Then there was the recording of "Cinnamon." Roderick recalls struggling to imitate a mandolin with his electric guitar: "I said, 'I hear a mandolin.' Ken Stringfellow [of Minus 5, The Posies and REM] listens from the control room and says through the talkback, 'I happen to know a mandolin player.' And Peter Buck shows up the next day." On that day of course, Roderick, the only one with the keys to the studio, was late.

Buck and Ripple are just two of the names to appear among the liner notes' extensive credits. Add to the who's-who list former Harvey Danger frontman Sean Nelson on keyboards, drummer Michael Shilling, Carissa's Wierd [sic] violinist Sarah Standard, Minus 5 frontman Scott McCaughey, and a host of other local talent, and it offers a pretty good idea of the personnel on When I Pretend to Fall. The drawback is that some critics have been so impressed by the names that they have substituted a roll call for a review, overlooking the quality of the album altogether, not to mention the highly mutable, organic nature of The Long Winters.

"No one has failed to mention the people who played on this record," says Roderick. "My experience of making the record is that I was in there myself for great stretches of time. For the majority of that month, it was just me sitting in the studio with Ken or Chris ... just me and the engineer, basically. It wasn't this big rock festival with people sitting on couches saying, 'Oooh, let me play the next part!' There was no attempt made by any of us to get as many people as we can. They were just the ones that were around and stopped by. The reason Ken Stringfellow picked up where Chris Walla left off is that he was coming around every day anyway." In that sense, the process has changed little since The Worst You Can Do Is Harm. The Long Winters are in part a collaborative venture with one man at the center tugging it all together.

But by Roderick's admission as well as the comments by listeners, When I Pretend to Fall is also very different -- a much brighter, more optimistic album, and consequently more ingratiating to a wider audience. Voicing an opinion in his own web forum, Roderick has described the new record as being "made of downtown right as the sun comes out after it's been raining and a little bit of 3am city bus in from the airport." Unlike the debut, the latest album doesn't greet you with an embittered, arrogant grunt and then turn back to its own affairs.

"In spite of the fact that I had been on tour with Harvey Danger for a year, there was no sign in the larger world that anybody was going to care about a record by me anymore," Roderick says, recounting the bleak circumstances surrounding the making of the debut. "Death Cab had broke, Harvey Danger was breaking up, and I was breaking up with a girl. It was the dead of winter, and I was 30 years old, and making that record was the experience of sitting in the dark studio going, 'God, has it really come to this?'" Just as the long, dark Seattle winter nights began to grow shorter, Barsuk Records released it. Then the reviews came in. And they were good. "The response was this revitalizing thing."

Encouraged by the acclaim and buoyed by the feeling that this was, finally, a project not doomed to end in tears and anger, Roderick returned to the same studio in high spirits and created a record to match his mood. And, much to his surprise, the follow-up has fared even better than The Worst You Can Do Is Harm.

Which brings us to the present. Aside from the handful of negative reviews he has intentionally sought out, this is the validation Roderick has always wanted. This is the kind of success he was searching for since his days as a frustrated, nomadic philosopher, but had not been ready for until now.

"I don't think it could have come any earlier," he admits, recollecting: "The Hurricanes and Death Cab came up right at the same time. When Death Cab arrived in Seattle, the Hurricanes had already been playing for, like, four weeks. The first five shows we played with Death Cab, they opened for us. We felt a real camaraderie with each other. We looked at them and said, 'Holy moly, they're so good!' They were 21 years old and already brilliant. But their attitude about the music business and what they wanted were completely different from ours. They wanted to make their own records. They wanted to put them out on their own indie label. They wanted to tour to build their following and maintain their credibility.

"I admired them, but I was a little bit condescending about their business attitude. I was coming from a dinosaur age. Even though everyone I knew who had signed to a major label had been screwed -- royally screwed -- I couldn't imagine a better way. That was the only idea I had. I understood DIY culture and I thought it was intentionally, willfully amateur. You want to make cassette tapes and sell them at shows for a dollar? Fine. You guys are really punk rock. "If I had been signed at any point in the late '90s, I would have right away been a cliché. I would have started acting like [Stone Temple Pilots'] Scott Weiland. Because I didn't have any role models to suggest anything other than that you be some glamorous junkie with shit for brains."

Death Cab for Cutie, maintains Roderick, was and continues to be "at the fore of a total sea-change in the way business is done" in Seattle and in the music industry itself. The band he once simultaneously respected and sneered at has made good on an ideal, proving to him that "there is a place for nerdy, over-analytical, articulate dorks who are making music and don't want anything really other than rent money, and hopefully people out in the world to come to the shows.

"Those guys [in Death Cab] are really cool cats in comparison to the vibe that At the Drive-In projects. Their attitude is not, 'Give me a blowjob, you bitch.' That isn't the vibe. And it's real. It's not the I'm-too-tragic-to-live vibe, where you're emo until you're at the Waldorf Astoria with the cast of Charlie's Angels. How emo is that?" he snorts. "Not very."

Yet for all he has learned about music and changed about himself, Roderick still has his regrets. Of the first Long Winters album, he says, "I think we did that too fast. We could have toured for six more months." So prudence is the new watchword concerning When I Pretend to Fall. In a humbling role reversal, The Long Winters will open for Death Cab for Cutie on the first half of their national tour (not the first time the two bands have paired); then Roderick and Nelson will spend all of November in Europe playing select acoustic dates.

"At least until December we're booked with tours, which is how it should be," says Roderick. "There are a lot more people who can hear [the two Long Winters records], and my plan is to spend the next six months introducing ourselves to America and Europe, and that way we will have used the first two as an opportunity to establish ourselves." Then, once the dust settles behind the touring van, some incarnation of the band will go back into the studio to begin work on the third disc.

"The direction for the third record is that it's going to know what it wants to be. The first Long Winters was a reaction against power pop ... we wanted to make something brooding and headphoney. [T]he second was re-embracing power pop and still uncertain about it. The third record is going to leave that whole question behind and ask instead, 'What are the limits of our abilities as songwriters?'"

Furthermore, now that the Western State Hurricanes repertoire has been exhausted, the third record will likely comprise all original material, marking a definitive break with the past. "The Hurricanes' music was on both of the records," he explains. "We used it as the raw material to have fun experimenting in the studio. We were taking a lot of that big, distorted rock out of those songs and trying to reinvent them. One of the differences of the new record was that most of the songs I wrote in the last year in the context of playing them live as The Long Winters. They weren't experimental templates." His proposal for the future is to start "attempting things just beyond our abilities" and also cut the personnel list by half.

"I think on the third one we'll bring in a lot fewer people. I don't know enough about engineering to really engineer a record yet on my own, but I will definitely learn." This sounds curiously like the adoption of Death Cab for Cutie's high-standard DIY ethic. But if you want a job done right...

Having turned away from his former Weltanschauung, insofar as it relates to music, Roderick has also found a way of tempering his fears of betrayal, a lingering wariness that arose out of the repeated implosions of each of his bands.

"I started to sabotage myself because of that wariness. If you're living your life as a musician according to Steve Albini's neurotic paranoia, you can't be happy. Part of what I did is that I said it from the outset: 'The Long Winters is going to be the name of whatever recording project I'm doing at the time and the only permanent member is going to be me.'

"I never wanted to be extorted by anybody. I just wanted to make songs. I didn't want to have to run it by anybody. With that as the governing principle, for anyone who plays in The Long Winters, they come on with that understanding." This ad hoc method, argues Roderick, takes the pressure off the other musicians just as much as it allows him to sidestep compromise. For example, "[The bass player] doesn't have to sit there and think, 'How come The Long Winters don't play my songs?'" Instead of quitting in a huff, he can feel free to go out and write his own songs with his own project. He's a member of The Long Winters as long as The Long Winters needs him, and vice versa.

It isn't the average approach to songwriting and being in a rock band; then again, Roderick claims that The Long Winters and its counterparts within the Seattle music scene are anything but average rock bands. "However our hedonism manifests itself, it's not rooted in the loins," he says, quickly begging the pardon of cock rockers. "It's hedonism that appreciates the real vices of life, the vices of things that are beautiful. To be able to play your rock music and not feel like you need to be a rocker. You don't need to be a member of Mötley Crüe. You can play your music and still be retiring and bookish."

This shouldn't strike anyone as a particularly profound revelation, but it has taken Roderick 33 tumultuous years to learn and understand it. So give credit where credit is due. It has taken others far longer to realize that there's more than one side to the rock lifestyle.

On the web:
The Long Winters

Inside Earpollution:
The Worst You Can Do Is Harm album review