The Dismenberment Plan

Thrasher Magazine, May, 2003

Two sold-out nights at the Bowery Ballroom in New York. "Genius," says the Village Voice, a remix album plus a DVD in the works.., too bad they're breaking up and there ain't no offer from no label big or small that can stop them. Ha! Ha ha ha! Travis is gonna do a record with some folks from Engine Down and Death Cab For Cutie, which is where some of the DisPlan songs might find a home. But anyway, here's an interview Jared Soares did with Travis Morrison, Jason Cadell, Eric Axelson, and Joe Easley in Lawrence, Kansas last winter, where they played on the same night as Beck and The Flaming Lips. Anyway. Who are we kidding?

Travis, In the song "Okay Jokes Over,"' you turn into a freestyle rapper. Have you ever done any Ludacris, or stuff by any other rapper who's hot at the moment?

Travis: Well, I wouldn't call it freestyle, 'cause somebody else wrote it. It's just an opportunity to appreciate/free associate songs. It's really exciting. Now, can I at the drop of the hat re-imagine melody and lyrics from random songs that just occurred to me? Sometimes I fail. That's not something you guys discuss before a show?

Travis: There'll be suggestions. Sometimes at a sound check I'll start singing something and it might show up that night.

Eric: When we toured with Death Cab we would bust into one of their songs in the middle, and then back into our own song. This tour we cut into some Spoon. It's premeditated.

Travis: The song is free of time and key changes by our standards. We have tricky chord shifts and rhythmic shifts, which make it hard to improvise, but that song is modal, kind of a drone. It' in four, so it's easy to improvise.

On your website you have a Top-10 list of songs and albums. Did you guys steal that from the movie High Fidelity?

Travis: It reflects our psychological similarity to the characters in that movie.

Jason: We stole it from Burning Airlines.

Travis: David Letterman dropped the bomb with that Top-10 List. People forget that before Top-10s, there were no Top-10s. It wasn't really a thing, then David Letterman made the Top-10 a cultural entity.

Joe: What was Casey Casum? Top-20?

Top-40.

Eric: It's fun though. People walk up and say they never heard of a band until they saw them on our Top-10 list. And they download the song off Morpheous and now they love Tom Waits or whatever

What do you guys listen to in the van during the long drives?

Eric: We always put on NPR. The new Flaming Lips gets a lot a play and the new Beck.

Joe: That is really good. So laid back is good for long drives, like today across Kansas.

Are you all into Andrew WK?

Eric: He's not my thing.

I saw him on this MTV special where they sent him to a predominately African-American college. He spent a day in an all-girls dorm. They put his hair in cornrows and tried to teach him how to dance.

Eric: Why can't we do that? I wanna get corn rows.

Travis: Andrew, you so crazy with yo bloody nose.