MG: Probably the hardest challenge for a movie director is to erase the scene that's their favorite scene in the movie, by far, because it doesn't fit the overall concept. It's probably the same with all the arts. Where we might have something in a song which is the coolest idea we've ever had. I can't think of examples of that, but on its own, it sounds incredible. It's groundbreaking, it's exciting, but it doesn't fit the song. And we really wanted to get rid of that. We really wanted to just pare things down.

One of the goals was to have space between the notes. And it's so typical to have the song and say, "Oh! What would it sound like with keyboards and percussion and horns, and a few exotic world instruments and a choir and some animals meowing in the background and some gadgets that are breaking... Let's shove it all in there because it's cool, and..." That's an exaggeration, but even if you take three tracks of percussion and add them to a groove, and even if the percussion is grooving amazingly, that might take away from the experience of really just being able to hear the drums do their thing.

What is your favorite part of the album?

MG: That's hard. It probably varies from day to day, because despite all the stuff Jared and I think about erasing, there's stuff in there that's kind of subtle that's left in... Sometimes my favorite stuff is the subtle stuff, like on "Flashback," the middle is an instrumental section, which is based on the bass. The bass is doing its weird thing with no time signature, no key, and it's just going through and the other instruments are enhancing. It's very spacious and it's supposed to be this inside-the-head-of-the-person image, the person singing the song as it's passing by him...

We had this idea to have someone talking over that, just sort of in the background. And we tried it, and it was cool. But it took the attention away from the interestingly changing bass lines. It put the attention on the talking. So then it became, okay, someone's at a party and talking and mumbling in their head and that's cool. And this interesting bass line is in the background. But that's not how we wanted it. We wanted that the interesting bass line was in the foreground. So what we did is we said, "Well, what if Myra [Flynn], who was doing the back-up singing, just said one word?" Like, "Hello?" So we had her say, "Hello?"

Even that seemed to be too much to get in the way of the bass line, and so we thought -- well, actually it was John Holbrook who was mixing the album who had this idea. He said, "Well, we could do this thing where we put it out of phase, which means that as your left speaker is pumping inward and the right speaker is pumping outward, and you're out of phase, and what that means is that if you're in the middle, you won't even hear it at all. But if you're off to the side a little bit, what you hear is someone saying "Hello?" in the back of your head.

Often it's stuff like that -- which most people don't even hear -- that's my favorite stuff. Or, there's other subtle things like in "Can't Stand Still," the drummer started playing this metal plate that was next to his drum set. And that's the kind of thing where it's so in the groove it becomes the groove almost, even though it's a background-y sort of thing.

And then "The Void" -- I don't know why I'm talking about the most background-y stuff... [Laughter] I was on the treadmill one day and I said, "Jared! The treadmill sounds so cool. We gotta get a microphone down there. And so sure enough, as "The Void" is fading into its ambient dreamscape -- thanks to Jared who did a lot of interesting sound design in that -- you hear the treadmill way in the background... It's not even the stomping of the treadmill; it's just the mill itself and its belt a little off the track and swooping by.

There's also the space between two notes. I love it when, in the middle of "What Things Seem," there are lots of examples of that: The guitar solo starts and the drum hits and there's this space where nothing's hitting between the one and the next beat. That's probably my favorite: the air that lives right in the middle between those two beats. Because, as I said, it's really hard to avoid the temptation of filling that every step of the way. That little gap.

I agree with Mike. There are so many little things, which is funny because we're talking about keeping things bold, but then it winds up being these little things. Like, Mike has an idea for a part to add on the Clavinet, but it's not just that we're going to put on the Clavinet, so let's put it through a Whammy pedal and do this so it bends in a way the Clav would never do on its own.

Little things like that. He would say, "I have this idea: Let's go out to the backyard and play the propane tank with the celeste and get the people to come out..." And next thing you know we're running out to the backyard with a stereo microphone doing some Alan-Lomax-style field recording, although I can tell you, Alan Lomax probably never recorded a propane tank and a celeste in the field...

MG: We try to not get involved in basking in the songs, or at least I try to keep some perspective by not listening to the songs over and over. We're already listening to them over and over while we're working on them. But the time that we really enjoy them is as it's coming to a close. We have this ritual. We've done several times now, and this time it was after the day of mastering. I'm pretty sure we knew we were going to call the album Moss, so we went to our favorite restaurant in New York, which is called Mas, although it's spelled M-A-S. We had this long meal, and we rented a fancy car with a great stereo system. It was some kind of Mercedes, a S-550, and we drove around the perimeter of Manhattan with a couple friends, cranking the album.