The Decemberists and Death Cab For Cutie may have landed the major-label deals, but the real riches in the Northwestern indie-rock scene can be found with the Long Winters. It’s wealth that comes from the sweat equity of singer/guitarist John Roderick, a large-hearted, professorial type whose presence on the Seattle scene dates back to the grunge era. Roderick found his footing with the Long Winters’ second album, 2003’s When I Pretend To Fall, a record long on lyrical charm (sample song title: “Prom Night At Hater High”) and loaded with punchy, jangle-rock hooks. So it’s no insult to note that the new Putting The Days To Bed (Barsuk) retraces many of the steps taken on Fall, which is to say its share of Varnaline-like acoustic strummers and Minus 5-style pop songs remains as clever as ever. But Bed more often opts to crank the volume knobs a little, with wildly divergent results: When Roderick, bassist Eric Corson and drummer Nabil Ayers try to rock out conventionally on “Rich Wife” and “(It’s A) Departure,” the guitars just kind of stab at nothing for three or four minutes. On the other hand, big trumpet blasts and a pumped-up bass line turn “Teaspoon” into the sweetest, catchiest song the Long Winters have ever recorded. Consider it the shiniest coin to be found in this album’s deep pockets.

MAGNET found Roderick at his Seattle home, far from the madding crowd.

I just happened to read the online journal you did for this year’s Bonnaroo festival. We had My Morning Jacket’s Jim James write an account for our next issue.
Oh, so this is an ongoing thing. It’s like a new genre.

Actually, everyone at Bonnaroo this year had to sign up to write a diary.
The funny thing about it is that you could have 100 people at the same festival and have 100 completely different takes on it. Even more so than at a usual show, just because of how you’re experiencing something like that festival. It depends on where you are.

And from a performer’s point of view, you could either be in the audience or in some backstage Valhalla smoking a bong with Tom Petty.
[Laughs] Right. I tried to picture the scene. I tried to picture Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks and the music-business people they surely attract to their backstage area, like how that actually is playing out.

Probably in a very lame manner.
Yeah. Because I was back there, I could see there are just mobile trailers back there. It’s not any kind of deluxe scene. And Tom is there in his velvet pants with a top hat and waistcoat, but he’s sitting in the same folding chairs as people who flew in from L.A., like the accountants from Columbia Records. And they’re back there spilling drinks on his pants and stuff. It couldn’t be pretty.

Are you currently working on a book?
[Pause] Yeah. Yeah, I am. I didn’t mean to say that hesitantly, but I haven’t worked on it for a month.

Is it a novel?
No. It’s a nonfiction account of a long trip I once took.

The long walk—the walkabout. [In 1999, Roderick spent five months hiking across Europe.]
Yes. It’s about 450 pages so far, single-spaced, 10-point type, and it shows no sign of being done. But I just have to keep going and let God sort it out.

Or an editor.
To me, to find a good editor right now would be like finding God.

Moving over to music, I read that you write songs to impress your musician friends or tourmates—Matthew Caws from Nada Surf or Colin Meloy from the Decemberists. That makes so much more sense to me than trying to impress an audience. And you presumably don’t even personally know that audience.
I can’t speak for those guys, except that the way that they call me when they get an advance copy of our new record, and the things that they say. And the way I call them when I get an advance copy of their new record, and the things I say, they’re the same things. Ben Gibbard and I have been in a songwriting contest since the day we met. And it’s a super-friendly songwriting contest. In terms of commercial success, he’s definitely winning. Certainly when I sit down to write a song, I don’t go, “This one’s for Matthew!” When I get a good hook or a moment that I’m really pleased about, I have in mind this very special audience of people who are doing the same thing. If they receive it well that counts for so much more than the feeling of approbation you get from getting a good review on some online blog or whatever.

That sort of friendly competition is a good thing. It raises the bar for the other guy.
Absolutely. And that can only come from when you know each other a little, at least. First, you have to identify people who are making music for some other reason, some ineffable thing. When I first heard Ben’s or Matthew’s or Colin’s songs, it seemed like they were writing songs for similar reasons I was. Initially, they were writing songs in a very private space. From there, you develop a community. And it’s a community I didn’t have; I used to write songs in a total vacuum.

While growing up in Alaska, you mean?
Yeah, growing up in Alaska, and even when I first moved to Seattle during the grunge years. I was writing songs, but they didn’t resemble any of the music being played in Seattle. And I didn’t resemble any of the rock stars that were parading around the city. So anyway, I think it’s going to be down to Ben to buy a house in Laurel Canyon—because none of the rest of us can afford one—and we’ll go there and make crazy hippie stoner records.

Tell me about Fire Island, Alaska. [“Fire Island” is a song title on Putting The Days To Bed.] I take it that it’s not much like Fire Island off the coast of Long Island.
No. They are polar opposites. And I do mean “polar.” You know, Anchorage is a peninsula. Fire Island is this huge island off the coast of Anchorage and is visible from the whole city. Like so much land in Alaska, it was a government installation that was off-limits.

Like a wildlife thing, or a military installation?
Some kind of military radar or missile base.

Oh. They’re looking at the Russians.
Exactly. Everything up there in the ’60s and ’70s was for Russia. So there’s this huge island, which everyone in the city ignores because you can’t go there. I’ve never been there. Nobody I know has ever been there. But they’ve abandoned the military base and in winter the ocean freezes, so you could conceivably ski over to Fire Island and nose around. In fact, the rumor is that there’s an abandoned ski resort they built there for military personnel in the ’50s.

I’ve never commented on drum sounds in an interview before, but I have to say that the drums on “Teaspoon” sound really great.
We very intentionally recorded them in different takes. We weren’t cutting them up in ProTools or monkeying with them digitally. We just recorded them in different settings to get the right sound. This is the first record I produced by myself. All the things I had learned co-producing with Chris Walla and Ken Stringfellow, I knew what I wanted the guitars to sound like. I didn’t know anything about recording drums, and on the first Long Winters record, I didn’t care. I would watch Chris Walla record the drums like I was a monkey and he was playing with mirrors. But reading recording magazines like Tape Op, over the last six years, I’ve trained to be more of a recording nerd.

So was your first production a laborious process?
No, that’s the best part about it. I could fill a wall with encyclopedias with what I don’t know about recording. But I knew I could produce it and brought the same kind of insouciant, devil-may-care attitude to the technical side that I bring to everything else. So it was in that spirit that I dove into it. It wasn’t laborious at all. We had a blast.

You joke a lot about being a sort of boorish, difficult band dictator, and cite the number of people who’ve cycled through the Long Winters’ lineups. But there really haven’t been that many ex-members of the band. Eric and Nabil have been on board for a while now.
That joking is a little bit pre-emptive. If my opening gambit is, “I’m super difficult and I rule with an iron hand and everyone can kiss my ass,” then the fact that I’m really not like that can be a pleasant surprise for everyone. It’s more of a reaction to the culture of the last several years. In the late ’90s and early ’00s, it seemed there was this music culture that was incredibly passive. Everyone was trying to be as inoffensive as possible in whatever they did. I remember listening in on conversations between two musicians where they were falling over each other to say the most complimentary thing. And I personally knew these two people hated each others’ guts. I felt woozy inside. Have we come so far in our civilization, are we so domesticated that we can’t just not like each other up front? As an antidote to that, I was trying to walk through life and say “Well, there’s one piece of pizza left and I’m gonna take it. Who’s gonna stop me?” For several years I learned who I could trust by who got that joke.

Do you think the culture of the Northwest music scene is much improved from the grunge scene you spoke about earlier?
The grunge era was patently false. The era in Seattle prior to grunge was like a total hesher paradise.

That’s the weird thing: It’s been archived that Seattle was a pure scene that got corrupted by national exposure.
Oh, that’s total horseshit. It was cock rock out here. There were a few people in the Mudhoney/Nirvana clique, or one or two people from Olympia who felt that someone had come in and stolen their fashion sense. But even that was just a fashion sense, you know? It was a whole sham of trying to imprint an ethical culture on top of what had been a teenage pose. Prior to the scene, there had been no ideology. It was just a bunch of teenagers trying to outdo each other on who was more punk. The worst part was when all these jocks playing hair metal adopted that pose. The generation that followed that—all the Northwest bands playing now—we were all really influenced by the integrity wars of that era. We all swore we were going to maintain our integrity. And unfortunately, the fallout was that a lot of the bands that came out in the late ’90s were super-conflicted about integrity questions.

I don’t think people know what it means anymore in terms of a music career.
I think it’s clearer now. Death Cab is a perfect example. Their integrity is paramount to them. In 1998, it was a challenge for them to put their records out on CD. They wanted to put them out on reel-to-reel.

The Long Winters are on a solid middle ground; you’re not on a major label, but you’re out there touring and recording whenever you like.
Questions of integrity, for me, are deeply personal. I’m not trying to prove my integrity to what I perceive to be a judgmental teenage audience. The kids don’t get a vote, basically, whether the decisions I make are honest. And if I’m consistent with myself, then there isn’t any conflict. I think the problems coming out of Seattle several years ago, the bands were making decisions based on this archetypal kid who was sitting somewhere writing a zine. “Would this kid admire my decision to not take these Budweiser advertising dollars?” It’s really a question of whether you can sleep at night.

Now, I think that inner kid has become a bit older—even if that kid has just aged from 14 to 17. Or maybe it’s just me getting older. But a lot of indie rock today caters to a wider margin of … hipsters.
That’s kind of a new development in the last several years. There was a time when, if you were over 27 years old, you listened to alt-country. You didn’t go out to see the challenging, abrasive New York band that was coming through your town. If you went out, it was to see Son Volt. I think that has changed. People in their 30s are still really current with music, and that is influencing the 17-year-olds rather than vice versa. I am not making music with the idea that it’s going to appeal to 17-year-olds, but I’m constantly surprised at the number of teenagers who are sophisticated enough in their tastes to really appreciate the Long Winters. I get e-mails and letters from people who are young and who are responding to the music I’m making. Which I’m making for people 10 years older than they are. Then again, when I was 17, I wasn’t fooled by Winger or White Lion. I was looking for music that had a deeper vein.

And that can be true in anything. If you’re a young reader, you don’t have to read Judy Blume or whatever. You move up when you’re ready.
That’s a perfect analogy.

I know we’re talking about a lot of sociological stuff in this interview. But I sort of feel like asking about your songs usually ends up as a discussion of your lyrics, which are pretty self-evident.
I feel like the people I’m really writing songs for hear the lyrics and they are self-evident to them. Because they’re self-evident for me. I get a lot of responses from people about my lyrics, but some of the things that I think are most obvious are so opaque to them. They want it explicated: “What is the meaning? What is the meaning?”

I think you’re correct to deny people that explanation.
I have to, because in the past, the more I’ve tried to explain, the more I’ve watched them ... they’re just crestfallen, you know?