1998 Ira Kaplan interview

Tim McMahon reproduces this rather mediocre interview on this website - he does get Kaplan to talk about YLT's songwriting process though which is rather interesting:

McMahan: What are you trying to accomplish when you’re sit down to write?

Kaplan: I try to answer this as vaguely as possible, but it’s still probably accurate: We just try to do something we like and we really try not to be constrained by anything else.

McMahan: So it’s like a jam?

Kaplan: That’s certainly how it begins. The nuts and bolts of our writing process at this point is jamming. In a lot of ways, we do things backwards. Where typically somebody writes a song on acoustic guitar, teaches it to the band, they record it, then they play it live and they extend it to 10 minutes or something -- that’s a rock cliche. Our way of doing it is to jam for a really long time, find a song within it, then learn how to play it on acoustic guitar. The last thing we do is learn how to play it.