Antony Hegarty: What drew me to music was this possibility of a form in which you could express yourself more vividly and expansively than in pedestrian life, especially in a form where emotion was validated or even heralded within the realm of music, whereas in pedestrian life and in patriarchal society in general, emotion tends to be disregarded or looked down upon, subjugated as a system of perceiving.
Chan Marshall: It either destroys you or it doesn’t. But fuck, I mean, we’ve all done things like that.
Hegarty: We shouldn’t be intimidated.
Marshall: I felt like I was falling out of an airplane. It was depressing.
Hegarty: And it was very hardcore.
Marshall: Like black or brown skin, or like wood grain or leopard print.
Hegarty: They’re more descriptions of a situation.
Marshall: Selling the farm. Carnies and gypsies. Malaria.
Hegarty: So he would wear three times the bracelets and put on more eyeliner, and he’d hiss and shake his wrists at the camera.
Marshall: You see these dogs and tires and these men come out of the bush and you wave and they smile.
Hegarty: I was excited by the idea. But I don’t see it as eclectic.
Marshall: It's like someone took a cigarette and applied heat really close to your skin.
Hegarty: Every animal cries out. Even gay ones.
Marshall: One time they let me and it was really inspiring.
Hegarty: It has a sense of a bomb ticking towards its final, terrible inevitability, so I always direct it that way.
Marshall: Like Madonna, dancing in a white room.