ELLEgirl Interview [Tokyo, Japan] [10.02.2011] Part 5 TRANSLATION;

Back to the topic of music, since your first album, you guys have been collaborating with producers like Dave Roth, Patrick Benzner and David Jost. What kind of effect has been brought by working with them? Bill: We've been working together for a long time. Tom: Yeah, we have been working together for 7, or 8 years since we started our band.

Bill: We know each other well, and all the albums are recorded with the producers. Our latest album "Humanoid" was slightly different that, we worked with different people, though we had put a lot of new ideas into the album, we still worked with those guys.
Tom: I think the most important thing is that, we know each other well, everyone in the studio knows the direction of production and sound.
Bill: It is important for us to have the same taste. If we have producers of taste for music different from us, it will be difficult for us to produce an unique song. But we have been working for long time, we know what to do, so it is quite easy.

Which song, from the album"Humanoid", contains the newest element? I think that "Dog Unleashed" is an unique song which mixed electronic with rock.
Bill: Yeah, that's the song which we performed our new sound best. Effect of electronics, programmed drum, keyboard and synthesizer, we had challenge to different sound.

Yes.
Bill: But when we put these stuff into our music, we had something bare in mind. The songs were ours, though we wrote our songs from our hearts, we might be affected by outside world when recording. There were people having different ideas, but their ideas might not be the best. If we used the wrong way, the sound would seem cheap. So, in order not to make those sound become cheap, we had to mix it with awesome rock. In the latest album, electronic rock is the part that I like most. I think that we are of the stage that wanna have challange for new stuff.
Tom: It's a tool for us to make music of larger scales. By introducing electronic rock, we were aiming at making album of sound of more sense of scale.
Bill: Actually, the musical instruments had played more music than we played, that's it.

Bill and Tom looked serious when talking about their music. There are still chat with the 4 guys.
Translation by http://www.tokiohotelchina.com/