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Interview: Jimmy Tamborello

As the beatmaking half of the Postal Service, Jimmy Tamborello helped bring laptop pop and electronic music into the mainstream, thanks to a gold-selling debut record (Give Up) and its ubiquitous single "Such Great Heights."

Prior to that success, however, Tamborello had already established a presence in the genre with his work as Dntel and Figurine, and the seeds for the successful Postal Service collaboration (with Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard) were planted on Dntel's Life Is Full of Possibilities.

Nearly six years later, Tamborello dusts off the Dntel moniker again on Dumb Luck, a semi-solo album that again finds the talented studio wiz getting by with lots of help from his friends—friends like Jenny Lewis, Conor Oberst, and Edward Droste (Grizzly Bear).

The songs on Dumb Luck were recorded between 2002 and 2006—a pretty wide range. Were the songs coming to you slowly, or was it more a matter of struggling to find the time to work on them?

It was more the first thing—it took a while for me to get the songs together. I was distracted a lot with other projects, too, but a lot of the reason that I started other projects was to get away from this one, because it was giving me trouble.

Were you writing songs that just didn't fit with the overall aesthetic?

Yeah, and sometimes I wouldn't even start working on songs because I didn't have any ideas that I thought would be exciting to do.

You started Dumb Luck essentially right after you finished the last Dntel album. Are you doing the same thing this time around, or are you taking a little break?

I'm already working on some new songs. I'm trying to not think about albums as much anymore; I think I get overwhelmed when I start thinking of it as a big project. I want to try songs for a while and not get stuck in one certain sound. I need to figure out what I want to do next. I'm also working on Postal Service stuff, too.

When you're writing without thinking about albums, are you also writing without thinking about which umbrella it will wind up underneath—whether it's a Dntel song or a Postal Service song or a Figurine song?

Yeah, I'm trying to do it a little more blindly—to just work on songs and see where they go.

You've said in different interviews that you don't have the same confidence level in your vocals and lyrics as you do in your music, and that's what initially led you to seeking out collaborators to fill those roles. Was there ever the thought, though, that Dntel would be an entirely instrumental vehicle? On this album, there are no instrumentals.

I like instrumentals, too, and I liked having the instrumentals on Life Is Full of Possibilities. But for this album, for some reason, all of the songs felt like they needed vocals. There was one instrumental that almost went on.

Does the title track feel closer to you because it's your voice and your words?

I guess a little bit more, but I feel pretty close to all of them—pretty close to ownership, even though the singers all wrote their own lyrics and vocal melodies. I still feel like it's mine. And theirs, too.

When do you start matching singers to the tracks?

It varies. Sometimes a singer will be interested and will have some time, so I'll try to write to them. Sometimes I'll have instrumentals lying around and will think of someone that would be good for it.

I assume the Jenny Lewis song worked differently.

Yeah, that was the only one [like that]. She came to me with the song.

Was that written specifically for Dumb Luck?

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