It's been four years since Beirut's last album, The Rip Tide, but this Friday, Sept. 11, will see the release of Beirut's next album, No No No.

"It feels like I got lost on tour for about three of those four years," says Beirut frontman and founder Zach Condon. "There's a lot of things that happened in my life; a lot changed, not all of it easy."

Condon recently joined Jade on The Current to talk about the new album and how it came together. For Condon, No No No was a hard-won effort. "I was writing an album and I think I hit this point where I would write a song, I would half-finish it, I would go on tour. I would come back, I would try to finish it, I couldn't," he recalls. "So I'd start another one, on and on and on until I hit this point where I eventually came back and I listened to what I had and I said, 'This is a mess. This is a bit of a disaster.'"

Fortunately, Beirut drummer Nick Petree and bassist Paul Collins suggested a solution: They simply invited Condon to jam. "And 'jam ' is not a word I like or use straight-faced," Condon laughs, "but that's literally what we did. And it got to the point after a couple of months, all these expectations and all these frustrations I was having with music in general just rolled off my shoulders and the album started to click."

Here are additional highlights from Jade's interview with Zach Condon.

Condon on writing the songs for No No No:
"Some songs felt like they wrote themselves and then there were others that I was like literally in the studio throwing a temper tantrum because I'm not a writer."

Condon's thoughts on songwriting in general:
"My favorite songs growing up were doo-wop. If I had my way, I would just write doo-wop lyrics."

How Condon approaches arranging:
"I will hit an accidental note on a piano and all of a sudden a drum part will come to me. That's how my mind works. It's weird."

Condon's thoughts on the title track from No No No:
"In some ways, it's very true to my kind of mission statement in the sense that the lyrics are brutally simple and it's all about the melody."

Beirut's No No No comes out Sept. 11, 2015, on 4AD Records.

Related

• Beirut - official site