Rogue Wave’s third album comes after a year of upheaval for the Oakland band. After years of dialysis, multi-instrumentalist Pat Spurgeon had a kidney replaced around the same time frontman Zach Rogue became a father. But Asleep At Heaven’s Gate (Brushfire) is mainly informed by a veiled sense of political frustration cloaked in the most expansive, jangly and pretty songs of the band’s career. With echoes of Bright Eyes (the rolling, segmented opener “Harmonium”), Wheat (the understated electronics burbling behind “Like I Needed” and others), Spoon (the rhythmic “Own Your Own Home”) and the Chills (the murmuring “Fantasies” and the harmony vocals elsewhere), Heaven’s Gate is a bit of an indie-rock compendium constructed with Roger Moutenot’s reverb-hued production and a recurring theme of idealism ceding to disillusionment, or vice versa. There are messages to decode here, but you have to rely on glimpses and clues: “Another politician leaning to the right,” sings Rogue in staccato syllables in “Lake Michigan”; “They’ll put you in the ground … they’ll kick you when you’re down,” he sneers in “Phoneytown”; another song is called “Christians In Black.” Heaven’s Gate has politics if you want them, but better still, it’s a bittersweet, deceptively beautiful journey.

MAGNET reached Zach Rogue at his home in Oakland.

You guys had a tumultuous year leading up to this album. How’s everybody doing?
[Laughs] We’re glad we made it. Honestly, I think all the adversity and life changes is why the record sounds the way that it does. I think if you can hear any desperation in the music, it’s because we experienced that. Before, I was feeling kind of burned-out. I was traveling a lot, and it was too much. I was having a child. When we decided to continue on, there was a feeling that we wanted to try and go farther, accomplish more musically and make a record that was more meaningful to us.

The album progresses through a series of peaks and valleys.
I wanted to make something cohesive; I wanted to make something that could be bookended with a real epic battle at the beginning and a real solemn sermon at the end. I wanted it to be one concise piece and tried to figure out how to get there and have all the logic and the storyline and the lyrics go together. Certain melodic lines are even revisited throughout. Kind of like a play, but in sound. At least that was my goal.

You said you saw it as an “epic battle”; between what?
Well, I think there’s duality in all of them. There’s duality in our lives right now. We’re happy to be alive and we’re happy for our families and our little circle and our own music, but we’re not so happy with our environment. In the last line of the song “Harmonium,” there’s the “you” and the “we”; it’s trying to take responsibility and trying to figure out how we get ourselves out of this situation and how to feel that sense of pride again, and wanting to feel triumphant. Trying to reclaim what once was good and trying to find our way. That’s not just a political statement, but I think that’s personal for us. Musically, the music business and the environment we live in is kind of confusing, and you can very quickly feel lost because of all the travel. It’s not a normal job, and there’s no one giving you guidance. You’re out on your own, and you make this art and just throw it out there, and hope that it enables you to continue on and to live the life that you want to live. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will; there’s a lot of uncertainty.

Is that where “Phoneytown” comes in?
I think so. We’ve experienced a lot of good things but also a lot of superficial things: broken promises, false statements. It’s a strange business and it’s not an exact science. You can’t blame it. Look at what’s happened to record sales. Things are getting fragmented at such a rapid pace, and media is evolving and transforming in a way that people can’t keep up with it. It’s a confusing time.

It’s hard to figure out how to make a living from music when so much is accessible outside the current economic systems.
Yeah, people largely think it should be free for them. That’s why they burn it. And the part of me that’s the artist thinks that’s true. You go back and forth. Ultimately, we want people to hear our music. That’s the most important thing. We want to be able keep doing this and have people hear what we do. We also want to survive as human beings and have some things that other people have, like places to live [laughs] and things like that.

You want to “Own Your Own Home.”
Yeah, there’s irony in a lot of the words.

There are several geographic references in the lyrics, especially Midwestern ones: “Chicago X 12,” “Lake Michigan,” etc. Does that come from touring?
I have an appreciation for the heartland of our country, which I hadn’t really seen before touring. And some of our best shows were always in Chicago. I was struck at how much of the country I’d been missing, and how much I liked it. With all the gas that we’d been burning driving the van, there was a sense of guilt, too. We want to play music, but we don’t want to burn gas and burn the environment. We don’t want to stop doing this, but we don’t want to be irresponsible. To see the American landscape going by you as you’re driving around the country and to wonder what your place is in it and what our role should be as citizens, it’s confusing.

How did you end up on Jack Johnson’s label, Brushfire Records?
I’ve known Jack and (Brushfire co-founder) Emmett Malloy for a long time; we go back a ways. We knew we were going to be changing labels, and we started talking, and everything these guys said made sense. The business is changing. Almost every label, even the indies, is based on this really antiquated system, with royalty points and all this stuff and you don’t really see what’s being spent. But media is changing so much that, if you’re a band that has a following, you should be able to try new things. It’s hard enough to survive, but at least you want to work with people who are interested in seeing you grow as an artist and who give you the tools to do it. And Brushfire, obviously none of their music on their roster sounds anything like us, but they want to try new things because they have the resources to do it. They’re part of Universal, but they’re totally on their own, so for us, as an indie artist, what more can we ask for? Environmentally, they have a real strong policy. They’re trying to run their office and recording studio on solar power. I know it’s an idealistic thing, but it’s real idealism: they’re backing up what they say with their pocketbooks.

I wanted to ask about “Lullaby.” It is such a pretty song, but it has these blasts that, if it were a real lullaby, it would startle people awake. It has those strong juxtapositions to it.
I think the record is all about juxtaposition; it has that duality to it. If you look at the lyrics to most lullabies, they’re kind of disturbing. A lot of the ways we talk about politics on the record is not direct, I recognize that. The way people are meant to feel like children and are talked to by government officials who try to lull them into sleep—these are the good guys, and these are the bad guys, these are the easy categories—it’s so absurd. A lot of the talk on the record about heartbreak and that sort of stuff is not about the relationship between two people. I mean, it is on a certain level, but it’s also about love of country and betrayal. We’re not children, so stop treating us like we are. We’re not idiots; we know when we are being lied to. I say, “as we fall in and out of love” on that song, and it’s not necessarily about a lady.

I hope to see you again in Philly. I think I saw you at the North Star Bar at some point.
Could be. That place is scary. They sent a guy outside to watch our van that had no gear in it while we were playing.

It’s not the best part of town, and several bands lost their equipment around there several months ago.
That’s just awful. That’s just stealing from the poorest people there are. If a band loses their gear, that’s the only thing they have. There’s a special place in hell for those people. And I don’t even believe in hell [laughs]. For them, and for the Bush administration, those two groups will be stuck in hell together. They’ll be the only ones there. Gear thieves and Dick Cheney. You know, Paul Wolfowitz will be able to talk to these guys about gear; it’d be great.