In order to do that, Long Cool World strips away most of the musical collaborators, allowing Walker and McDermott to settle on an approach that is at once intricate and simple, creating hypnotic music that loops and layers, with subtle shimmers of noise or quiet psychedelic freakouts hiding beneath McDermott's unshowy but emotionally affecting guitarwork and Walker's pedal steel hum. The duo refined their collaborative relationship as well, with McDermott sending isolated guitar tracks to Walker, who then listened to them while on drives and walks around Portland, before going into the studio with only a loose sense of what he wanted to add to them. Eventually McDermott and Walker came together to record the album, giving the whole thing a sort of free-flowing, naturally collaborative feel. "We were really excited to dig into our own process in a more focused way together," McDermott says. Walker echoes this sentiment, speaking of how those guitar loops built into a full-fledged collaborative relationship: "There were times when we played the organ together," Walker says, speaking of the tandem organ drone of "The Last Rockabilly." "We sat down and it was feeding through the Leslie speakers and we were doing a drone together-it was a lot of instinct."