With their unique style of alt-country meets grunge meets rock meets pop, for sale Those Darlins dropped their third release Blur the Line on October 1. Personal favorite? “Optimist” (and the super catchy “Red Light Love” from back in the day). We talked on the phone with founding member and guitarist/singer Jessi Zazu about the new album, maturing after the release of 2011’s Screws Get Loose and 2009’s self-titled Those Darlins, and becoming a solid again after lineup changes and the discard of the “Darlin” moniker.

Lisa Battiston: So the new album is called Blur the Line. I was curious about what the recording and writing process was like for the new album.

Jessi Zazu: Well, we worked on it for about a year and a half, writing it after the release of our last album, Screws Get Loose. We wrote a couple songs on the road during the breaks we had from touring, but we had some time off last winter and spent a few months really doing a lot of writing and focusing on it. It was more of a daily thing.

Was that different from the way you guys did Screws Get Loose?

JZ: Yeah, it was pretty different. We didn’t really have a set amount of time to work on Screws Get Loose. We just wrote songs when we could. It was a little bit more of a put together type of thing. We all just wrote some songs and said, “Here’s some songs. Let’s just do it.” And we recorded [Screws Get Loose] in, like, ten days… We didn’t really have that much prep. We had played a few songs on the road a lot, so we had those ready, but a lot of the songs on Screws Get Loose were written right before we even went to the studio. I’m kind of laughing to think of it.

[For Blur the Line,] we worked for a long time. We wrote over thirty songs [for Blur the Line] and, with Screws, it was like we just had enough. There were just two extra songs that we cut off the album… So we wrote all thirty songs [for Blur the Line] and we had lots and lots of time alone writing, but we also spent a lot of time as a band practicing for a couple months and just playing the songs over and over and over again, working on individual parts and arrangements and stuff like that. Some songs started coming together more than others.

And then we started working with our producer Roger [Moutenot; Sleater Kinney, Yo La Tengo, JEFF the Brotherhood, Be Your Own Pet] and he helped us. By then, we kind of had a demo CD of about thirty-some [songs]. It was just an acoustic demo, not full band. We picked the ones that were sort of the strongest and that we felt were coming ahead more quickly as songs, the ones we felt like fit together better that we liked as a group. That’s when we started working with [Roger] and working on pre-production – same thing, really, just playing as a band and helping us work on arrangements. He gave us little pointers here and there on how to change parts to make them fit together better and then we spent a month and a half in the studio. We went in every day for about six days a week, eight to ten hours a day. We just wanted to really make sure that we took our time with it and got everything to the place where we wanted it to be and where we heard it in our heads. I think there was a lot of patience involved with this one, which I would say was a newer thing compared to our last two albums. I think we were all just ready to say, “If we’re gonna do this, let’s do it right. Let’s really put in the time because we have the time right now.” So – that’s kind of how it happened [laughs].

I read a lot of reviews of the album that have sort of called it more focused. Do you think concentrating on it in that way helped produce this more focused kind of sound?

JZ: Yeah, I think that we have gotten better as a band – as musicians, I mean. We’re sort of a new band now since we have a new lineup [Kelley Anderson left the band in 2012 to pursue other musical interests and was replaced with bassist Adrian Barrera], but we’ve gotten better as musicians, as songwriters, and just as people in general. I think we’ve matured and one thing that was sort of figured out was that, you know, before this album, we were switching a lot of instruments and were just a little bit more confusing as to who was doing what. And, on Screws, Nikki [Kvarnes] had a broken arm and couldn’t play, so me and Lin [Regensburg] and Kelley were playing all over it and it was just like – it was cool because it was kind of a free for all, but it was also kind of chaos, in a way. On [Blur the Line], we decided that we all were going to play our respective instruments that we ended up playing on the album for the rest of our, you know, career. This is gonna be what we do on this album and what we focus on and it really helped us solidify our sound a lot and just knowing our roles and be able to say, “Okay, I’m the guitar player. That’s my job. To play guitar. And figure out the guitar parts and sing and help everyone fit their part into where it needs to be.”  Another goal was to make sure all of the parts had their space and no one was playing on top of each other and nothing was going to be on there that didn’t need to be there. There is no extra stuff thrown on top. We were open to just keeping it really spacious and open  – but full at the same time – we just didn’t want it too cluttered.

You mentioned the lineup changes and I read, too, that you guys relinquished the “Darlin” surname?

JZ: Yeah.

I was wondering if you could talk about that a little?

JZ: Well? It was always kind of like a representation of, like, a gang mentality or a group identity or sort of like The Ramones. It was always sort of a thing between me, Nikki, and Kelley, and without Kelley in the band, it just kind of seemed like, “…Oooh.” You know? It didn’t make sense anymore, really, if it was going to be Lin and Adrian and then just me and Nikki are the Darlins now? It just didn’t… It was like, we’re a band and it’s not just about us two. We thought we would preserve our group identity more by getting rid of it. But also! We wanted to sort of develop our own individual identities within the group as well. With just sort of a generic last name, it was harder to do that. It was just something we decided, like, “The time has come.” [laughs] We’re at the point now where we’re real people, we’re gonna put our names on there.

To sort of go along with that identity idea and to bring it back to the album, I was reading that a lot of the album deals with masculinity and femininity and gender identity… I read that you guys were sort of seeking a balance between masculinity and femininity and I was wondering if there was sort of gender identity stuff that you guys were trying to explore within the songs.

JZ: I think that a good portion of the album is – I can’t say intentionally that that’s what we wrote about or were trying to make a statement about gender identity or anything like that, but we were just writing about ourselves. We just happen to be women in a sort of male-dominated society, especially in music. Well – I won’t say especially in music, but there’s definitely a lot of guys around and not as many girls, but I feel like that’s the same in a lot of fields, so… It’s just really more about us and our relationships with the people around us…

So the cover art! I know there’s a big YouTube thing when the Fox affiliate there in Nashville had a little piece about the banner of Blur the Line’s cover art hung up at the record store. My hope would be that there was a more positive response to it. I was wondering if you guys have gotten more positive feedback from the cover.

JZ: That thing was kind of weird. Even when that happened, there’s all these comments or whatever on it. Because Fox news posted a picture of it on their Facebook and said, “Some people have complained about this picture. What do you think?” or whatever. And there were all these comments. It was interesting that there were a lot of kind of Bible belt comments on there [laughs], but there were also just as many if not more comments that were taking up for it and saying, you know, this isn’t offensive and blah blah. There were a lot of different opinions on there, but it was interesting to see the argument that came out of it. Some people were saying that trying to hide and cover up the human body and human sexuality really results in worse things than just accepting it. It was cool, I thought it was cool. Mostly, the reaction has just been people asking us about “that Fox thing” – like, really, it’s mostly people saying, “So? What’s up with that?” [laughs] But I think it’s been generally positive, yeah.

Was the actual physical photo shoot for that sort of difficult? Like, had you guys been naked around each other before?

JZ: It was a little– well, I wouldn’t say it was difficult. It was a lot of fun, actually. We were just laughing and having a good time. Especially with me, Lin, and Nikki – we’ve been living in the van for seven years. We’re not really shy around each other. We’ve probably been all naked together at some point [laughs]. It wasn’t really that weird. It was Adrian’s first photoshoot with us and we were like, “Here’s your real initiation!” [laughs] So that was kind of funny, but he did a good job and we all just laughed our way through it and had a good time. It was actually like a lot easier than you can imagine, I would think.

So you guys are sort of in the midst of touring with Blur the Line. Are there any places in particular that you’ve already played or that you’re excited to play or excited to revisit?

JZ: We’ve only played two shows so far. We played Knoxville and Charlottesville, Virginia. We’re all excited for all the shows! Every city. We’re excited to be back on the road and meeting people and playing for people again. We’re especially excited because our new show – we’ve really worked hard on it and all of our new songs. It’s exciting to get to bring it out to people. We’re excited to tour through the Northeast. Haven’t been there in a while, in Boston in particular because our last show got cancelled, so we haven’t been there in forever. We’re really excited about Boston.

So what can we expect from you guys?

JZ: We’ve been practicing all summer and trying to get to a point where, like, the album’s really good, but you gotta be able to play the album! [laughs] So, I mean, we did play the album, but there’s a lot of stuff that gets changed in the studio and then it’s sort of like we’re relearning the songs again. We’ve been playing shows all summer, just here and there, and practicing a ton, to the point where – we’re a new band now. Like I said, me and Lin and Nikki have played a million shows together, but with Adrian, [we have gotten] to the point with him where we’re a unit and we’re a band and there’s no weirdness or whatever. We’re at the point where we feel really comfortable on stage together. It’s a good feeling.