This morning, as he does every morning, Joe Easley drives his two kids from their home in Northwest Washington, D.C. to preschool. Joey is four, Cooper is almost two; their dad almost always refers to them as "the midgets." Easley drops them off, then points his green Volkswagen station wagon toward NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, where for six years he's been writing software for robots performing in-orbit maintenance on satellites.
It's a blazing hot day in late August, but Easley and his coworkers are unaware of the sizzling temperature: As is the case these days, they're shut in the large, windowless black box that is the Satellite Servicing Center, testing a robot arm. The test takes three hours and involves what seems like a zillion steps. As the architect of the arm's software and primary operator of the thing itself, Easley sits in front of a bay of eight screens, calling out each step to his small team of engineers as it begins and ends.
"Beginning Step 43..."
"...Step 43 is complete, moving on to Step 44..."
It's meticulous, incredibly tedious work. Around hour three, robotics facility manager Ed Rezac turns to a laptop sitting on the desk behind him. At first it seems like he's taking notes or opening an auxiliary program—but no, he's fiddling furtively with iTunes. With a low chuckle, he clicks play, slowly turning up the volume and sneaking glances at Easley's back until finally, at the end of what seems like the thousandth step, Easley whips around and gives Rezac a mock-death stare. It's not that he hates the distraction, it's that he knows the song: "The Face of the Earth," by beloved '90s indie band the Dismemberment Plan—a band that's about to release its first album in a dozen years. It's also a band for which Easley also happens to be the drummer.
~ * ~
A few days later, about a half-hour west of Goddard, Easley and the rest of the Dismemberment Plan have congregated in his basement. It seems about as typical as band practices in a family basement get: Wood-paneled walls stand in for studio soundproofing; amps are stacked among storage boxes and knick-knacks. A punching bag hangs in the back corner. Joe is now in a gray tank top, red basketball shorts and socks. The rest of the guys—bassist Eric Axelson, guitarist Jason Caddell, and frontman Travis Morrison—have been setting up and are ready to rock by 7 p.m. Timing is strict: Upstairs, the midgets' 9 p.m. bedtime is sacred.
Joey, who's been checking out the mic stands, rushes to the bottom of the stairs. He plants himself in front of a visitor and asks, "What are *you *doing here?" It's a good question. For starters, it's because Axelson has driven up from Virginia, where the onetime English teacher works at Capital One as a marketing content manager, to be here tonight. And because Morrison, for whom today also marks the announcement of his newly launched music tech start-up Shoutabl, has driven down with his wife, Slate editor Katherine Goldstein, from Brooklyn. (Caddell, like Easley, still lives in the capital, making it majority rule for the originally D.C.-based quartet.) It's a rather momentous occasion: This is the first practice the band has held since coming off the recording of Uncanney Valley, their first album in a dozen years. They're again convening in D.C., Avengers-like, to prepare for the short stint of touring they'll do behind the record.
Until recently, The Dismemberment Plan had been broken up for a decade. In the years since the band announced the split, its members—like those of most other bands that break up—grew up.
"People always ask me why we decided to get back together, and it always freaks me out because it sounds like they're talking about a college love affair," Morrison says. "That was the kind of energy we had when we were 22 and 23; we probably were a college love affair for some of them. I understand how that energy was exciting, but it's not that way anymore for us, for better or worse. It's more, 'people who aren't in that place anymore, doing something together again.' It's a different paradigm."
After D-Plan, Morrison, now 40, turned a web-development hobby into a PHP gig at The Washington Post; in 2009 he moved to New York and the Huffington Post, but quit last year to develop Shoutabl, a sort of social network for DIY musicians. Between Capital One and the high school classroom, Axelson, now 42, also worked at Rock the Vote. Caddell, now 41, became a producer and engineer; now he does sound for A-list political events around the city. Easley, 39, who worked for a software company in between six-month tours during the band's early years, went back and finished school at the University of Maryland; he's been with NASA since graduating in 2007. The band reconvened for a quick quasi-reunion bout around the U.S. and Japan, at fans' incessant request, in 2011. During practices, it just started happening: The quartet found themselves grooving, not just on the hits, but with new ideas as well.
One thing led to another, and then another, and then one day they had ten songs. Now, for better or worse, those have become Uncanney Valley, the product of a decade of houses and midgets and spouses, a decade of debugging and million-step test runs. Coupled with a maturely sparse, weekends-only touring schedule, it will test whether middle-aged music can work for a beloved band of modest renown.
~ * ~
There's little question why the Dismemberment Plan broke up the first time around.
"Towards the end that's all we were doing, we didn't have other jobs, and everyone was pretty burned out," says Easley. "Originally we were like, 'We're gonna make this like a job. We're gonna practice eight hours a day, five days a week.' We got to be awesome players, sure, but more than anything, that's what sucked the life out of [the band]. If you look at how our shows were laid out, it was just more and more shows, year after year. We got three quarters of the way through a [new] record, but we just couldn't do it. "
"We went off the rails when we spent four years in the van continuously together," Morrison agrees. "Our songwriting completely dried up. Because of the business structure and the path we were on, we were never going to get out of that tour, so there was really no visible place for inspiration to come from. I don't think we put it together at the time, but I do think that's why. I remember this dry cracker feeling, running out of juice."
As one of Morrison's idols says, it's better to burn out than fade away, so they closed up shop. For a while after the split, Easley and Axelson played in the short-lived band Statehood; Axelson started Maritime with ex-members of The Promise Ring. In 2004, Morrison released a solo record, Travistan, best known (and perhaps thus misunderstood) for its astonishing 0.0 Pitchfork rating. He released a second one, All Y'All, with a full band in 2007, but that was pretty much it.
Of course, the indie breakup-and-reunion song is as old as time. The Dismemberment Plan is far from the only act to have shuttered for lack of inspiration; furthermore, the Plan were never chart-toppers either, despite being critical darlings. Still, few have sung that time-honored song so matter-of-factly. The band has always been of the sincere camp, thematically and otherwise. In countless interviews, Morrison has explained that none of them ever claimed to be career musicians. Perhaps more accurately—as has been the case for so many other mid-sized bands of their caliber—at some point, career musicianship simply becomes insupportable, whether you want it or not. Adulthood calls, and you move on.
The rock stardom took a backseat to nerdier, more sensible hobbies (robots, web development, politics), and led to a more domestic life—the indie-rock world has changed around them too. With the explosion of a DIY-friendly internet (from which the tech-savvy Dismemberment Plan certainly benefited while they were together), more and more bands began finding audiences to support tours, but the amount of money to go around, as many have noted, has dwindled, and bands with day jobs – even bands with as big a following as the Plan – are, as Morrison puts it, "far less of an affront to the cosmos" than they might've been before.
"Now that there are midgets, I definitely *have *to work," Easley tells me at lunch, back at NASA. His employers, who by now know full well of Easley's past and its current revival, even went so far as to publish an in-house profile on him and "his indie rock band 'Dismemberment Plan'" last year. "I've always wanted to do engineering stuff, and I've always wanted to do band stuff, but back in the day, we definitely did not make enough money to keep up with two children and health insurance and mortgage payments. Even now, I don't think we could do that. Luckily [NASA] is a job I want to do, but also have to do. The band is just a job I want to do."
But now, the reunion market is booming, and the Dismemberment Plan's particular brand of normalcy is perfectly attuned for it. It's still palpable after literally decades, starting with how casually *Uncanney Valley *seems to have together and continuing with their touring schedule: They'll be using weekends and vacation days (a week here and there, some occasional Fridays) to play them live over the next few months. Once you've proven your road mettle with hundreds of shows a year over four albums, they figure, it's the only sensible way to even attempt getting back on the horse.
"I don't feel bad about riding the wave a little bit," says Easley, whose "lady," NPR producer Heidi Glenn, and kids flew out for their recent Riot Fest gigs in Chicago and Denver. "We did play like 800 some odd shows back in the day, to five people in a basement for half of them. We can still play shows now, and they're fewer, but a little bigger. People are excited, so we're going to do it."
The best part: It's become apparent that diving full-force back into the normalcy that made fans fall in love with The Dismemberment Plan is Terrified, Emergency & I, and Change to begin with—the real-life doubts and struggles of real-life people with real-life lives—is, ironically, what brought the Plan back to life.
"I think that having normal human lives forces us to prioritize," says Morrison. "Before, it was very important for my generation to believe that you didn't have a day job. There were these aspirations [that] over the hill, there is this golden city where you didn't have a job and you just played music all day. I'm not so sure that's a widespread construct anymore—maybe it is, I'm not 20 anymore—but our needs and the realities of music have dovetailed nicely in 2013. Now, there are competing priorities for grown-ass men. The idea [people have now] is that, if you can take care of all your priorities, you cannot be creative. And yet here we are."
Easley, who used to build and fly remote control helicopters on tour and was eventually laid off from his (otherwise incredibly lenient) between-tours software job for taking too much vacation the first time around, agrees: "J. Robbins [the frontman of Jawbox], who recorded [Uncanney Valley], had some kind of job at some point, and then he stopped working. I was like, 'Well…what…do you write about?' He laughed at me, but still to this day, I don't get it. If you're submerged in that world all the time, I feel like I would get bored of it. If I was only working as an aerospace engineer, I would be looking for ways to keep my brain from melting, too. Bad things can happen to your brain if you're not doing different things."
~ * ~
Back in the basement, Joey has been deposited upstairs and the band is at their stations. "Wanna run through the hits for exercise?" Travis asks, before launching instead into a haphazard cover of Heart's "Barracuda." The rest follow along gamely for a minute, then they get down to business.
Over the next two hours, they run the majority of their roundly celebrated 1999 LP Emergency and I, a few from the soberer Change, and a bunch of songs, all restlessly adult, off the new Uncanney Valley. It takes a few minutes to get off the ground together, Travis forgetting lyrics here, chords there; Joe's usually impeccable drumming is a bit off in the beginning. But gradually, they fall into that 800-show groove.
Between songs, Joe fiddles with a new program he's designing for the band's light show. The four banter about new synth sounds they're using. (All of Uncanney's songs feature the keyboard.) They muse about this neighborhood's growing gentrification: the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the sprawling veteran hospital complex down the street, is being shut down; they're putting in a new shopping center.
And at 9 p.m. on the dot, they pack up and head upstairs. The kids are in bed; Heidi and Katherine have ordered pizza for the grown-ups, who now congregate around the couch and coffee table to catch up in babies-sleeping voices. Heidi makes Joe show me the three-foot, homemade telescope he'd made at home, for fun.
Is this the new regular?
"We've gotten too old to predict anything anymore," says Morrison. "Who knows if there will be another one? We haven't had any experiences thus far where I was like, 'Oh, hell no.'"
"Is there such a thing as a 40-year-old punk rock drummer?" muses Easley. "I don't think there is."
Correction appended [1:07 P.M. PST 10/8/13]: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that it has been 15 years since The Dismemberment Plan's last album instead of 10 years.
