Travis Morrison Hellfighters play Thursday night at the Rock & Roll Hotel as part of a benefit show for Survivors and Advocates of Empowerment, with Ra Ra Rasputin and Jukebox the Ghost (***). 8:30 p.m., $10 in advance, $12 at the door. You can read our review of Morrison's latest album, All Y'all here

What does the new album, All Y’all, mean to you?

Well, it’s the first thing I did with this band. Travistan had a band, but it was small - it was me, and a drummer and a producer in a studio. This was the first thing I did, I guess, as a band leader. I was kind of a band leader in the Plan, but a band leader of people I met when I was like 17, so.

It was a little different?

Yes.

How’d you go about putting this band together?

I asked around, I took out ads… one guy found me. When the Plan was breaking up, one guy who had been in a band that the Plan played with in Florida came to me and said that he was moving to D.C., and if I’d like to play we should do that. And it worked out pretty well.

What does he play?

He’s the bass player, Brandon Kalber.

So did you just try other people out?

Yeah. And the lineup has been through a couple of generations now. Phases. When we were recording, it would kind of be the same group, and I would change one person or one element or instrumentation. The lineup as of yesterday, at practice, is a bit different from what it is on the record – one person is gone, and now there’s two more people. Now there’s two people who are still with the group from the dawn of time, from 2004.

What’s your favorite song on the new record?

Probably "Catch Up." It was kind of our ah ha moment in terms of some of the crazy things we can do as a band.

Have you been writing anything new lately?

Yeah! Like maniacs, actually. We have a great torrent of new stuff.

Do you have plans to record?

I hope so. Making this record… to say that it was like pulling teeth would imply that pulling teeth takes three years. So it would really be more germane if I were ever at the dentist, and I were having a tooth pulled, and I were to say, “God, this is like getting my last record out!” In terms of metaphorical scope. And probably dentists are a lot better at what they do.

So what was so difficult about getting this last album out?

Oh, everything. Well without getting too into it, there was this one review of my first record on Pitchfork, that really captured people’s imaginations. In kind of a melancholy and depressing way. And it made getting things done hard in the music industry. And it really destroyed my taste for playing rock music in clubs. Not the review per say, but the obsession with it. So I joined a church choir and I just kind of retired for like a year. So I kind of didn’t want to capture that moment on record. Playing rock music totally depressed me! Enjoy! Then I felt like I was bailing on it – I felt like I owed it to the guys to see it through and kind of take what we wanted to do from there rather than give up on it.

You’re just answering all my questions without me asking them, so just keep talking Travis.

Well I knew you were gonna ask about Pitchfork, so I’m just gonna tell you what I think. And so then, there was a lineup change, and we hadn’t been playing together for a while, so when we reconvened there was this crazy rush of new music. My dream right now – and I think the label is signed on, but I may be delusional about this – and while that actually has helped my career sometimes, the delusions – I think they’re into this this. I want to put out a smaller record, like an 8 to 10 song thing within a year. As opposed to three years of torment. And I think we can do it.

The band we have now is the best group of musicians I’ve ever played with, and it’s very inspiring. And I think I’ve learned a lot about being a band leader, which is different from being a semi-leader in an adolescent cloud. Which is beautiful! I mean adolescent clouds produce some of the world’s greatest art. But that’s not the game I play anymore. I mean, Miles Davis did what he did without the help of an adolescent cloud, and I’d like to work towards that. It’ll take a while, but as I learn more how to operate in that situation, and not just be a pro-dingbat, but actually try and find magic, then I think that’s also fueling the creative process.

This has been a really long answer to, “do you have any new songs?”! So then when I was five, I changed elementary schools, and I think that helped…

So you mentioned that this is your dream, the best people you’ve worked with. So what do you want out of your music career now?

Well, I don’t want it to be miserable. I’ve got standards now. And misery is out! Um, I don’t know. I’ve done a lot of thinking about that, and the word “career” has taken on an awful Pavlovian reaction for me.

One of the things that was most unpleasant about the Travistan experience, was getting nagged about the damage I had done to my career with this record. And I was like, what is this word? Who are you people? And what do you want out of your artists? I mean, I can make more money, traveling less, if I have a “career” programming computers. And I realized that I didn’t want to play by those rules. And while I realize that often times it’s good for art to have a capitalistic fire under its ass, and that lust for a career can be a really healthy aspect of it, for the moment – while I feel really ambitious about music, and I want to keep that feeling going – the idea of a “career” in music, it makes my head hurt.

I mean, I’m all for winning the lottery and having a huge hit and getting rich, but that’s not a career. That’s Power Ball that you play with one of your songs. And that’s cool, that’s great. But I don’t know, after the last few years, I have to admit that the whole rap about, “wouldn’t it be nice if I could just make a middle class life out of playing my songs,” it actually kind of sounds corn ball to me now.

And you know, I’ve been singing with the National Cathedral Choir, and it’s really satisfying. Those people, I mean you don’t have a career singing in a church choir, you do it because you love it. And they’re very high-level musicians. And there’s no obsession about, well, are they making their mp3s free on the internet? I mean really, is that much of an achievement?

So you know I have to ask about the Dismemberment Plan. The two reunion shows last spring were a huge success. Did that leave you guys wanting more at all? Make you want to do it again?

Well you know… you have to remember the circumstances that made the show so great. They don’t show up all the time. It was… I mean… not really.

If I ever got the sense that the four of us – and I think we all agree on this – were hungry enough to start playing together all the time, and start pushing the boundaries musically again, then yes. I’m open to a moment happening again between the four of us. But I don’t see that happening now. One good thing about the Plan is that we were completely stubborn and spacey, and to a certain extent, immune enough to the call of popularity that we could just be like, “NO!” Unless the four of us are feeling it in that way. And that’s good! If people are like “come on, we love you,” we can still be stubborn. It’s healthier for everybody. That being said, it occurred to me that if we could get together a reunion tour with Joan Jett, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d pay so much money to go see that show, but I wouldn’t have to, cause I’d be in one of the bands.

Do you miss playing with those guys?

Yeah I do! I miss playing with them a lot. I miss playing with Joe a lot. Joe is a raging ball of energy. And he’s really become an incredible drummer. I mean the main thing for me is, we needed a break from each other after playing in a band together for ten years. And the main thing is, now we’ve started to socialize. And that’s what we did before we were even in a band together. I mean Eric and Jason and I just kind of knew each other. To get back to that space has been very satisfying – almost more so than playing together.

This next question comes from our technical guy at DCist, Tom. What's your favorite Javascript library? dojo? jQuery? Prototype/Scriptaculous? moo.fx?

Tell him I hate them all. Because they have unintended side effects. I’ll go with jQuery for now.

Tom would probably say that it says a lot about you.

Tom would be wrong. And Tom would be a nerd.

Musician and programmer seem like kind of opposite ends of the spectrum...

No I disagree! I did an interview with Stereogum about this. I actually think that there are similarities. There are big-differences, but you’re working with a mathematically-rooted language to do something that helps people, or make them happy or get them fired up. And I actually think, structurally, there are so many connections between playing music and being curious about science. I think that computer programming and music have a lot of archetypal similarities. I think that which road you take kind of depends on how much you like drugs. And maybe women? But mostly just drugs. I think that’s really the scale tipper right there. The abstracts are there, 'cause music is mathematical. Harmony has a lot of math to it – high level math. You have to have a certain personality germ in common to do either.

So do you go to many shows around town? Do you like any local bands that are playing now?

I do! I think Jukebox the Ghost is great, I think Georgie James is great. I’ve seen Mass Movement of the Moth a few times, I think they’re really good. I go through waves with shows, where I go to 7 in a month, and then I don’t look at club listings for two months and then I’m like, Hey! Rock!

I saw a show of a band called the Dirty Projectors at the Black Cat, I was screaming like a girl they were so good. Oh my god! I was actually starting to worry about my relationship with rock and roll, nothing was really like... I mean there were things I would appreciate and enjoy listening to, but I hadn’t been obsessed with rock music for a while. And I kind of got a band crush, I kind of flipped out about this band.

You have to see them live. Live is the craziest thing – and it’s crazy without being, CRAZY!, with costumes and stuff like that. It’s very simple – two guitars, bass, drums lineup. But it’s the most unbelievably ambitious amalgam of influences. And then things that – I just don’t understand how these people got together. Which is kind of the greatest feeling of all with bands. I mean, the singer has this female bassist and female singer, who he does these incredibly intricate three part harmonies with, like out of time with the music they’re playing. It’s really evolved music, he’s not kidding around. He really knows what he’s doing. But somehow he’s not a wiener about it. It’s really moving when he does it. How did he assemble a team that can pull off these tricks? It’s really amazing.

But no no, I still get the band crushes, and I still – whenever I go see Jukebox the Ghost, it’s like a Tuesday night, and I’m like, “well I may have to leave halfway through the set,” and I never do. There’s always some weird shit going on at those shows. I think it’s a strange moment in D.C. music – I don’t think there’s any real center to it. You know, I think that kind of reflects music at large. And culture at large. It’s very fragmented. There isn’t “The Band.” But that has its plusses as well as its drawbacks.

OK, one more thing. Which do you think is cuter, koalas or pandas?

This is a hard one, as you must know. I struggle with this a lot. Koalas sleep like 20 hours a day, and also will tear your ass up if you bother them. And then go back to sleep, I guess. And when a cute animal's usual M.O. is drowsy passivity, but can be provoked into devastating violence... well that's just like turbo cuteness, to me. In animals, and honestly, in people too. I don't think panda bears have this kind of game, so I'll go with koalas.

Photos from last spring's Dismemberment Plan reunion show by Andrew McDermott, with permission.