In January 2010, when the Airborne Toxic Event had just finished a run of 354 shows in support of their first album, frontman Mikel Jollett predicted that their second LP would be about life on the road. Now that the record is finished, Jollett tells Spinner that's not exactly the case.
"I'd say three or four of them are actual road songs. One's about my parents, one is about the Cure," he says. "We didn't choose any particular dogma. We weren't like 'we're going to make a concept record about the mating pattern of bees.'"
While the band isn't making any extreme variations on the album, which is tentatively due in January 2011 and may be called 'All At Once,' Jollett points out several differences in the new material.
"We didn't try to recreate the first record. It definitely sounds different. There's probably a couple songs that could've been on the first record. It's louder than the first record ever was but then it's quieter than the first record ever was. There's way more keyboards than there were on the last record, then there are a couple of acoustic songs, and there weren't any on the last record. It's got a little bit of a broader range in terms of the instrumentation."
Another change is that this album is that Jollett is no longer writing about the devastating breakup he went through and inspired him to write such heartbreakers as 'Sometime Around Midnight' and 'Innocence.' "If you compare it to the first record, there are only three sad songs about girls," he says. "The entire first record was sad songs about girls, but there are echoes of that idea in every one of the songs except for two."
