Jokingly, the members of The Silent Years say that the band's name came out of time spent in mime school. "It's one of those things that we think it's funny, so we don't ever say, 'No,'" explains songwriter and vocalist Josh Epstein. "I don't know how it came up, but I think it's hilarious. One time someone asked me to show them some [mime], and I actually had to mime a bunch of stuff. It was ridiculous."

Although reference to the term 'The Silent Years' also conjures thoughts about the lost years of writing between the Old and New Testaments, the story of the band name origin is perhaps even more meaningful, although much like that first reference, Epstein's too is about lost years:

"As a kid I was always singing. Both my parents and my sister have beautiful singing voices. Actually, they all sing on The Globe as backups. So, I grew up with car trips doing four-part harmonies with my family," Epstein recalls. "The "Happy Birthday" song in my family is ridiculous. My mom and dad do these harmonies, and I remember as a teenager being really embarrassed about being in a restaurant and having there be this elaborate "Happy Birthday." Everyone would start looking at us, and it was just like, 'Oh, man. Come on. Can't we just sing it the normal way?'

"Music was the thing that was always the most natural for me, but it was also the thing that I was the most embarrassed about. I remember, when I was in high school, I was in a band, but I didn't tell anyone that I was in a band. It's weird. For people who are really shy throughout their lives, sometimes being in a band is this outlet for them to get up there and be the center of attention. There are some people who I've definitely met who are more like, 'I've always been a pretty social person, and I've always been comfortable interacting with people.' So, for me, being the center of attention, it feels a little awkward. I loved the writing of music and the making of music but the performing of music was always a little bit strange. But, it's getting--that's gotten--a bit easier. Because of that, I didn't necessarily think I was going to pursue music.

"When I went college, I didn't even bring a guitar. That was it. The only thing that kept me in touch with music was that that was at the tail end of Napster. I remember being so excited to go back to my room to download all my old favorites. Music's always been such an emotional thing for me. I'm the kind of person that can put on something, gear up and start crying. That's part of my experience. And so, whenever I was feeling lonely or homesick, I would download all my old favorite songs and listen to them. That was my only experience with music for maybe a year and a half.

"Then I got sick and was in the hospital for a month. I actually had meningitis, and the doctors were like, 'Wow, most people either die or lose a limb and part of their brain function, and you seem to be fine.' I remember a priest and a rabbi came into my room and were both like, 'Hey, you better start thinking about the fact that God has a plan for you.' I think they were both trying to get me to become religious; they thought that since I'd survived this sure death that I was destined for doing something like that. I remember, because I didn't have to go back to school for the rest of the semester, because I'd missed so much time, I went home, and the first day back I was lying in bed and a song just came into my head. That had always happened to me, but I guess I tuned it out. So this song came into my head, and I ran to the piano, I figured it out, and I recorded it immediately. Then I just started recording these songs, and ever since then, that really hasn't stopped. A lot of times I'll be lying in bed, and I'll hear songs and just try to go write it down, try to go record it. It just made me so happy that I kept on doing it, and I've been trying to pursue doing it as a career ever since."

In 2004, joining up with friends from his hometown of Detroit, Epstein, his year and a half fallow time pushed aside, began work on the debut EP Stand Still Like a Hummingbird and the band's self-titled LP. After much domestic and international touring, including show dates at 2006 and 2007's South by Southwest music conferences, The Silent Years, welcoming new musician talent along the way, hit the studio to record The Globe, a mixture of pleasant unexpecteds, its jubilant trumpet calls and chimes mixing with homey folkie melodies, its sheer poetic depth warming itself also to the playfulness of the lyricism.

The album, Epstein explains on the band's Web site, pulled inspiration from the science edu-flick Powers of 10. "In the film, the camera starts out, framed on a couple having a picnic. Every ten seconds, the field of view expands by a power of ten — the picnic becomes Chicago, Chicago becomes North America, and soon you’re seeing the Earth in the context of its solar system. This got us thinking about the similarities between mankind and all other components of the universe. An atom is to a cell, as a cell is to a man, as man is to the Earth, as the Earth is to the universe..." The description is apt, the album conveying a sensation as being both grand and intimate in scope.

In the following conversation, Epstein speaks to the constraints of low-budget music video making, his fear of getting older and the rich theories and ideas that underlie his approach to creating music.

SM: In both the first music video ["Someone To Keep Us Warm," handmade by the band members themselves] and the second that Ann [L. Orrin] worked on ["On Our Way Home," an oft-lauded track from The Globe], I noted influence from both the writing of Jules Verne and [Georges Méliès’] A Trip to the Moon...It's also nice, I thought, that with both there’s an authorial mark set for what the band is doing visually.

JE: We were actually nervous about that. We don’t ever want to be redundant and didn’t want people to be like, “Oh, here’s that band that does the puppet thing again!”

SM: (laughs) I actually thinks that’s good, especially because you have two other videos for the album coming off the line shortly from other animation students. If you see a departure there, I don’t think it’ll be problematic. But then, I always appreciate it when I see a video and can tell what band it is just from looking at one frame.

In an interview over at Deep Cutz, you were talking about the difference between the self-titled album and The Globe, specifically focusing on the use of instrumentation. That led to one difference I noticed in the visual approach to the videos, where in the first video there’s a mimic [in the editing] of the melodic nature of the song, that isn’t so much an element of the second video. There’s something much more surreal, intrinsically surreal because of the reference, but also surreal in terms of its rhythms. It’s not as direct a visual corollary to the song.

That’s my long way of asking the question: What was your first impression when you saw Ann’s video, especially in terms of how the visuals complemented what is happening melodically and lyrically in the song?

JE: I thought it was so much darker [than the first video], but the new record is darker. The first record came out really bright, and I’m really happy that it did. But, the new record is just a little bit darker in its themes and mood, and so I thought that Ann really captured that mood really well. It’s a playful video, but she also made it—it is surreal. The characters she created were straight out of a like (laughs) Dali painting.

We have one more video that we are going to try. There’s a song on the new record called “Aging Gracefully,” and the idea was that it was going to be one frame of my face singing the song, and then every five seconds I was going to age one year. We were going to do it with make-up, but when we talked with all these different special effects people, the lowest quote that we got was $6,000, and that was just for the make-up. It was going to involve facial prosthetics and all of this. I really wanted to do it because for me, like you said [earlier], big budget videos that aren’t creative, that’s terrible, but I think that there’s so much that hasn’t been done that can be done…Videos are an afterthought for some bands, which I don’t understand because if you’re releasing a video on behalf of your band, then it is you guys. Whether someone else made it and you just sign off on it, people associate it with you. For us, we want to be involved with everything, and so I really want to do some bigger videos like that when we have the budget.

Right now in the music industry there’s so little money to go around for things that by the time it gets around to the video, people are just like, “Okay, we’ll just make a documentary of you guys recording in the studio.” I’ve seen that a million times. I don’t want to do that. At the same time that’s the cheapest thing you can do.

SM: I actually want to talk a bit about that fear you have of getting older. You’d mentioned it to J.Milo in that Deep Cutz interview, that you're afraid that as you get older you're constantly changing, that you can never capture a moment and have it remain the same. I'm fascinated by that fear. I was hoping that you could talk about that.

JE: Don't you have that fear too? Isn't everyone kind of afraid of aging?

SM: No, I'm trying desperately to get out of my 20s.

JE: Really?

SM: (laughs) Yeah, as rapidly as I can. I'm fascinated that other people don't feel that way.

JE: Oh, wow. Well, I'm a big history of music kind of guy and having been able to watch all the big bands from the 60s, 70s and 80s and then seeing where they are now, sometimes I--I recently opened a magazine and saw a picture of Robert Smith from The Cure, and it freaked me out because he looks like a monster. The Cure is one of my favorite bands. I guess it doesn't even matter what he looks like; it's more about the music that he's making. But, I heard their last record [2004's The Cure, the first self-titled album for the decades celebrated band], and I was like, "Man, there's nothing here." It's so scary to me that as a lot of creative people get older they just don't have it anymore. I don't know whether it comes from getting too comfortable, lack of inspiration, or maybe people just have a finite amount that they can get out, and then once that's gone, they are just trying to rehash all of that. It just scares the shit out of me to think about getting older and getting worse.

SM: I think there's an assumption that artists are supposed to be able to indefinitely pull new things out of themselves. They are supposed to be able to pull original concepts, or original evolutions of concepts, without fail or fault, and I think it's almost an unfair charge to expect of anybody. At a certain point that dilutes your own essential nature as an artist. I don't know if you feel that way at all. I know with the development of your lyrics, you've said that their are two different processes with which you approach lyricism: the first is as an exercise where you have something to say and then you explore what you have to say, and then the second is that the writing is just a stream of consciousness self-discovery. Coming from those angles, don't you feel there's a certain essential nature that you are that you explore through the lyrics and the music?

JE: Definitely, writing music and lyrics, for me, will always be cathartic, but the fear is that at some point, you stop being able to relate to the audience. People will always go to The Cure concerts, but I don't care about their records anymore. That's really depressing because they were so good, and they meant so much to me. (pauses) I guess they do mean so much to me, and they are going to mean a lot to people forever. You can never take that away from anyone.

SM: I'm on both sides of that argument because on one hand that idea presupposes that you're making the music for the audience in a sense as opposed to creating it for yourself.

JE: You're doing both. For me, when I'm writing a song, it's for me, but as soon as it's out of me, it's for everyone.

Someone asked me recently, "Are you mad when people interpret your lyrics in ways that you didn't intend them to come off?" And, my answer was that, "Whatever it means to me, as soon as the words leave my lips and people can hear it, then it's theirs, and I would never dream of wanting to take anything back, be like, 'Oh, no, it doesn't mean that. It means this.'" It means whatever it's going to mean to whoever wants to have it mean something to them, and that's great. So while I'll always be making things, even if they don't come out, when I'm working hard at putting out a record, it is somewhat intended to be for everyone. I do think about that. Maybe some people don't, but personally I think about the audience and how it's going to come across.

There are some bands that put out the same record five times in a row. I've never wanted to do that. So, if I was just making (a record) for me, that wouldn't necessarily be as big of a deal because what do I care if it sounds just the same as everything else? But, when you're trying to take into consideration that there are other people that want to hear it, it makes you work harder. If it wasn't for the fact that there were other people listening, and people interested in listening, then you wouldn't necessarily be pushed as hard to keep exploring, keep doing new things and keep going.

SM: I agree with most of what you said, though I don't agree on one point, and that's that you wouldn't push yourself just naturally. Ostensibly, when the self-titled album came out, people were downloading it like crazy for free, and so you guys weren't making any profit. So, in the end, that first album is an exercise in a labor of love, and I adore that album. It's [sonically and lyrically] diverse, even though, comparatively, critics and bloggers have mentioned that The Globe is a step up. But, I don't think that working with your premise that, left to his own devices, an artist stagnants, you could possibly produce an album of the quality that the self-titled is.

So, I agree with you in the sense that it's nice to know that people will push and support you, but I do think the diversity of a piece of art, particularly with music in its melodies and lyrics, does not necessarily derive from the existence of the audience. All that derives from the existence of the audience is the support to continue. The inspiration, though, will always be your own.

JE: I think I agree with that. I mean, even this record is a labor of love too. It's not like we're going into anything thinking that we're all going to be able to afford mansions and multiple cars. We don't approach it that way, and so it's all a labor of love.

My point was that, for me personally, I could sit around writing folk songs, and they would all sound different. I would just have my acoustic guitar, but, I guess I'm influenced by such a wide variety of music that I would eventually come out with a bunch of different songs. (pauses) Well, you might be right. I probably would get bored.

SM: Yeah, you get bored with yourself, you know?

JE: Yeah, yeah.

SM: That scares me. That is a fear of mine.

Epstein laughs.

SM: I envy people who never feel that. That's a great thing, to never get bored with yourself.

JE: People who say they don't feel that are stretching the truth. Everyone has self-doubt, and everyone questions what they are doing. Without questioning what you are doing, you're not doing your job. A lot of things come from the gut and come from the heart, but sometimes it's really good to do some self-examination, really question what you're doing, why you're doing that and why you're going that direction.

I think most people do. If you interview other people and ask them, "What's going on with this record? Was this a conscious decision?," I'm sure there are some people who have no idea and are just making shit up, but I think for the most part people are like, "Well, we did this because of this." Those conscious decisions to move in a specific direction are a direct result of not wanting to be bored with yourself.

SM: Though I do find it interesting when you find that minority group that isn't cognizant of the change that intrinsically their mind or heart, or wherever it is that they created this piece of music from, has done for them, has self-regulated that sense of boredom on a subconscious level.

JE: Or they wrote something without the intention of having it mean anything. There are a lot of people who are writing things, for good or bad, that they don't necessarily intend to mean anything. It's a piece of music for something or someone, and that's fine. But, sometimes, there is no intention there.

I've heard about bands that analyze chord progressions from hit songs, and actually, I know Warner Bros. Music was doing this for a while; whenever they were looking at a band, they would run the album through a computer program which would analyze it and compare it to all the hits from the eras. That would give you a statistical percentage of whether or not the song was going to be a hit or not. I know that there are bands that write like that. They look at charts and analyze charts of like, "So, this is what The Beatles did, so if I follow that exact same progression I'm going to have my hit song." Sometimes it's really calculated. I'm not saying any of that is a bad thing. I'm not passing judgment. It's just that sometimes there is no intention.

SM: I think there's a validity to music without an intention too, and then it just becomes about some primitive, elemental, mathematical equation, that we're just listening to a series of mathematical equations that somehow resonate with us because there's something symmetric in the patterning there. Ah, right! You were talking about this in another interview too, that in the past you used to write songs based on chords and nowadays you find yourself progressively focusing on beats. There's something true and elemental about listening to a beat and being able to respond to that first.

JE: Absolutely. I think that music has become, in a lot of circles, this high art where everything has to be super new and super weird. I love all music, but at the root of everything, if you traced it back anthropologically, music is just typically a form of happy or sad expression. It's either really joyful, really simple and elemental, or it's really sad, really simple and elemental. It's now evolved into this thing with so many genres, so many options, so many technologies and so many instruments, all these different things you can use that steer it away from that. But, at the very heart of everything even without drums, music has a cadence and a rhythm; the human voice is able to express so much because we all have one. At the heart of everything that's there.

To learn more about the band and hear tracks from The Globe, visit The Silent Years' MySpace page here.