Holiday Road

[David]

I don’t think Lindsey played everything on his albums because he had trouble working with people. I think his method could only be realized in a solitary setting. When he talks about painting, he means it almost literally. Ordinarily, you take a bunch of people into a recording session and you have to articulate and verbalize everything so that communication happens. Lindsey’s method is to toy around with tools and instruments beneath the surface of language, except with oneself. A lot of his best work is probably happy accidents — trying something else and discovering something that sounds better extemporaneously, which then gets added to the tape and you keep going from there. Completely unplanned. Some of his songs are probably in a form that he had no idea he would reach when he went in that morning. This requires solitude, lowering all barriers, and letting musical ideas led you (as he’s said in interviews multiple times). In the same way that Stevie loves sitting at her piano at home with her candles and incense and songwriting, Lindsey finds his blissiest bliss searching for musical ideas without having to explain them first to other people.

I would venture to say that any of us who buy ourselves a keyboard workstation with thousands of complex sound effects on it love to do that very thing: use it by ourselves without any preconceived plan or agenda. We just start pressing buttons, turning knobs, and hitting the keys, and then we look up out the window and it’s already sunset. It’s exactly like painting, or writing.