It’s funny that it has this big reputation now from all of us talking about it, but it really only holds 200 people.  But, it’s a great room.  It sounds great from stage.  It sounds great in the audience.  It’s really about the people who hang out and work there and the guys that run it.  That’s really what it’s about for us.  It’s just a room with a couple of speakers in it and a platform stage, but it’s great.

The first time I played there was a little over two years ago.  Cary (Brothers) set up a gig for me.  He told me about MySpace and I went on there for a couple of weeks and just started adding people in L.A.  I went out to L.A. and played the Hotel and sold it out!  At the time, I think it held 90 people.  It was the first time I had played outside of New York.

A breakup.  It’s a breakup record.  Well, it’s a record about falling in and out of love, but mostly about falling out of it.  But, I couldn’t make it too dark.  Every song couldn’t be about it!  I was living with this girl in New York, and for about six months before we broke up, I started writing songs because I couldn’t express it any other way.  All these songs just kinda came out.  Then, we broke up.  Then, I met a new girl and wrote a couple of happy songs and the record came out.

I get more emails about the happy songs then I do about the sad ones.  “This is the song we’re playing at our wedding!” and stuff like that, rather than “This is the soundtrack to my suicide.”

Well, I wrote ‘Star Mile’ for the movie about the movie. In the vain of the movie.  So, that’s how that one got on and it ends the movie.

‘Paperweight’ is a song I wrote with Schuyler Fisk.  We did a demo in Schuyler’s basement on her laptop and I played it for Zach.  He said, “You’ve got to make a recording of this.  I love it and listen to it over and over.”  So we did that and spent about two hours in the studio and gave it to him.  A couple of weeks later, Zach called and said that they were going to add six more songs to the soundtrack that weren’t in the movie and he said they wanted to end the soundtrack with ‘Paperweight.’  I’m the only one with two songs on it, so hopefully that works for me.  It seemed to go well for The Shins.

I’ve never played the electric guitar.  I own two, but have never played either of them.  I may play them someday.  I like the kind of music I’m playing now, sort of 1970s singer/songwriter.  That’s what I do with the live show, too.  I like to keep it intimate and organic.  When we play with the full band, we don’t do electric at all.  We do upright bass, cello, violin.  I love strings, all acoustic sounding… that’s the kind of stuff I love listening to.  I’m not a rocker, plain and simple, which is why I found it interesting playing at The Patio (Indianapolis) to Butch Walker fans.