As much as I'm not a huge fan of the band Kiss, I totally appreciate what they did in creating a show. They wrote these simple, pretty crappy rock songs, but they created this huge image and this huge show. It was like this iconic thing, and I think that's really cool. I think that's something that we've always really appreciated. |
At least in a food-and-sustenance sense, we've always taken what we put into our bodies in a fairly serious light. |
Basically, we're letting our fan club pick a third of our set. |
I don't understand people who don't like good production. It drives me crazy. We hear all the time from people who prefer the way our first records sounded, but if we had more money and time back then, we would have made them sound better. I always want our albums to sound more polished, as they say. Polished is the point for what we do. |
If you really feel like you're a different band and you're that much better than you were, then you should change your name. That's a silly stance to take, because you're just going to disappoint people. Your early stuff is what people really attached themselves to. There aren't any songs that we won't play because we don't like them and don't think they're good. |
It's flattering, but you start to wonder whether people that are becoming fans of all the bands that have taken on that look know where it's coming from. I'm not saying we invented it -- we drew influence from the Damned and the Misfits -- but it wasn't very popular when we started doing it. It's strange, but if you start worrying about stuff like that, it becomes less about being a songwriter and more about trying to control what's going on in some kind of scene. |
The front row of people is 50 feet away, which throws you off. But the crowd reaction was pretty amazing, from what I could see. Rocking that many people, that's something I'd like to get used to doing. |
The show is kind of like a celebration. We're all just very much in love with what we do. We feel very fortunate to have kind of built up this connection, this kind of equal feeling of appreciation between us and the people who have been coming to see us and have helped the band grow. It's about them as much as it's about us. |
We don't want to take ourselves too seriously. We're not like this gothic, brooding, sitting-around-with-wine-in-silver-goblets, kind of Hot Topic thing. |
We figured it's about time we tried to put on a really good show. It's hard to do that when you're going out drinking every night. |
We just want to write songs. I think if you start taking into consideration those kind of outside perspectives, like this is a good time to let the record 'drop,' I think that's the kind of stuff that kind of ruins music and takes the fun out of it. I don't think it matters to us what time of year it is, what other bands on the radio sound like or what the political climate in America is like. |