Tales From the Script

"I try not to sabotage myself, but I know that's me to a T," he confesses. "But I'm trying not to do that. It's especially difficult now that The Ugly Organ has become so successful. It'll be difficult writing a new Cursive record, 'cause there's this constant, nagging voice in my head saying, 'Oh, you're cashing in' or 'Hey, that'll sell.' It's hard not to listen to those voices. In all fairness, there's nothing wrong with writing another Cursive record. I've been doing it for a long time now. And I've stayed honest to it; I always have. But when I know that it's going to be so anticipated and potentially well received, it really makes me not want to do it.

"Getting too popular worries me -- a lot," he adds. "It worries me that it might affect the way that our songs are written. I have a pretty strong hunch that if we start getting cocky or buying into ourselves too much, we're going to lose that honesty in our songwriting that got us here in the first place."

Written hard and put up wet: Tim Kasher (from left), Ted Stevens, Gretta Cohn, Matt Maginn and Clint Schnase of Cursive.

Details

With the Blood Brothers and Criteria
8 p.m. Tuesday, October 14
Gothic Theatre, 3263 South Broadway
$12, 303-788-0984

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More About

• Tim Kasher
• Omaha
• Bright Eyes
• Blinding Stars
• Gared O'Donnell

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Seeing Cursive on stage with the home-field advantage, anyone can tell that the group's honesty is in no way in jeopardy. The songs rock; the crowd is rapt. But as airtight as their set is, the players seem vulnerable up there on stage, almost tender-fleshed. There's no cant, no hyperbole, no posing, no shields. And though the show's attendees are for the most part sassy, stylish teenagers, Kasher and crew are predominantly in their late twenties, sporting rather mundane haircuts and nondescript jeans and T-shirts -- nondescript, of course, except for the two-inch-high letters spelling "This guy's the limit," emblazoned like a shaky commandment across Kasher's chest.

"You'll have to ask Gared about that," he says with a laugh. "It's his phrase. I guess he just nominated me as the guy who's the limit, so I took it upon myself to carry his banner."

When asked to deduce some sort of deep, underlying message from his Sharpie-scribbled T-shirt, Kasher laughs again -- this time, more at himself than anything else. "It's something so super-duper ultra-cocky that only a real fucking tongue-in-cheek rock star would be seen in it," he replies wryly. "It just seemed like a good thing to wear."