The Airborne Toxic Event's Mikel Jollett is just going along with the ride. After extensive touring across the United States and the United Kingdom, backing artists such as Franz Ferdinand and Kaiser Chiefs, the band quickly rose to national attention with their self-titled debut album and hit single "Sometime Around Midnight". The Travesty sat down with Jollett to discuss touring, recording, and abandoning your literary aspirations to become a rock star.

Texas Travesty: You guys have played South by Southwest before. What do you think of Austin?

Mikel Jollett: It's like West Berlin. It's really cool but you're surrounded by…Germany. I don't know, it's great…you can take a beer on the street and I don't think anyone cares. I like that.

TT: The name of your band kind of makes me think of a superhero movie, like all of you guys were exposed to an "airborne toxic event" and then you turned into superheroes and your powers were to be able to play a bunch of different musical instruments. Is that how it happened?

MJ: The name came from a book called "White Noise" by Don DeLillo, and it's from the second part of the book, when the chemical explosion happens, and the media, in its "Orwellian-speak", calls it "the Airborne Toxic Event". The cloud becomes this big metaphor for all of these different things. And in our case, it becomes a metaphor for an indie rock band.

TT: We did a search on Youtube recently and we found a bunch of videos of your band, as well as a bunch of covers of your songs. How does it feel to be "covered" and to have to deal with the whole Youtube culture of anyone uploading videos of your music at any given time?

MJ:It's great. Every now and then, someone will send a video to us and we'll check it out and at first, it's really surreal, and then after a while its just kind of…bad. My favorite is this old dude on the ukelele doing a song, and then every other one is a 14-year old girl on a guitar. It's cool…all of these different types of people covering us, and they cover us in all sorts of different ways. There was one R&B/soul singer who covered our song "Gasoline", but he did it "a cappella". It was really great.

TT: Could you explain the whole songwriting process that you go through? Is it collaborative, or is it just something that you sit down and do yourself?

MJ:I mostly write the songs, and then the band will come together. Some of time I will have a basic arrangement done, but then sometimes we'll work on the arrangements together. It depends; it's really sort of a case by case basis. But usually, it's alone, at two in the morning, traveling...

TT: I know you guys have been on tour for a while now, what are some of the best and worst experiences you’ve had on the road?

MJ:I finished a show once with blood going down my face. We let fans come on stage, and this guy was head-banging and they he head-banged too hard, and the back of his head hit me in the face. I got this really bad shiner for a week. I don't know if you're ever had a shiner, but people really respect you when they think that you fight, and maybe you lost the fight, but you were in a fight, and so at the very least, people are like, "hey, that guy will fight me!"

TT: Yeah, I think you probably have a lot more credibility on the streets…

MJ:Yeah, you definitely have credibility, like when you're going on the subway, and everyone's like, "Whoa, hey…."

TT: Don't want to fuck with that guy...

MJ:There was one time when we were going over the I-5, like, the great divide between Oregon and California, and we had chains on the tires because of the snow, and one of the chains got wrapped around the rear axle, and we had to get out of the van. It was one in the morning, and there were 40 MPH winds, and I'm lying in a snowbank, trying to unravel a chain from an axle, and the next day we have an early interview, and they're like, "How do you stay humble with all of this that's going on?" I was like, "well, last night I was under a fucking van, unwrapping a chain from an axle on a snowbank, so it's actually pretty fucking easy to stay humble."

TT: That's pretty intense. I was reading that you used to do some writing for various publications, and now that you've transitioned to writing music, how were you able to make that switch?

MJ:I was a columnist on NPR, I was published in McSweeney's, and I had written some things for the LA Times. My career was going really well, and I had just gotten into Llano, which is this writer's retreat that's really hard to get into, and at this point I started writing songs, and people asked me, "Oh, wow, you finally got into Llano, you can finally finish your book," and I was like, "well, no, I'm going to start this rock band." They thought I was fucking crazy, that I was giving up on this writing career that I had been working on. It was kind of an absurd thing to do at the time, and people thought I was out of my mind. It just felt more natural; it honestly felt like what I should be doing and where my head was at. I really did spend a year doing nothing but playing music, and it just felt like the honest thing to do.

TT: So you have no regrets switching from the journalistic world to the music scene?

MJ:I was more of a fiction writer, actually. I didn't really do much journalism, really. I think that was just an angle that comes in the press sometimes. I was really bad at it, anyway…the journalists that I meet are really good and they're really smart and they get the story down and know all of their facts…I always fuck all of that stuff up.

TT: What is the plan for the band for the rest of the year? Are you on tour, or are you working on new material?

MJ:We played about 200 shows in the last year, and we have about 50 more to go between now and Christmas. With touring, we're living on of a bus and living on the road for about 15 months, and we're just going from place to place, putting on shows. There's a bunch of new songs written, and I think we're going to start working on a second record soon enough…we just haven't been able to get off of the tour right now.

TT: Last question. I play a pretty mean kazoo, and I also dabble on the washboard a little bit, so I was wondering maybe if there is an opening in the band or if I could just fit in somewhere or something...

MJ: Absolutely. 100%. We're thinking about having a kazoo section, so if you have any friends you can bring along, that would be nice. Also, the didgeridoo is like the big brother to the kazoo, so we could have a kazoo section that's anchored by someone playing some wicked didgeridoo solos, that would be rad.