COMPANIONS

sM | The Layers is a companion to your recent album, View With a Room. This is a formula we’ve seen before with Live in Los Angeles, which was a companion to Arclight. Do you conceive of these companion albums as B-sides to their predecessors, or as expressions of something new, but in the same language?  

JL ─ In making View with a Room, I wrote a lot of songs and then whittled the album down to about 16. There was a time where Layers was gonna be a 70-80 minute record, kind of like an epic journey. As an experiment, I separated them and said, “Well, suppose the things that are the connective tissue were not used as connective tissue, but as a standalone experience?” And I loved it. That’s how Layers came about. I wouldn’t say they’re B-sides at all, they just originally served a different function. It’s a kind of re-contextualization.