For the past couple of years, music blogs have functioned much like the NME in Great Britain. Each week, that paper elevates some hip young band to superstar status, and with great regularity, those bands sink without a trace. Music blogs operate much the same way, though with a much more accelerated publishing schedule.

All of this has been good and bad. Good, of course, because I’ve heard a lot of music I might not have otherwise; bad because a lot of that music isn’t very good, or at least not worthy of the slavish praise heaped upon it.

And then there is Shearwater. I had never heard of the band until last year, when many bloggers began writing about the band’s disc, Palo Santo. I downloaded a couple of tracks and really liked what I heard. I picked up the disc, and it continued to grow on me. Eventually, I fell in love with it, listing it at no. 11 on my Best Music of 2006 list. I heard a lot of Talk Talk, maybe some Peter Gabriel and some of the grander indie rock like Shearwater’s brother band Okkervil River. It was a majestic disc driven by Jonathan Meiburg’s sweet falsetto and the rest of the band’s mastery of dynamic shifts and instrumental tension.

I was excited to learn earlier this year that the band had signed to Matador and would be reissuing a revised version of the disc. Hearing the new version of “Red Sea Black Sea” compared with the old one is a revelation, a comparison that shows the band is more fully able to use all of the tools at its disposal, its reach meeting its grasp.

Meiburg took some time after South by Southwest to discuss the reimagined version of Palo Santo, the band’s next album and the way the band member’s outside interests contribute to the whole.

TIRBD: What is the status of the next record? Has the work on the Palo Santo reissue affected that, both timewise and in terms of helping you to realize what you want to accomplish and/or now have within your grasp?

We're working on the next record, though we haven't started recording. We've started playing a few new songs in the set and plan to keep adding others over the next tour or two. Recording is really the shortest part of making a record; in a way, most of the work is done beforehand, in the writing and arranging of the songs. I think working on the Palo Santo re-recordings was probably helpful, in that it got us back into the studio and reminded us what it's like to feel comfortable there.

But the most important thing that's taught me about the range and ability of the band has been playing together, both for an audience and just for ourselves. Sometimes it feels like every time we play, the whole thing opens up just a little bit more. We got together and rehearsed a few weeks ago and I was just delighted at the way this group of people works together musically – it's very special.

What was the idea behind doing the reissue and rerecording some of the tracks? Were you looking for a way to bide time until putting out a new disc in 2008, or has this been something you’ve long wanted to do?

Definitely not biding time. I put up a long post on our message board about this, but in general we felt there was an opportunity to put Palo Santo’s best face forward in a way that it hadn't been before, especially after we'd played the songs live many times. The whole thing had evolved in a way that we really liked, and we jumped at the chance to capture that and re-present it to people.

How do you balance your time between Shearwater and Okkervil River, and how do you see your participation in Okkervil River and Will Scheff’s participation in Shearwater evolving over time?

Okkervil and Shearwater met and started dating immediately – we moved in together after only a few weeks of knowing one another – and we had a very rewarding relationship for a while. And then, as time went by, we noticed that we'd sort of changed and become different people with different interests; Okkervil was leaving the house for several nights in a row without explanation; we were leaving dishes in the sink and driving Okkervil crazy. So, after a long, sleepless night at the kitchen table with a bottle of tequila, we decided that we'd have to split up. Shearwater moved out to stay with friends, but we got to keep the dog. A few months of intermittent and slightly terse communications ensued, followed by a sort of rediscovery of each other as friends. We're tight again now, but in a very different way, and as time goes by it starts to get harder and harder to even remember those early days, or to look at one another and think "I've seen that band in its underwear."

How has it been different as the sole songwriter in the band? Do you find yourself needing to dig deeper because you’re responsible for the entire record rather than half of it from a songwriting perspective?

Oh, I'm a control freak anyway, so I love it. Now everything bad is my fault, too, which is an added bonus.

I would assume the band is playing more and more live shows, and will continue to do so to support the reissue. How are the shows going, and what changes can you see in the band and the songs as you play more?

Well, we're still in that unending process of learning to shut up and listen to one another. The more you do it, the more powerful the music gets. It's a thing I've always envied about string players; they're trained from the get-go to play as an ensemble, to blend the sounds of their instruments, to think of the piece rather than themselves as star performers. Most rock bands only seem to learn it after years of trial and error. We're getting better at it. Even I remember to do it sometimes.

One could assume that certain aspects of your music and the presentation of the band are influenced by your ornithology studies. Is that a fair assessment, and are there other interests of yours or of your bandmates that have an influence about which fans might be surprised?

The birds mostly help me to remember that there's a world outside of my house and the computer where I spend way too much of my time. Everybody's got other interests in this band; we'd be a formidable team for Odyssey of the Mind if we could only go back to junior high. Thor can build anything out of anything, Howard can devise a system of notation for a purely oral language and Kim can write an award-winning play about the whole thing.

Musically, I always blame my upbringing in the Episcopal Church for my melodic instincts (and my sort of formal sense of drama). When we played in a church a couple of weeks ago [in Austin for SXSW], I realized that I'd been writing songs for that kind of space from the beginning; I just wasn't aware of it. I'm trying to get Matador to send us on a tour of churches. Not for the theology! Just for the acoustics. Your average church is way better acoustically than your average rock club.

What are some of your favorite albums, and will you admit to any guilty pleasures?

Peter Gabriel's Passion (the soundtrack to "The Last Temptation of Christ") sure is awesome, still. I think it might be my favorite thing he ever did. I've also been listening to a woman from Mali named Kokanko Sata, and a friend played me some Indonesian guitar music that I completely loved a few months ago. Dr. John's first record. Kraftwerk. Nina Simone. Town and Country's Five. Jon Wayne. Guilty pleasures...hmm. Bruce Springsteen's second record? The second Dire Straits record?

Labels: Monday Interview, music