Because Rick Rubin is one of the last guys out there that’s gonna be like, “This is what you did that was good.”  I mean, he’s done it with a lot of people, you know.

 

Jake: Neil Diamond.  I gotta fit Neil Diamond into every interview.

 

I gotta be honest with you, I really like Neil Diamond. His performance in the “Last Waltz…my mom was big Neil Diamond fan.

 

Jake:  He’s the Fugazi of 70’s band rock.

 

Matt: Don’t put that down!

 

Jake:  It’s true! You try to play “Cherry, Cherry”! That shit’s …like…Fugazi!

 

Matt: Why is that like Fugazi?

 

Jake: Learn the song, man!  It’s really, it’s really clever. It’s really, very clever.

 

Austin: Are we still talking about Neil Diamond?

 

Jake: Not anymore.

 

Matt: It’s four chords!!!

 

Jake: Time changes, man! It’s fucking brilliant!

 

Alright, I want to know about the creative process.

 

Austin: No creative process.

 

Jake: It usually starts with the riff and then we kind of build it from there.  It varies pretty widely.

 

Matt: It’s usually, like, the band fleshes it out.

 

Austin: Matt’ll come in with a chord progression and lyrics and everything. And we’ll flesh it all out and, you know, I’ll show him how to play cool guitar things with them.

 

Matt: Usually, if we come in with a riff, it’s not gonna go anywhere but bad.  It usually turns pretty bad.  There’s been a few successes, but, for the most part, if there’s not a vision behind…like usually probably like 75% of the time we usually have a concise vision.  This is what we were thinking about a verse. This is what we were thinking about a chorus.  And here’s the tie-in and other songs are kind of I would say, maybe like a small fraction are written from a riff.

 

Austin: We don’t have a lot of time.  We’re on the road so much, you know, like a couple months ago we were hanging out in the studio and, uh…(orders another margarita)

If we have time to hang out and goof off, you know, in the space, we’ll come up with a couple cool ideas and then …but the thing is, we get kicked around, you know, for three or four months and during that its so sporadic.  It’s hard, you know, because we’re on the road all the time.

But it’s stuff like that.  And we’ll end up in the back of the van trying to like figure out shit on the acoustic guitar and that shit’s hard!

 

Matt: Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m trying to do now.  I’m in the mode of trying to write a song on the acoustic guitar and trying to translate that into the band.  And we don’t know if that’s gonna really work but I sure hope that it does.

 

What are some of the things that sort of inspired your songwriting?

 

Austin: Good things?  All things that are good?

 

There’s an aggressiveness to your songs. . Where does that come from? 
You guys are coming out of Austin and, I hate to go this route, but it’s a pretty politically-charged town and it seems that that comes out in your music.

 

Matt: You know, it does.  And it ties into what the record was called.  It’s the whole vibe of the record, you know.  With the first record, we were in a very hot place above a bar with no AC and it turns into a very kind of angry feeling when you’re trapped up there.  And the songs become a little more aggressive. 

And, you know, we were playing live a lot and when you do that and when you’ve got 30 minutes to convince a crowd that wants to hear high energy shit, they don’t really care for - you gotta have stuff that’s pumping and that you can get behind and if its not?  It quickly goes out of the set and eventually doesn’t make the record.  That’s how we’ve done it.

And the second record was made more, for more of a refined sound.  And we were having fun and now.  It’s time for something new. 

I’ve been thinking about that a lot.  I have a lot of old demos of Kurt Cobain, and you can buy demos of Billy Corgan, you know.  You can buy...Neil Diamond.  And they all started on acoustic guitars and a melody lines and they built them up.  You know that whole Siamese Dream record?  You could break that down into five chords nearly every song and then he supplies guitar and melody riffs over it but the song was essentially just a small piece.  That’s kind of what I would like to tack onto the next record and that’s something that we haven’t really done on the older stuff.  You can’t really do that with our older songs.  It probably wouldn’t be very interesting.

 

Austin: And, you know, the other thing is, we haven’t really had like time to really write like a record. The last two records we wrote…the first record we wrote and recorded in less than a month, in like 2 or 3 weeks.

 

Matt: We had time on the last record?

 

Austin: We had like a month or a month and a half, maybe.  But I mean it was pretty much like we were in the studio for a week, pretty much just kind of like pounding it out.  We’ve never had time to just sit down and let things stretch out for like a month or two.

 

Matt: I think the last two records have been the search for the ultimate riff…and now it’s the search for the song.

 

Austin: That sounded really pretentious.

 

Jake: The trick with all that is to capture it with the same kind of relative energy that we play with live.

 

Austin: Which is also a problem because we haven’t been able to do that on record. I mean, the two records that we have, they’re good records, but they don’t, you know, if you go see us live its two different worlds.

 

Jake: Well, its getting them as close as we can to those two things.  You know, it’s like what’s the best sounding record we can put out and still play it live and have some pull to it?

 

So your fans have a pretty huge influence on the direction of the band?

 

Jake: Well, not necessarily. I mean we like to - well obviously we want them to freak out and stuff.  I mean, I guess it’s a consideration, but its not necessarily a major thing.

One thing that I can say about this band for any other bands that I’ve been, nearly everything that we‘ve ever done has been done organic.  And something that was created was created out of something that we all got off on.   You know, there’s nothing that’s really like, “Oooh! We need to keep playing that song!”  Some songs will get a little boring on the set and we’ll pull them, but that rarely happens. 

For the most part, we kind of think that whatever we get off on we’ll show up on stage and our fans will get off on.  I think that’s the magic of it,  I think that the minute you start trying to fake it, people see that, and they’re not gonna like it as much.  I think speaking for myself…

 

A guy walks by with a dollar bill in exchange for a cigarette.  Jake hands him a Parliament, gives him a light, and waves off the dollar, “Don’t worry about it, man.” 

 

I just think that that’s the secret to whatever success that we’ve had.  Is that we’re just trying to be honest about it, about what we do, and I think that people respond to that. I think that, when people talk about the bullshit in modern rock and all that, I think it’s because people can sense that there’s not a lot of honesty.

 

As far as I know you guys aren’t signed and it’s been a completely DIY venture.

 

Band: Absolutely! Still is.

 

Jake: ‘Till I plug my fax machine back in.