Probably because most of his effort was put into making Digital Ash completely different stylewise than any of his other albums. I think he was trying to make a point with the simplicity of I'm Wide Awake compared to the way Digital Ash was produced..

I think he probably put more effort into Wide Awake than Digital Ash. Digital Ash is more Mike Mogis's chance to shine while Wide Awake is basically all Conor.

I think I'm Wide Awake is Conor doing what he does naturally, as far as making the album personal I could see what you mean, but I think Digital Ash was probably a much bigger headache and much more time consuming.

Yeah but I think Mike Mogis was much more in control of the music side of things than Conor was on that album because electronics/producing has always been the Mogis side of things. There's only a few songs on there like a Theme to Pinata that I think Conor did a bunch of stuff on.

Oh I'm not disagreeing with you on that at all, I just think it would be a bitch to make an album that is completely different stylistically than anything previously done before.

Well he'd briefly dabbled with it on some tracks on Fevers & Mirrors but yeah Digital Ash did probably take more songwriting effort.

I love Digital Ash personally. Arc Of Time especially.