"I'm kind of shy and I don't really know what to say in a lot of situations, so sometimes I just howl"- Jim James, talking about the yee-aahhs and whoa-oohs on Z
(Spin magazine, September 2005)
A conscious effort
Well, we really made a conscious effort with this album to put on less songs. Instead of 74 minutes of music on the record, we focused on having every track be something really solid. Jim's range is also unbelievable now, the way he can stretch out and the way his voice has gotten deeper over the years. In the past, we produced the albums mainly by ourselves, and on this one we had a producer. We recorded it in a different place than we'd recorded all our past stuff, so we definitely tried some different things on Z.- Tom Blankenship
(The Pitch, November 2005)
A bridge between It Still Moves and Evil Urges
In retrospect Jim James has said that he considers Z to be a bridge between the older sound and the newer sound.
"I feel like ‘Z' was a bridge kind of between more of the older sound and to more of a newer sound ... they still have all of elements but it's progression"- Jim James
(msnbc.com interview, August 2008)
"I think we’ve always tried to progress. Each album sounds different—from the recording quality to the songs to the new things we try. I think it’s definitely the most different album we’ve done but not radically so. I think we’ve always tried to do weird things."- Jim James
(PopMatters interview, October 2005)
Reverb
"I don’t sing without reverb. I think the sound of a dry microphone against the human voice is kinda gross. It works for some other people but I just don’t like it for my voice. I think we did a good job of messing around with it on the new record. It’s not just all big reverb. We tried different delays and different room sounds. There’s a lot of texture on the vocals on this record, but they’re not all buried in reverb, and they’re not dry either. Some sound like a robot. I’m just obsessed with making things sound weird."- Jim James
(PopMatters interview, October 2005)
