Where exactly is Port Townsend, and what’s it like there?
Robin Pecknold (vocals, guitar): If you’re coming from Seattle, you would take a ferry north. Port Townsend is kind of like on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle, so it’s on the peninsula. It’s pretty slow moving. It’s nice, because it’s secluded, but it’s not like you can only go to the Wal-Mart or the Safeway. There’s a couple of good restaurants and a good food co-op. And Washington’s first independent record store is here—Quimper Sound. So it’s kind of a sympathetic environment. You’ve been recording up there? Kind of writing and setting up a better home-recording situation than we had last time. We could only record two tracks at a time at home, which is cool, but the more you do that—the more you’re layering that many tracks—it starts to sound more like a fake environment. Nothing has any relationship to the other instruments. So now we can record more tracks at once, but it’s still a pretty basic set-up. So mostly getting all the home recording stuff together and learnin
