City Paper : Since this is Baltimore, I have to ask: Where did you go to high school?

Jenn Wasner: Andy is an alum of Catonsville High School, and myself I went to private school. I went to McDonogh. I was a boarding student there. It doesn’t exactly give you a lot of cred on the street, as it were. I was a very happy, very content, very nerdy high schooler. I really entirely enjoyed my experience there.

CP: And you two met during high school, right?

Jenn Wasner: We did. We met when I was about 15 years old.

CP: And you played music together first around that time?

Yeah, we actually started playing music together the day we met. I met Andy because I was joining a band he played in in high school—to play keyboards of all things—and I showed up to practice and that was when we met and within five of meeting each other we were playing music together. And it’s been nigh on a decade now.

CP: And what were you trying to do back then?

JW: I won’t get too deep into that, but we basically spent our youth and our teenage years cutting out teeth and figuring out how to write, how to arrange, how to record, all the trappings of being in a band. I started playing guitar around that time, so that was a pretty important time for me. And I started writing songs around the same time I started learning to play guitar, so things are pretty linked for me.

CP: Moving on a bit—in fact, up to about a year or so ago, I guess—The Knot was a good record and people seemed to like it. When making a new album, many musicians will say, “Well, we did this last time, let’s try that.” What is it you set out to do differently with Civilian?

JW: To be quite honest with you, this record is the first time I’ve felt comfortable and in control and that I had a direction and that I knew what I was doing. I know I’m not supposed to say this sort of thing, but I do consider all the records we’ve made up until this point as learning records, as growing records. I was definitely still figuring some shit out as a songwriter and a musician. I felt like I was grasping at straws with those earlier records, maybe sometimes successfully, and other times unsuccessfully.

I certainly don’t like to obsess over what I regret or what I would have done differently, but I will say going into this record I felt like I had written my strongest, best songs up to this point, and most of that is I realized a couple of things. One is that songwriting is a skill you can improve upon with time and effort and work. In the past I had taken these ideas that could have been stronger songs and just accepted them as gifts from the universe. Because my songwriting process is so linked to my emotional state and instincts and feelings, I always kind of viewed it as this mystical, magical, unknowable thing. But past that, there are ways you can improve. Whereas before I would have taken an original draft and accepted it and it would have gone on the record, this time I sat down and thought, how can I more perfectly, more carefully, more concisely say what I want to say?

But part of it was that I was just caught up in my head and in a very hermetic, insular place, so I had a lot of time to think and obsess over the songs. So going into the process I was more confident in a way I’d never been before with the songs themselves that I’d distilled them down into exactly the way I wanted them to be.

CP: Was that different headspace deliberate, or was that just sort of how circumstances worked out?

JW: The circumstances of my life at the time were just a period of really intense introspection and a lot of abrupt change, just feeling really displaced. A lot of aspects of my personal life had shifted really quickly all at once, and I responded to that by withdrawing really deeply into myself and isolating myself. And it took a while. I pretty much holed up and spent all of my time working on these songs and on myself as a person.

It’s great to hear them and play them now, because I’m in a much better, much more content and stable place, personally and emotionally, but I think it’s healthy to have these relics of the time that I spent and of the things that I hopefully learned.

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