“W
HEN we started working on the next album, Jeff had sketchier ideas for what he wanted to do, and that’s why
Sky Blue Sky
is such a collaborative team effort. One of the songs Jeff had was ‘Improbable Germany’, but he didn’t know what to do with it and was still looking for ideas. I came up with the idea for a long instrumental coda inspired by ‘The Dream’s Dream’, which ends Television’s second album. Jeff and I are both Television fanatics. I wanted to see if Jeff and I could play something like that – an entirely worked-out guitar thing with no improvising, no soloing.
“I taught him some of the guitar melodies, which he and Patrick worked out at the Loft.
They hammered out their parts, which was the exact thing I was trying to do with Jeff. So what do I do? Jeff said, ‘You just solo.’ That was the opposite of my idea, which was not to solo. We did some demos and I played something different on each one. When we went to track it for real, I improvised something new. Jeff stopped and said he liked what I played on one of the demos and could I do that again. I had to write it out note for note, even though my sight-reading is terrible.