It's an understatement to say that Will Markwardt—lead singer of local folk-ish group The Absent Arch—surrounds himself with music. By day he works in a record shop, and then returns home to his apartment, which is above another record shop. So maybe this accounts for the pervasive melancholy of the songs on Keep Calm And Carry On, The Absent Arch's sad-but-sweet debut album. In addition to Markwardt's resonant vocals—at times it seems as if he's singing simultaneously out of two parts of his throat—the viola, trumpet, and bass that support him don't so much melt together as echo off each other, making for an incredibly deep, layered sound. Decider talked to The Absent Arch—Markwardt, keyboardist/trumpeter Brian Voerding, bassist Joe Wojtysiak, and viola player Jonathan Waldo—about the new album, which gets officially released Nov. 21 at the Triple Rock Social Club.

Decider: The tracks on Keep Calm are often more like stories than songs. Is narrative something you keep in mind when writing?
Will Markwardt: I wrote short stories before I started writing music, and my narrative sense comes from that, I think—I spent a lot of time in that realm. So yeah, more than anything, the lyrics are the most important thing. Everything after comes second.
D: And does this influence the way your songs develop, in a musical sense?
Brian Voerding: When we first started out, we had a drum machine and synthesizers. But we found that you can't really complement a story with this sort of technology stuff, this thick wall of sound. It felt a little cold. Eventually we started to transition back into more of the basics. The dry viola without a lot of effects. I started playing more trumpet. We have a song where we play washboards. The folk aesthetic really just seems to complement the songs better, the stories of the songs.
Joe Wojtysiak: A big part, too, of when you approach a song with a narrative structure is that it can breathe a lot more. You don't say, "We're going to start here, and crescendo here, and end here." Take a song like "Texas, 1935"—you can hear it breathe. The song comes in and goes out and comes in and goes out, and so things like melody are secondary, while the dynamics become more important.
D: The folk-storyteller combo seems to be a distinctly Minnesotan style, following in the line of musicians like Bob Dylan and Mason Jennings. Do you feel at all influenced by your locale?
Jonathan Waldo: It's never felt to me like we're playing this kind of music because, you know, that's what Minnesotans do. It's kind of just the way it wound up.
BV: The music is conscious of—some of it is, anyway—season and weather and landscape. I would imagine that any artist is to some extent influenced by their surroundings and by their environment and the way they interact with that. So you know you have the cold, kind of sparse songs of winter and then the breezy pop songs of summer, and both of those, I think, are on the record.
D: Keep Calm is your first full-length, but it seems like you guys have been recording together for a while.
WM: I've been recording for forever. In fifth grade I had a rap group, The Green Olive Posse, and we made albums to sell in the cafeteria. I was using the name 'Solo' for a while; there's an EP floating out there somewhere. Then, in college, I recorded a solo thing under my own name. I hid as many copies as I could, so no one had it in their hands.
BV: I still have one. It gives me a lot of power over Will.
WM: And as Crown The Clouds—which was Waldo, Brian, and me—we did something like eight albums altogether. Once we did 14 tracks in four days. I'm pretty sure we were drunk the whole time.
BV: We still won't admit it to each other, I don't think, but it was the reason the band's together today. What we recorded then convinced us that there was something worthwhile. It's not coherent—there are a few tracks that are ridiculous and nothing more—but it had a feeling we still try to capture with the band.
D: Did you approach Keep Calm differently from what you've done previously?
JW: Doing everything all at once in four days was empowering and exciting. But we knew that Keep Calm was going to be important for us. We wanted it to be the real thing. So we were more careful with it. It was the opportunity to change things and evolve sounds. And we took full advantage of that… sometimes maybe too much. Which is probably why it took all the way from January to July, not even including mixing.
WM: More than anything, I think that over the years we've always tried to do this album. But anytime we tried to record something, we either had to give up on it for some reason, or we'd just do it on the fly. This is the first time we've really sat down and said, "Hey, we're making a record. This needs to actually happen. I need to have it in my hand."