Travis: When most bands go into a new record, they listen to other bands for inspiration. We listened to our last two records over and over and picked out what we loved about those albums and expanded on that. The Papercut Chronicles has a lot of really personal stuff, and after a while, it got hard for me to listen to. And our last record, we worked on it in New York, where there’s so much hustle and bustle. I had, like, four nervous breakdowns just trying to write that record. With The Quilt, we were in L.A. and free to do what we wanted.

Travis: Each song is like its own entity. There’s not one song on the album that sounds like another song.
Matt: It’s pushing new ground for us. There’s music on it that we’ve always been influenced by but that has never found its way into our albums before, like reggae. We just took what we do well, being a versatile band, and expanded on it.
Travis: I’m a huge Hall and Oates fan, and we even did a song with Daryl Hall. After we did that session, I was like, “What do we do now?” It’s all VH1 Behind the Music from here....