Photo by Shervin Lainez.

In 2011, the Dismemberment Plan returned after an eight-year break (four-year break if you’re counting the 2007 Callum Robbins benefit shows) and the frenzy for tickets was palpable. People came from all over the country to get into the Black Cat and 9:30 Club, and DCist put together more D Plan-related posts than anyone thought possible. Since then, they’ve released an album, hit the festival circuit and their shows (which have usually come through town annually) no longer have the essence of surprise. They do, however, provide locals with a reliable chance to sing along to songs like “The City” and “You Are Invited.” They are usually some of the most high-energy shows of the year, and now the Plan is returning to pre-breakup habit of scheduling those shows over holiday weekends.

We spoke with singer/guitarist Travis Morrison in advance of Friday’s show at the 9:30 Club about t-shirt designs, the Change vinyl release, playing over a holiday weekend, and the reason they didn’t re-learn “Sentimental Man.”

You seem to have found a spot where you can do these shows on weekends and a couple of times a year. Is this a format that works for all of you?

Yeah, I think so. I do wish we could do a week or two straight, but that would be very hard for us, because there are kids and relatively demanding jobs and all that. We did manage to do a week in England and that was just nice to be able to play seven shows in a row because there’s a little bit of a, play and then play the next night and then you don’t play for two weeks. And it’s nice being there, playing with the same people night after night for a while. But yeah, it works for me. I don’t find myself upset as the shows approach like, “No. God, do I really have to go do this?” I wish I could do more in a row, frankly.

Black Friday seems like a weird time to put together a show.

Someone has to play! What, do you think people will be shopping? That seems like the wrong day to go shopping.

I won’t be. But was that just a day that worked for all of you?

Sure. I think sometimes playing your hometown on a holiday weekend is pretty nice, actually. It’s not a great time to be out on the road and play Phoenix on Black Friday, but playing your hometown on a holiday weekend can be good. Obviously, some people “go home” but then other people “come home.” So, it’s kind of a wash and it’s pretty impossible to really get everyone. Someone’s going to have to miss the show. That’s what it comes down to. For any given show, someone’s going to be out of town, etc. So I think that playing your hometown on immediately post-holiday weekends can work pretty good, especially on a Friday night or weekend night when you’ve had just about as much of your parents or your family as you can handle.

You just released Change on vinyl, which seems to have been a popular decision. How quickly did those disappear?

Certainly fast, which is shocking. From the shows, they just went like wildfire. That’s always how it goes. Sometimes you get so many and then three people buy one and you’re stuck with this huge box of vinyl. Then the other times they’ll sell out before doors are even open. Yeah, they went really fast at the shows, which is great.

Will there be any left for people at the D.C. show to pick up?

I think I’ll raise that up the flagpole of Plan Inc. [Laughs.] I do really hope so. Bands usually have Vice Presidents of this and Vice Presidents of that, and I am decidedly not Vice President of the Merch Table. I am Vice President of Design, so I do look out from stage and see my beautiful t-shirt designs, but I am not Vice President of Merch, so I would address that with Vice President of Merch.

And who might that be?

That’s Eric [Axelson]. Eric is Tour King.

You designed the new Change t-shirts then?

I did! Although now I have professional help. There’s a very talented graphic designer at our label and he and I have worked together. For the Change t-shirts, I was not actually moving the mouse around myself in Photoshop, but I do know those tools and he and I were able to communicate well, but he was able to execute it better than I ever could. So I said, “Why don’t we take the corner of the Change sign and make kind of a one color, gritty, almost Xerox copy of it?” Then he did a much better version than I ever could. Back in the day, I would have actually executed it and done a shitty job of it, but yeah, the concept did come from my fertile brain.

The Emergency & I cover was your design, right?

That was. That one I moved the mouse on. That was me pushing pixels, for better or for worse. Some people were like, “That’s your album cover? Are you fucking kidding me? That’s not the album cover. It’s terrible.” I was like, “I don’t know! I kind of like it!” Now, there’s tattoos of it but at the time people stared at it like, “This is awful. This is the worst. This is so bad.” But it’s kind of taken on — are you a Black Sabbath fan at all?

Yeah.

You know the cover of Paranoid? That bizarre, blurred figure of a black dude waiting around in a shitty superhero outfit? It is so random and so wrong and weird. It’s like, “Why is this the cover of Paranoid by Black Sabbath?” The randomness invokes nightmarish paranoia more than any logical picture ever could. It looks like a nightmare. Sometimes fucked up album covers are just what the record needs.

Or maybe the guy from Emergency & I could be like Eddie on those Iron Maiden albums. Except it only appears on one album.

We’ll call it “Merge.” Hey, Merge! Heya, Merge! It’s short for “Emergency.” “You know, Merge? He’s got a big ol’ head! You’ve seen him around.”

Since these shows are surrounding the Change vinyl release, were there any songs from that album that you had not been playing that you went back and re-learned?

Yes. “Come Home” and “Secret Curse” and “Superpowers” all had not been played in twelve to thirteen years and are back in the mix. I really, really love playing “Superpowers” and “Secret Curse.” I enjoy playing “Come Home.” It’s a bit maudlin but it’s cool. Now the only songs that aren’t in the rotation are “Automatic,” which I think everyone would be okay with, and “Sentimental Man” which is strange. I don’t know why we’re not doing it. It’s just kind of like, that friend. You go out with a bunch of friends and say, “Did anyone call Rick?” And everyone’s like, “No. Do you want to call Rick? Why don’t we bring Rick?” But you’re like, “Nah. It’s cool. I guess Rick isn’t going bowling with us.” We ran out of time. We’re kind of late. We don’t have time to call Rick. Because we had to bring a bunch of songs back and that’s a long one to bring back and we had done the summer festival schedule which is “Play the same fourteen songs and then go get dinner and then watch the Replacements and then go see Skrillex” again and again in the same places throughout the world.

So, we were playing the same 14 songs every time so we new we’d need to bring certain gear, so some songs got left off. So, there’s a certain amount of reconstituting back into the touring band version where there is somewhere upwards of 35 songs on the playlist. So I think between writing songs that maybe jazz everyone a little more and not having the time, “Sentimental Man,” got Ricked. It’s nothing totally against Rick, but it is against Rick on some level. But passively so. He’s kind of annoying.

We’re bringing that into the lexicon.

We’re bringing Rick back.

You guys released an album last year but you also have another band. How do you determine which songs are Dismemberment Plan songs as opposed to Burlies songs?

I don’t really write the songs; both bands are extremely collaborative. Mentally I don’t think about The Burlies when I’m not there. I write the lyrics at rehearsal. What comes out of my mouth — we’ll just kind of expand on it as we jam. The Burlies are completely — it happens between the four of us while we play in the rehearsal space or it never happens at all. None of us work on it. And the Dismemberment Plan is kind of the same way. There’s a little bit of me bringing stuff in. I could kind of go down the history of the Plan and be like, “This song is a Travis song and this one is a jam that I just put lyrics on” and it’s interesting that way because some of our biggest songs, I wrote them and then some of our biggest songs were definitely collaborative creations and I kinda slapped some lyrics on top. That’s what I really enjoy about the Plan. I think it’s great that we can be more of a song based band and not be more of a Led Zeppelin talent-construction kind of dude. I write songs but I kind of wait for the collaborative context. I don’t go through life being like, “I need you to play my song.” I don’t wake up like, “Who will I get to play this song?” I have collaborative situations I just happen to have lyrics written already. It’s almost like “whiffs” which is riffs with words.

You’ve played with another D.C. band, Priests, for this entire series of shows. How did you find them?

The first consciousness I had of them was simply listening to “Doctor” on YouTube and it blew my gourd. I was saying on Facebook that and “Digital Witness” by St. Vincent are my two favorite songs of the last year. I just thought it was incredible. And then I said, “Who are these Priests?” It was like, since you live in New York, you don’t know anything anymore but they are from Washington. And Joe [Easley] knew about them. Joe had seen them at Fort Reno and said, “Yeah, they’re great!” So, that’s how it came about. They’re great and I feel like they’ve only scratched the surface of what they can do. They were unstoppable in New York. I think they’re just getting started. It’s a pretty inspiring thing.

We’re gonna get a little meta here. Are you aware that DCist has a bit of a reputation involving The Dismemberment Plan?

Like, we had sex?

Like, particularly around the 2011 shows, we gave you guys so much coverage that our commenters said, “Enough!”

That they’re like, “Please stop with this band already!” Well, keep it up. I appreciate the support. It’s good to have coverage. Some people have fear of overexposure. Fuck that. Keep up the saturation!

The Dismemberment Plan plays 9:30 Club on Friday, November 28. Tickets $25. Doors 8 p.m.