Tonight at 8 p.m. veteran alt-rockers Built to Spill will hit the State Theatre, one stop on their ambitious North American tour promoting the just-released There is No Enemy. BTS frontman Dough Martsch — who started the band in Boise back in 1992 — took a minute from his busy schedule to chat with us via phone from his tour bus. Among other things, we learned that even old-school rock stars like the “shuffle” function on their iPods:

The Sun: Thanks for speaking with us. You’re in Kentucky right now?

Doug Martsch: On my way.

Sun: How’s the tour going? It’s pretty big and ambitious.

D.M.: Good. We’re just a couple of weeks into it, and it’s going great so far.

Sun: What kind of crowds are you seeing? Lots of old “Northwest Sound” people, college kids, who is it?

D.M.: Well, it’s kind of all over the place; it’s pretty nice. We mostly play all ages shows, that’s always been pretty important to us, unless we can’t get an all ages show. So it’s nice, lots of kids coming out, lots of old people, people who have been listening to us for fifteen years … it’s really sweet.

Sun: How did you guys get involved with your opener, [Swiss band] Disco Doom?

D.M.: Well, we toured Europe a couple of years ago, and we didn’t have an opening band — we just wanted to play with all local openers. Unfortunately, they were almost all not very good. I don’t understand why the promoters would put them on a bill with us, ’cuz I’m sure there are bands in every town in Europe that are good and more similar to what we’re doing. And then in Switzerland we played with Disco Doom and it was such a breath of fresh air to see a good band. We fell in love with them right away. And then we went back there last year, and they did the whole European tour with us. We became good friends and we loved their music so much [that] we invited them over here to do this tour with us.

Sun: What kind of non-musical things do you like to do when you’re on tour?

D.M.: The bus is kind of nice ’cuz you show up in the mornings, you get a little chance to walk around town … [We have sound check], everyone eats, we play. After the show I’ve been DJing sometimes. After that we just go to the hotel and go to bed so we can get up and drive all day the next day.

Sun: You’ve been DJing?

D.M.: Yeah, I’ve been DJing some after-show gigs.

Sun: How’d you get into that?

D.M.: Last year I started doing it in Boise just for something to do. Like once a month at this local bar, just to play music loud and dance a little bit, get people dancing. So I started doing it on this tour — just something to do rather than go sit on the bus after the show. You get kind of pumped up from the show, [so] sometimes it’s annoying to go decompress on the bus — it’s fun to have somewhere to go, something to do. And you know, interact with the fans a little bit without having to chit-chat. Interacting with them with music again.

Sun: There is No Enemy is the first album you’ve recorded digitally. Why’d you to decide to do that?

D.M.: One of the reasons is because they stopped making tape a few years ago, and then they reopened some plants, and the technology’s not where it used to be. So people that are trying to make records on tape are completely having a hard time with the tapes shredding. It’s fine to do a little bit — and we recorded bass and drums on the tape and dubbed that — but if you want to overdub on the tape and mix it, there’s just so many passes, and with each pass a little bit of tape shreds and eventually it’s gonna start making the record sound bent.

And also all the obvious reasons: There’s those things about ProTools — not necessarily the sounds, but all the editing features and the fact that I can take it home and have the whole session at my disposal. There’s just all those technological advances — that’s the reason it took over. I think the reason why everyone’s doing it with that stuff is because of all the features, not ’cuz of the sound quality, necessarily. Tape sounds great.

And then we mixed it on tape. We tried to keep it as much in the analog domain as possible. We didn’t use plug-ins and all that kind of stuff. We tried to use ProTools like a tape machine and run in to the outboard gear.

Sun: Why have you guys been shifting to jammier stuff in recent years?

D.M.: I don’t know that I feel like that’s happening. With [our previous album,] You in Reverse, a lot of those songs were written with us jamming, a lot of the parts came out of jam. This record’s just more stuff I brought in. I’m glad that it comes across sort of jammy. To me it seems a little more conventional. I just work on it so long I can’t tell what it is after awhile. You know, we’re just making the music that comes naturally to us, whether it’s jammy or not, it’s just what we happen to play and like to play. There [are] a lot of conscious decision, but for the most part … I don’t know. I don’t know why we do what we do. I have no idea. [Laughs].

Sun: How do you guys jam?

D.M.: What’ll happen is one person will just start playing something and then everyone just joins in and starts playing things. When we’re working on a record, we will consciously be trying to come up with parts — we’re not just noodling around, playing leads. We’re trying to come up with set parts, interesting little chords, or something that fits with it. And we just do it, it’s a weird thing, a natural thing.

Sun: Do you tend to add lyrics after you’ve come up with the instrumental parts?

D.M.: Yeah, pretty much. I’ll come up with melodies, how I want to sing it, what it’s gonna sound like, and then it takes a long time to turn those ideas into actual words, some meaning.

Sun: How do you listen to music?

D.M.: I mostly listen to an iPod. I have iPod things all over the house. I have a record player, too, I listen to records sometimes, but mostly my computer and my iPod. I like the shuffle. I like to shuffle my collection.

Sun: Oh, yeah? Do you listen to a lot of full albums still?

D.M.: A little bit. But mostly I just like to shuffle shit around. If I get something really exciting to me at the time, I’ll listen to the whole album. [But] you know what, for a long time I didn’t listen to much music, almost because I couldn’t pick out an album. I had such a hard time, like, “Do I wanna listen to this whole thing?” That’s what I loved about the iPod when I got it, was putting it on shuffle. It’s like a radio station of mostly good material.

Sun: What can fans expect when you play here?

D.M.: We might just start playing some There is No Enemy stuff. Till now we’ve only been playing one song off of that record, ’cuz we don’t have much rehearsal, and we figure people don’t need to hear it. People don’t hear too much until they’ve heard the record. Yeah, we’ll be playing tons of it. And pretty much the stuff we always play. We always try to mix it up between all the records and then play a few songs off the new one.