What started out as a procrastination issue for Mikel Jollett turned into the indie rock outfit which he now helms--The Airborne Toxic Event [ tickets ]. Songs casually penned while working on a novel became fodder for the singer/guitarist's demo and, eventually, the group's first album. Now, with more than a year-and-a-half of band brotherhood under their belt, the quintet are enjoying their rising success and a record deal with West Coast indie label Major Domo.

The LA band's long-awaited, self-titled, full-length debut dropped August 5. Currently taking a couple weeks off between stints on the road, the rockers will continue supporting the new album in early September with a thorough North American tour.

Los Angeles-based indie-rockers The Airborne Toxic Event [ tickets ] are currently taking a short break between tours supporting their recently released self-titled debut.

LiveDaily contributor Maya Marin sat down with the quintet--Mikel Jollet, Steven Chen, Noah Harmon, Anna Bulbrook and Daren Taylor--to talk about their individual influences, the group's rising success and the inspiration behind their new album's tracks.

So, I believe the story goes that the idea for forming a band began with a novel you were writing, Mikel. Is that true?

Mikel: Sort of. That's the gist of it. It was in the utter excruciating boredom of trying to write a novel, I ended up procrastinating by writing a lot of music.

Did the songs come from the story or the plot of the novel?

Mikel: A couple of them do actually. "This Is Nowhere" is vaguely about the characters in the novel but also about being in a band in Silverlake. It all starts to mix together sometimes when you're sitting there at three in the morning.

And then you thought it would be a good idea to start a band yourself?

Mikel: Yeah. Actually that song was written after we were already playing. It was about our whole scene that we come from and all the bands we play with and how everybody in Silverlake right now is just really—it's an extremely vibrant scene and everyone's just going for it. Everyone's mortgaging their lives to be in a rock 'n' roll band and we're no different. We're just one of many doing that.

You've also done a bit of freelance writing I understand—NPR, LA Times and I believe a short story was published in McSweeney's. Do you consider writing your first love?

Mikel: Paula Bristow was my first love actually. (laughs) Yeah, I always wanted to be a writer and I always knew I was going to be a writer. You know when you're a kid and your parents reinforce something. I think with Anna it was probably violin playing. They'd say "Hey, Anna, how's that violin playing going?

Anna: "Hey Anna, we'll send you to band camp each summer."

Mikel: What was it with you, Noah? What do you think you were bred to be?

Noah: I've never done anything but play bass.

Mikel: Was your family always like, "How's the bass playing?" Was it a thing with your family? My family was always like, "Have you written any stories lately?" when I was like 11.

Well, you've already started talking about everybody's background. Why don't we go one by one and talk about your musical background and how you knew you were a good fit for the band.

Anna: I was a classically trained violinist and I've been playing since I was four. I said goodbye to the violin when I realized I wasn't going to be a concert violinist and missed it a lot and then I ran across the band and got back in touch with music all at the same time. I knew it was a good fit when we played our first show. It's like a first date, when you come out and you think it was exciting and what's next. I consider myself a recovering violinist to this day. It's awesome though. This is exactly how I want to be playing music.

Steven: My musical career started when I was six. I did the whole Asian thing where you're forced to play piano so I played from six to 12. Then I asked my parents if I could get a guitar and they said no. I think my grandfather convinced my mom to get me a guitar and she wanted it to be a surprise so she said something like, "I’m taking you to get a haircut," and I was like, "Mom, it's like 7pm." So we went and a family friend, their son played guitar and my mom had asked him to buy a guitar for me and I went and got it. I started playing when I was 13. I played here and there in high school, never in any really good bands. In college, I ended up being the guy with the acoustic guitar who would play forever in my bedroom and piss off the neighbors. Then I met Mikel when I was also trying to write a novel. We met in San Francisco. We bonded over writing and music but we didn't really know that each other played music until about five years later. We'd been in and out of touch because we were living in different cities. I moved back to LA and he got in touch with me and said he was starting this band and asked if I wanted to come down and play some keyboard. I told him I could play guitar, so gradually that's how it happened.

Daren: I've always been a fan of music. I was actually speaking to my brother last night. He's 10 years older than I am and remembers vividly me being two or three years old and being planted in front of the television watching MTV, knowing all the songs, all the artists, all the videos, everything. I'd always loved that and of course I was influenced by my older brothers' and sisters' musical tastes. In high school when I was 15 years old, I sat behind a drum set one day with some friends and they said, "ok, you're the drummer." I was like," Ok, my dad has a drum set so I guess it's meant to be." From that point on, I just started playing along to stuff. I taught myself how to play by playing along to stuff like The Cure, The Smiths, The Ramones. The Ramones were actually the group that told me that the bass drum happens on one and the snare happens on two instead of both of them happening on two. When I was 21, my high school band broke up and I knew I needed to do something else so I moved to LA and I went to school for a year. I got a certificate that says I'm a professional drummer. I don't know what that means exactly. Then I played in bands in LA and through people, I eventually ended up in a band with a friend of Mikel's who told me he was looking for a drummer. I listened to their three-song demo and I instantly knew that this is music that a lot of people are going to like and I like it more importantly. This is music I want to play.

Noah: I haven't had much formal learning but I haven't done much else aside from play bass. When Mikel asked me to join the band, I said no.

Mikel: That's not true. Noah has a degree in jazz.

You mentioned a three-song demo. Who worked on that demo?

Mikel: I did, on my own. I recorded it mostly in my apartment. I was trying to get a band together. A lot of the songs that I had, two of which are on the record, were on this demo--"Papillon" and "Wishing Well." I couldn't get bandmates to save my life. It was probably good, though, because it weeded people out and now we've got the right chemistry.

And you started gigging around town in the Los Feliz and Silverlake area. I read also down in Orange County as well. Orange County isn’t an area that a lot of LA bands talk about a lot so I'm going to try to eek some stories out of you.

Noah: There are clubs down there. It's definitely a different city. It's no Silverlake, no offense to any Orange County resident.

Mikel: We've got a lot of really good fans down there, people who are big music fans but just live far away from the cultural centers that we live near. I think they're really appreciative of the fact that we would take that trek. We just pack up our cars and drive down there and load in. We played probably eight shows down there in three months. We really appreciated their response. It just grew--the first time we played, there were about 50, then 75, then 100. The last time we played, there were like 300. It just grew and grew and grew by word of mouth, just like it does anywhere else. We're a rock band. That's what we trade on is our live show.

Anna: The cool thing about Orange County, too, is that everyone there listens to the same radio stations that we do here in LA, so in terms of the airwaves, we're a lot more connected than you'd think. So as soon as we started getting played on the radio, we noticed in Orange County the excitement kicked up a level just like it did in LA. That was really cool to see.

That's no small feat to get regular airplay on commercial radio here in LA being an unsigned band. And because of that, you were courted by major labels I'm sure, but you decided to go with an indie label. Why'd you do that?

Steven: We heard that the major label system might be in trouble and there was a lot of talk amongst the band. It wasn't this approach where we were shunning the major labels. We were looking at everything. The environment that we found ourselves in, it made a lot of sense. There were smart people at Major Domo, the place where we ended up.

Mikel: We realized the major label system was tanking and they didn't realize it. They kept telling us that we had to be on a major and then that guy would be fired in the next week and someone else would tell us we had to be on a major. It just didn’t make any sense and then we just followed logic towards this group of people who were really smart and really knew what they were doing and offered us a super modern deal and had a really good plan for us. Plus, they'd been to a ton of shows and it was this upstart West Coast little indie label called Major Domo, but they were for real. They were not messing around. They seemed ready to go for it. They wanted to be the next ATO or Sub Pop. They're really into it. They were trying to build something and we were the first band they were going to go for it with. That was great by us.

Daren: And, oddly enough, they were the one label that didn't buy us dinner or take us out for drinks. Also, most of the other meetings we'd taken were with one or two other people. When we sat down with Major Domo, it was like 12 to 15 people, staring at us with big smiles.

Mikel: They were ready to work. They came to us with a plan. All the other ones, it was one guy telling you all this stuff and talking down to you.

Noah: None of them ever told us that they liked the record, which was kind of weird.

Mikel: They were just businessmen in suits and you feel like you're shaking hands with the devil. It just seemed weird.

Anna: Another nice thing about Major Domo is that we came to them with a record ready and just handed it to them and said this is our record. They said ok.

Mikel: All the majors had been treating it like a demo. They wanted to get a real producer and we were telling them that we'd just spent a year on it and this is our record. This is our blood, sweat and tears right here. This is what we believe in and we produced it ourselves at our friend Pete's studio. It was the best we could do so it didn't make sense to give it to someone else. We tried with some other mixers but we couldn't really swing what they were doing. Some of the stuff on the album is actually from my apartment. Some is from Noah's apartment. Most of it is from that studio, live first takes. They're live mixes because it's all outboard gear so basically what it meant was that the mix itself was a performance, so it means that you had to play it and then you had a day to capture it before you have to pull the patch bay. It puts a lot of pressure on having to sit there and get the song done within a day.

Noah: Think about it as the computer as tape. It was kind of like recording analog but to digital.

Mikel: It wasn't actually tape that we used but we did all live mixes because it was all outboard gear and once you pull it, it's done. For "Wishing Well," we did six full mixes in 13-hour sessions, trying to get the mix right. We were really trying to make sure that all the levels were right. There are so many intricate things that we didn't know but we learned in the process of making the record just by trial and error.

That explains the very live feel to the record.

Mikel: That was the goal. We'd been playing a lot of shows and we felt really good about the audiences we were with. We got a lot of feedback but we felt it too. We walk off stage and feel like something just happened. We wanted to capture that on the record so there was that sense.

The buzz certainly didn't stop with the radio play. You were also named one of the top 25 bands on MySpace by Rolling Stone.

Anna: That actually happened I think three months after we played our first show. That was very early on.

Mikel: That was actually a contest. Steven on a whim one day entered "Wishing Well" into the contest and then one day he called me and was like, "Dude, we won that contest!"

Daren: We were number one because our band name starts with an A, so we were at the top of the list.