP: So in that sense the album has allowed you to push the envelope and expand on the possibilities.

Mike:  That’s right. We’ve given ourselves permission to explore this style. I like doing that. I think a composer, or song writer, or artist, should be neutral. He or she should have all the tools at their disposal. You shouldn’t use them all at once but you should have them. You should feel free to play loud, then turn around and play soft, use acoustic guitars, use an electric, and so on. That’s what you are there to do and you’re just more creative that way.

MLP: I agree. There’s such a tendency for bands right now to have a certain gimmick. It’s, “This is what our band does,” not, “This is what this particular album is like.”

Mike:  Right! Whether it’s the bouncy Sixties beat, the Motown vocal style, or some group from the Eighties, bands seem to be taking specific characteristics and using them over and over again. They pick something that a group of people identify with, or that the press can easily talk about, and they run with it.

MLP: That sounds like the opposite of your approach, what you’re trying to avoid.

Mike:  Well, personally, it doesn’t inspire me as much to hear stuff that’s just one thing, because once you identify what that one thing is, it’s good for a song or two and then it’s like, “OK, I’ve got it.” At the same time, it does make it interesting from the song writer’s perspective. It’s all about reducing it to little elements and seeing how many variations you can come up with using just those. We could probably use a bit of that, but I don’t consider us to be unfocused. I think our unifying device is that we do different things. We come at songs at the time of composition, and instead of saying “We’re doing this,” we say, “We have all this stuff we can do, now how do we feel?”

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