Ian MacKaye has one of the most passionate, rabidly committed fan bases in the music world -- people attracted to the raw power and purity of epochal hardcore innovators Minor Threat and Fugazi. There's a sense of ownership on fan boards, a sense that songs that MacKaye happens to have written have become some sort of collective property and woe to anyone who abuses them or fails to appreciate them. It's the kind of following that might become restrictive to artists who care about how they're perceived -- its hulking presence might put a damper on any attempt to try something new -- yet for MacKaye, the past is just that. His most recent project, The Evens, with ex-Warmers drummer and longtime friend Amy Farina, is radically different -- more acoustic, more melodic, almost folky. According to MacKaye, far from being a conscious departure, or a substitute when Fugazi went on hiatus in early 2003, The Evens could not have evolved more naturally; the group began as two friends in a basement, making songs together. "It was effortless," he remembers. "We ended up just falling in love with playing music together. We ended up playing about three days a week with no thought of forming a band."

I spoke to MacKaye just before he left for The Evens' Japanese tour. We touched on the group's evolution, the limits of volume and the political and social issues that inspire him. His main message, he says, is for people to think harder about things -- not just music but community, life and your place in the world. It's good advice, easy to agree to and difficult to put into practice. If you're looking for a place to start on a new, more reflective life, The Evens' self-titled album, with its 12 songs about political engagement and social struggle, is as good a jumping off point as any.

Splendid: I was listening to The Argument again this morning, and then The Evens, and I was seeing a lot of transition between the two. Do you think there's a link between the two, given The Argument's more melodic sound?

Ian MacKaye: Of course. Yeah. People often say it's such a departure, but I actually think if you go back even to some of the earlier Fugazi records, songs like "Long Division" and "Pink Frosty", to me, it seems like it has always been in the mix. I think what's always caught people off guard is just sort of the unmitigated... unadulterated version of it.

Obviously, I am the link between the Evens and Fugazi. But that's it. They're really different bands. There may be a logical follow-through in terms of my personal trajectory, but in terms of the bands, obviously, Amy's not the other three guys. She brings a whole new element to The Evens. I understand that to some people, it may seem like quite a departure. It doesn't seem like a departure to me.

Splendid: I actually was thinking that maybe the structure of the songs was not that different. It's different instruments, but it seems like some of the rhythms are the same and the sort of stopping and starting is very similar to what you were doing with Fugazi.

Ian MacKaye: That may be. It's funny, because my arrangements, in terms of writing stuff for Fugazi, at some point I stopped... I used to write songs in total. I'd write from beginning to end, everything. And at some point early on, especially when Guy started playing guitar, it didn't make sense for me to bring in finished songs, because everyone was a writer and had ideas. So I think that the arrangements of Fugazi were the arrangements of that whole band. With some of the songs on The Evens, the arrangements are really back just to me. So maybe my style or my aesthetic changed from being in Fugazi. Early on, I didn't have a lot of stops and starts.

Splendid: Yeah?

Ian MacKaye: Yeah. Although I've always been a sucker for a properly placed stop.

Splendid: Can you talk about Fugazi's hiatus? I guess a lot of you had kids and couldn't tour anymore and...

Ian MacKaye: Our lives had become too loud.

Splendid: Sorry?

Ian MacKaye: Life got too loud. It wasn't just kids. Everybody had lives they needed to sort out. Their parents were getting sick, and their parents were dying. People were having children. People had to sort things out. We had been working for 15 solid years. And it was just sort of like, "Oh, this has become unsustainable right now."

Splendid: How did you start up with The Evens after that?

Ian MacKaye: Actually Amy and I had been friends for years, since the early 1990s. We became very close friends around 1995 or so. She was in a band called The Warmers. My brother was in that band as well, and I recorded them and was a huge fan. We became great friends and spent a lot of time talking about music. We always had talked about getting together and playing some music, but we never did. Both of us were busy. We were both working away at different projects. She was a painter, so she was working full-time doing her murals and so forth. We just never got around to doing it. Around 2001, there had been a series of breaks Fugazi had gone on for different reasons, personal reasons. Different people had different things going on where we had to take a few months here and there. There was a real interruption in our work. It was at that time, late summer, early fall 2001, that Amy and I finally said, "Let's just play music." We'd never done it prior to that. So we went down into the basement. One of the reasons we hadn't played was, I think, because we were a little bit nervous about what would happen if it was no good or we didn't enjoy it, but the fact is that it was great. It was effortless. We ended up just falling in love with playing music together. We ended up playing about three days a week with no thought of forming a band. We just loved playing. We just figured that while we were on break, it was a way for me to get this music out of me, and it was the same for Amy. She hadn't played in a band for a while, so she was just happy to be playing the drums. She was living in an apartment at the time where she couldn't set them up. So it was just sort of playing music, three or four times a week. And then we started writing songs for each other.

Fugazi went on for another year. At the end of 2002, it became clear that we were going to have to change up. Right at the very beginning of 2003, we decided to make an indefinite hiatus. There was still another year of playing in the basement before The Evens actually played a show. It wasn't a decision, like, now that Fugazi's not happening, I'll have to do this. It was just a natural transition. I was just playing music. Fugazi stopped being the absolute priority and left room for me to do other things.

Splendid: Was there stuff, musically, that you couldn't do with Fugazi that you wanted to try?

Ian MacKaye: Sure. But it wasn't quite so calculated. Fugazi... in any kind of situation, bands are relationships, you know?

(Ian goes off to check on the workmen who are power-washing his house.)

I'm going to Japan in a week and a half. I don't know why I decided to paint the house.

Splendid: You'd think they could do that while you're gone.

Ian MacKaye: The house is going to fall down if I don't have it painted.

Splendid: Tell me about working with Amy. What do you like about working with her?

Ian MacKaye: What do I like about her? It's effortless music. We're just closer than close. It just works out. She's a really ... she's a brilliant musician. She's very engaged with drums and arrangements. She just gives me a lot to think about all the time. She has a really different ...super kind of aesthetic. Something that's different than mine. I think for a long time I admired her aesthetic, but I couldn't figure out how it would fit with my vision or my aesthetic. It's one of those things where you have two very distinct ingredients that I think actually create a really entirely new entity.

Splendid: Is it possible to describe how her aesthetic is different from yours?

Ian MacKaye: Not really. It's one of those situations where, if you start logicking life, you can break it down into pretty much dismissable. I think it's the same with music or art or anything else. I think it's folly for me to get into any kind of ... like if you and I were sitting there and I was really trying to break it down to you and we were just talking then, yeah, maybe I could take a stab at it, but in terms of doing an interview, it just makes it trite.

Splendid: Okay. Is there anything hard about writing a softer, more acoustic song? Is it more or less difficult than a big loud one?

Ian MacKaye: It's different, sure. Volume should be used for power. It can be a really powerful sound. There's a lot of drama in that. But volume creates a situation where it really changes your range, how you sing a song. Remember that, for the most part, in Fugazi, I had to yell. And when you're pushing that much air out, it really changes your range in terms of how many notes you can hit and what you can do.

One of the really fascinating things about the history of recording is that in the very beginning of recorded music, the way they recorded was they had...basically studios were acoustically treated rooms where one wall was just a giant speaker. You would play in the room into a speaker cone. The vibrations in your music would move the speaker cone back and forth, which would then send those vibrations down a wire to a needle which would cut the wax cylinder. So then when you actually play the wax cylinder, with a needle on it in reverse, it moves the cone back and forth to make sound. So early recording, because there was no electric recording, it was vibration basically, to move that cone back and forth, you had to play at a certain volume. As a singer, the only way you could be heard was you'd really have to be super loud. That's why, if you think about early recordings, you hear this kind of nasally, loud voice. Almost something like "Jeepers Creepers", that 1920s kind of sound. Because that's the only thing that's going to make that cone move back and forth.

The microphone changed everything, because all of a sudden you could croon. You could sing in a lower register. That's why you have in the 1930s and 1940s, you start getting all these crooners, because they had the technology. What you're working against, really, is volume. If something's really loud, you can't croon. Not that I'm a crooner, but that whole other kind of singing, softer kind of singing, has a much wider range in terms of emotions. It certainly is different. I can't say it's better or worse. It does present certain kinds of dilemmas, but it also presents liberation.

Splendid: One of the things I love about The Evens is the way that the drums work with the guitars and the vocal lines. It just sounds like you're really listening to each other. It's almost like a conversation rather than... with some bands, you feel like they're shouting at the audience. Do you feel like there's more of a communicative thing going on with The Evens than with other stuff? Not necessarily Fugazi.

(Ian goes off to oversee the house painters again.)

Ian MacKaye: Sorry about this. I think that's what I meant by effortless. That was what I was talking about. We do communicate about our music, and the songs. I guess it's worth noting that in the first year or so that we played together, we wrote 50 or 60 pieces of music. We had so much music. We finally decided to take it to the stage. We ended up breaking it down, saying, "Well, we're going to pick 10 or 12 songs." And those songs, we really worked on them, really thought about them. But Amy's not... There are different kinds of musicians and different kinds of drummers. There are drummers who are essentially time-keepers, who are just rocking out. Amy's actually playing songs. Her drumming is a really conversational style. I think that we understand that there are limitations to the instrumentation. So in that case, we really need to think a lot about the arrangements and the way the melodies work and what the music is saying. Any element of that music taken on its own is so simple. It's just trying to make interesting combinations.

Splendid: It reminds me a little of Sonic Youth. They have more people, but they're always doing things that mesh but don't exactly go together.

Ian MacKaye: That's interesting.

Splendid: So it seems to me that one of the themes of this album is a loss of community. Do you think that's fair? There's all this language about "there's no around the corner anymore" and "nobody's home."

Ian MacKaye: I don't know. That's not the way I would perceive it. That particular song, for instance, is... it's about the future. There's a saying that the future's around the corner, but there's now. Now is the time to act. It's not something we're waiting for. I think that probably, in your own life, you've been meditating on the idea of the loss of community and these lyrics are sticking to that, perhaps.

Splendid: Could be.

Ian MacKaye: Which is... that's the magic of art and music. That's it. What the transmission intended is not necessarily what the reception received.

(I laugh, because this is the nicest, most philosophical way that anyone's ever told me I was completely wrong.)

Splendid: What about "Mount Pleasant"? Is that about a real place?

Ian MacKaye: Yeah, there's a neighborhood called Mt. Pleasant.

Splendid: What exactly happened there?

Ian MacKaye: The song was inspired by a riot that occurred there in 1993. It was a riot that was started by the police, really. They had arrested a Salvadoran guy, who was drunk, and he was handcuffed and he got shot. The policemen shot a handcuffed guy who was drunk. It just set off... People were enraged by this. And in that neighborhood, there's been a lot of friction between the police and the community. What happened in that whole thing was there were a lot of people who came out and were very angry when it happened. But also, some of them were bored. It just turned into this two-day smash and grab, and the idea of the song was discussing the nuances of a riot. Really, what's in play, all of the things that are going on. Ultimately, at the end of the day, the neighborhood was destroyed. And of course, a central theme of it is that the police play the role of police. In most riots, I think the police play a rather unconstructive role. They put up immovable objects which become the focus of violence. Or they impart their own violence. But when I think about it, people are saying, well, the cops this or the cops that. They're sort of accusatory about the police or want to blame the police. You can't really blame them. Their job is to be there. As the lyric says, we can't really expect the police to behave in a way that would make everybody happy. We can't excuse them for what they've done, but we can't expect them to behave. We have to take all these things into consideration when we're thinking about what exactly is going on. Riots are really strange creations. A lot of people celebrate them, but ultimately, most riots destroy the very neighborhoods of the people who are already unhappy to begin with. They end up making it even more desolate. And then, of course, just basically, what you're left with is fields that are fallow. It's all going to get bought up by somebody, who's then going to turn it around and gentrify the neighborhood.

Splendid: That's a lot of nuance for a song. I was thinking about some of the old protest songs that were about similar kinds of events, but much simpler take on them.

Ian MacKaye: Yeah, but I think that my take on music is that I'm singing about things that I'm thinking about. I'm putting them into songs. I'm not writing an essay. Music for me is something that's a point of gathering. It is central to community. It's one of the few areas in our society where people still will regularly gather and exchange ideas. With movies, you don't really exchange ideas. People all sit at separate tables at restaurants. We don't really have that many gatherings anymore, I don't think, where people are just sort of put together in the same room for a common purpose, and are then left to discuss things and to organize. From my point of view, I'm just singing about ideas. If they're provocative, and if they bring about change or cause people to think about things, that's excellent. That's what I get from music. But when I write a song, I don't intend nor do I expect people to get everything I mean. That's not the way I think about music. There have been songs that have been deeply inspiring to me over the years that when I finally read what they're about... There's a great story. There's a band called The Obsessed from DC. There was a song called "Touch of Everything," and I just loved the lyrics to it. They were really kind of a metal band, kind of a heavy band. And this guy who played guitar and sang was named Wino. A really incredible guitar player. I have a lot of admiration for him. I really liked his words, and I just liked the song. At some point we were talking and I said, "I really like those lyrics," and he said, "Oh, yeah, I wrote that song taking a shit once."

(I laugh)

And for him, I don't know what that song is about, but the point is the reception.

Splendid: Do you think he was messing with you, though?

Ian MacKaye: No. Wino doesn't mess with people.

Splendid: What's the sample at the beginning of "All these Governors"?

Ian MacKaye: It's not a sample. It's me.

Splendid: Oh, it's you. I thought it was maybe a political figure.

Ian MacKaye: Well, it is a political figure.

Splendid: I guess so. What's your current feeling about political involvement? It sounds like you're deeply skeptical of all the structures of government. How should people get involved and effect change?

Ian MacKaye: EVerybody has their own craft. I am skeptical of the government. I live in Washington. If you live in this city, you recognize it as the business that it is. Then you start to understand that they're just like any other business looking out for their own good, for the most part. Frankly, they're one of the few businesses in this country that has the ability, the funding and the nerve to go and murder tens of thousands of people in other parts of the world. It's really a discouraging situation. So, of course I'm skeptical about the government, but how people help, that depends on who they are.

Obviously, the first thing that you could do would be to think about the situation. I do think largely that people in this society steer clear of thinking, of recognizing the unhealthiness of the situation, because it is an unpleasant thing and it seems incomprehensible. Like you can't do anything about it. That's too bad. That's not the way that I look at it. I think that if they would just spend a little bit more time thinking about it, that would change the situation immediately. As that starts to develop...you know, people have said that there's no anti-war movement. It's hopeless. It's discouraging that Bush won a second term. But Vietnam was going on for two or three years before anybody said boo, practically. I suspect that this, this particular war, this crime, is going to be going on for a long time, and people are starting to recognize that this is wrong.

So how do people engage? What can they do? Well, first of all, just wake up. Start getting information from places other than the television. And then engage in your community around you. The more people connect with other people, the more we can act as sort of a community. I think a lot of people feel very discouraged about that. I'm not worried about it. I think that things go in cycles. In the wintertime, people tend to go into their houses and close the doors and keep the curtains drawn. We're in a winter right now, but seasons change. As things become more desperate in society, for instance, like when you have a blizzard... Where do you live?

Splendid: New Hampshire.

Ian MacKaye: Right, so you know about blizzards? When you have a blizzard, people talk to each other. They're out there, and it's like "hey, how are you?" So I feel that right now, with the oil prices going up, everything is unsustainable. It's clearly unsustainable this society. The economy can't continue.

Splendid: I don't know how it's gone on as long as it has. It's like a collective delusion.

Ian MacKaye: Right. It's like watching a junkie or something. It's going to hit bottom. And when that happens, that's the blizzard. People recognize that all we've got is each other. That's the way I look at it.

Splendid: That's cool. I was thinking about Dischord and the way it's sort of set up as an alternative to an industry where things should work and they don't. I'm wondering if that kind of model -- doing what you love and treating people fairly and thinking about money last or not at all -- if that's something you see as applicable to other kinds of things?

Ian MacKaye: To other kinds of business? I don't see why not.

Splendid: Not even just to business, to politics as well.

Ian MacKaye: Yeah. I don't see why not. I think part of the dilemma is that the American business model, the philosophy, what they teach at Harvard Business School, is so unhealthy and so self-serving. But people accept it as sort of like, well, that's just the way it is. People accept this for a fact, for example. People accept it as a fact that if a business doesn't grow, it's dying. I don't agree with that. People accept the theory of operating at prices the market will bear. I don't agree with that either. I think there are ways of doing business that are not predicated on those kinds of ...they're not even half-truths. They're eighteenth truths or something. It's all based on the profit motive. It's not even capitalism. It's greed. It's insane. And one of the reasons that I think you're seeing right now this crazy spiralling in prices is that the people that are operating these companies, they know the well's running dry. They're just dropping bigger buckets. They're getting as much now as they can, because they know that it's coming to an end. It's just desperation. If they had just learned to have taken less water, for god's sake, there would have been so much more for all of us. It's these kinds of things about... the way people approach things. I feel like there are other ways to do it. Do I think it would work in other areas of life? Of course. Of course, I do. Why wouldn't I? Do I think that other people will do that? I don't know. I would hope so. I can't really think about... for instance, I can't believe people would shoot an exploding piece of metal into another human being. That I find shocking. And yet people do it all the time. I don't understand it. So I would hope that people would want to think more about operating businesses or running the government in a more sensible, thoughtful way. But do I think they will? Well, they've got to put their guns away first, probably.

Splendid: So, you know, what's happening with music now, where a lot of the barriers to entry have come down, and there are a lot more bands getting their music out, and it's become a problem to figure out what to listen to, do you think that's a good thing? Is this a positive period for music in general?

Ian MacKaye: It's hard to say. I always think that now is the most important time. I do worry that... one thing that America seems to have really excelled at is creating a framework without actually developing the content for it. Something happens, somebody creates something, and it's such a powerful creation that frames are built around it. But then, when those things die off, then it turns into a search for content. I think a lot of businesses and bands and film and all sorts of things... the content is thin. I don't get a sense that there are real visionaries. If you asked me, "Who are the real visionaries?" for me, when I was younger, in 1982 or 1981, that era, I would tell you Dr. Know from the Bad Brains. I could name off five or six people or shows or bands, where you couldn't miss the show. If you missed the show, you might miss something incredible, every moment had incredible potential. Every now and then, I'll ask people now, "Who are the real visionaries?" or "Who can't you miss?" It's interesting, because people really stumble with that one. It's hard to put together a list of names. I think that's indicative of people who think, "Okay, I want to have a band, so first we'll get some players, and then we'll get a name, and we'll do this and this. And at some point, we're going to write some songs." For me, the music starts it. It's always the first thing. The music, that's the most important thing. Not the structure. So, I don't know what's going on right now. To be honest with you, I have seen some really interesting and some great music, but I'm not bowled over by anything right now. I'm not, like, "Wow, my mind is fucking blown!" That may be as a result of 25 plus years of really intensive music submersion on my part.

Splendid: I think it's also -- at least I feel this way, and I think we're about the same age -- that you only get so many transforming musical experiences. If you have them all by the time you're 25, you may see good music, but nothing else is going to hit you the same way.

Ian MacKaye: Maybe, but I think... I guess I feel like I've had some pretty transformative musical experiences in the last ten years. I'm 43 now. I think I'm pretty open to having my mind blown, still. But part of the problem is that what attracts me or what is interesting to me is organic honesty, where people put themselves out. That's really what I'm interested in. I don't give a damn about the genre of music or the ironic stuff. I could give a fuck about that. What I want is people to lay it on the line. That's always been the thing that most catches my eye. I want to believe people. I want them to play and for me to believe it.

Splendid: I think the first time that I heard The Evens was on that Burn to Shine DVD. Do you want to talk about how you got involved in that and what it was like? It must have been cold. Was it cold?

Ian MacKaye: It was cold, yeah. Brendan from Fugazi was organizing it. He had this idea... A friend of his had bought a house and was going to tear it down, and he said, "Hey, do you want to use this house for anything?" So Brendan came up with this house to get all these local bands to come play a song and they'd film it. So they called me up and asked me to do it, and I said, "Sure." So we went up there, and it was probably ten degrees. The house had no heat at all. It was a nice day, though. We had a nice time hanging out with everybody. We came in the afternoon, so we didn't see the morning stuff. We were there for The Make-Up and Ted and Bob.

Splendid: It was such a good DVD. I found it really moving, just the idea that the house burned down.

Ian MacKaye: He just put a second one out.

Splendid: Yeah, I just got an email from him. And you also did a Pancake Mountain show?

Ian MacKaye: Yeah, one of the guys, a friend of ours, is Scott Stuckey, who also is a video person. I'd worked with him on the Minor Threat DVD and he'd really helped us a lot over the years with video stuff. He started working on this children's TV show, the idea was to do a regional kids' TV show called Pancake Mountain. I was working on the Minor Threat DVD at the time. Amy and I were playing music, and Scott asked if we wanted to do a children's song. And I said, "Okay," and we started writing something. Actually, we wrote that song in about five minutes. It was ironic because people think I'm totally connected to that. I guess I've been somewhat of an advisor to him over the years with the project, but it's mostly as just somebody who looks at it and gives him ideas. That one is our most requested song, but we never play it. It's for children.

Splendid: Do you like playing for kids?

Ian MacKaye: I never played for kids. We played that song to a camera.

Splendid: You didn't have an audience.

Ian MacKaye: The original idea was that we were going to play in a room full of kids, which would have been fun, but we couldn't arrange it. We couldn't get all the parents to bring their kids out.

Splendid: Oh man, you should have called me. I've got a kid who would have loved to have come.

Ian MacKaye: Yeah, well, now it's rolling. Now every time Pancake Mountain needs kids, Scott puts an announcement on his web site and gets 100 responses in ten minutes. But at the time, it was early. It was the very beginning of the project. So we ended just playing the song to a camera, and he made the video and superimposed kids into it. I like playing to children a lot, but we just don't play that song. But it's ironic, because again, people are very like... "Play 'Vowel Movement'!" But it's a kids' song. I actually kind of like the fact that it was one of our first songs... It's not the first song that we ever did. The first song that we ever had out was on this Sonic Youth project. Thurston and some friends organized an anti-war web site.

Splendid: I remember reading about that, yeah.

Ian MacKaye: It was called ProtestRecords.com. We put a song on there. That was the first song we ever did. It was in the spring of 2003. I always thought it was really appropriate to follow up with a kids' song. So it all worked out.

Splendid: What happened with the Nike thing, the Minor Threat imagery?

Ian MacKaye: We're working on that.

Splendid: Your fan base, I was looking at some of the boards and stuff, it's just so passionate. People have constructed their whole lives around what they think about Minor Threat and Fugazi.

Ian MacKaye: That's a little harsh. They didn't construct their lives...

Splendid: Well, they seem like it matters to them more than you'd expect music to matter. Do you see that as a plus or a minus? Does it affect what you do at all?

Ian MacKaye: I don't know. It's very hard for me to measure things like this. It's sort of beyond me. It's not really me. I'm sort of... We put out records. We made music, but beyond that, I don't know what to say. It's almost like they're angry about things that have more to do with their relationship with music or what's important to them. I think if anything it's indicative of how slender a grasp they have on the music itself. I think they feel that most bands are just not worth it. I think that we represented a, like a purity, that doesn't really exist in what a lot of people do, like in other bands or other labels. My point is that it's not so much... Like, wow, look what we've done, but rather, wow, look how much people are hungry for something to believe in.

Splendid: Yeah. Do you ever feel like your work has gotten away from you and means things that you didn't intend it to?

Ian MacKaye: Sure. Yeah. I don't have any control over that. To me, I don't... to try to control my image or to control my work would just be insane. I'm already doing too much as it is.

Splendid: It's interesting because in the Fugazi stuff, the lyrics were really anti-violent, but the music was sort of violent music and you could see people getting the violence of it and not really understand what it was about.

Ian MacKaye: I don't know if music is violent. I know what you mean. To me, volume and crashing... Do you think that orchestral music is violent?

Splendid: It can be.

Ian MacKaye: I understand what you mean by the term.

Splendid: Music has an effect on you, almost chemically.

Ian MacKaye: Of course, but I don't think that necessarily... I think that's a culturally ingrained idea. Music can definitely affect you. You could hear loud music and just jump up in the air, just start jumping around, or somebody else could hear it and punch you in the face. I actually think that kind of violence, that kind of reaction, has more to do with being socialized by weird ideas about what music is supposed to be. At Fugazi shows, the minute we'd start to play, people would start fighting. It would be like going to see a movie and the minute the lights go down and the movie comes on, everybody jumps up and starts punching each other. It was unrelated to what was happening. It was just a behavioral ritual, one that was largely promoted by the media and certainly, at some point, by rock videos. I know that because I know that Fugazi played music before Nirvana and after Nirvana, and I definitely saw the impact of that era of music video, the way suddenly people in all corners of the world dressed and behaved the same. It wasn't a zeitgeist. It was a fully articulated advertising campaign, you know? I knew that because when we would play a slow, quiet song, people would jump on people's heads. They were bored. They didn't know what to do. It didn't make any sense in terms of what the music was doing. That drove me crazy. But I think this takes me back to this whole issue of thinking about stuff. That's all. Just think about it. Actually contemplate them. Don't just do them. With Fugazi and to some degree with The Evens, I agonize, because I feel like, "Think about what's going on here." Like with Fugazi, it's not just, "Okay, we've got guitars, so let's start punching." It drove me crazy that people couldn't get past their perception of my persona. Which is almost always wrong. The fact that people were so sure that the four of us were so humorless, it couldn't have been further from the truth. You could not imagine the kind of humor that this band had. If we spent any amount of time together, we laughed, you know? We didn't pander to that kind of thing. We didn't make obvious jokes. We were actually thinking about things. There was a lot of very, sort of nuanced jokes that we would sing about. We'd make songs that we thought were just absurd and people would react strongly to them, and we thought, "Wow, that's strange."

Splendid: People get an idea in their heads.

Ian MacKaye: Yeah, but you can't control that. And if you do try to control that, you go insane. All I want to do really is to make songs and to be a part of what's going on, to live. Music for me is my way of doing it. I don't think it's everybody's way. I don't even think it's necessary for everybody. But it's definitely necessary. Music is a form of communication that predated language.