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Interviewer:
Some people have made the comment that this album, and ‘Siberian Breaks’ is typical of it, is you deliberately trying to scare off casual listeners. That’s the polite way of saying it. I guess the not-so-polite way of saying that is, it’s a “fuck you” to fans. What do you make of those comments?
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Andrew VanWyngarden:
I think it’s pretty ridiculous. We can say, till we’re blue in the face, that we just sat down and made an album, made music that we like and that it’s almost like we were writing a journal or something. It was a picture of who we were, 16 months promoting our first record and the whirlwind of that, and I think it sucks that we’ve made something honest and heartfelt that’s interpreted as intentionally alienating or an attempt to drive people away. Really, if people paid attention to the first album besides the singles, or listened to ‘Metanoia’, or listened to the interviews where we’ve talked about the bands that we love, I think it’s really not that big a departure. Saying that it’s a “fuck you” is a misread.