In late-September, Norman, Oklahoma’s Traindodge released The Truth, a sprawling, two-disc affair that at times calls to mind the sweeping nature of Pink Floyd’s The Wall - not because The Truth is a heady concept record that exposes listeners to a dark month of the soul, but rather because it’s clean, well-managed, and, despite its length, never bloated. But, let’s get serious, right? Who releases a double studio album in this day and age? Didn’t that gesture fall out of favor somewhere around 1982? What were the members of Traindodge thinking?

“ We were asking ourselves the same question while we were recording the album,” jokes guitarist/vocalist Jason Smith (who is responsible for all of the quotes in this article), who along with his brother, drummer Rob Smith and bassist Chris Allen, forms the core of Traindodge. (Second guitarist Jon Holt joined the band in 2003.). More practically, it had been two years since the outfit had released its last full-length, 2002’s On A Lake Of Dead Trees. In that time, the quartet had accumulated plenty of new material, enough that the members considered releasing a full-length, followed by an EP featuring what Smith calls “weirder, ambient” material.

But label owner Hieu Nguyen suggested the band take a slightly different approach. “He said, ‘Well, that’s a great idea, but that means two separate promotional pushes, twice as much money that I’ll have to spend on you guys this year,’” Smith says sympathetically of Nguyen’s concern. “But then he said, kind of indulgently, ‘If I could talk you guys into doing a double-album, that’d be OK.’ We thought about that for a moment and said, ‘Well, OK.’ We’re all classic rock and prog rock fans, and I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t a small part of us that wanted to get that part out of our systems. Suddenly, our label asked us to do it. We weren’t going to say, ‘No.’”