[Norman Blake, interim chairman of the Enron board, insisted he and his colleagues did question management and did not rubber stamp management's recommendations and requests.] Unfortunately, ... I believe that we were uninformed because management and outside experts who reported to us failed to do their jobs and give us full, complete information. |
[This was harder to do an ocean away.] So we basically brought a guitar each, and that was it, ... Which was good, actually. |
All you can do is make the records, and hope a group of people will pick up on it, and it will become the received wisdom that that's the record to buy, ... Because that's kind of how the music business works, isn't it? You think of the Coldplay record or something like that. The received wisdom is that you should have that on your coffee table, if you buy one record every two months or whatever. |
Far Away, Down On A Georgia Farm, |
It was sort of liberating in a way. We had to concentrate on arranging the tracks, we couldn't embellish them needlessly. |
On the other hand, there's never pressure on one person to come up with an album's worth of songs every year, ... We only have to concentrate on four or five songs each. It's something we're all comfortable with; some other people wouldn't be. We're not very confrontational people; we like things to go smoothly. |
Over the years -- 15, 16 years -- we've picked up all sorts of bits and pieces, ... And normally when we make an album we load a van up and deliver it all: old Wurlitzers, odd synthesizers and things. |
Over the years, 15, 16 years, we've picked up all sorts of bits and pieces, ... And normally when we make an album we load a van up and deliver it all: old Wurlitzers, odd synthesizers and things. |
Right from the start John said, 'Look, you guys have been doing this for years, so I'm not going to tell you how to arrange things,' |
That sounds too much like hard work for us. |
There's more pressure on the melody when you don't have all the embellishments, |
Unfortunately, I believe that we were uninformed because management and outside experts who reported to us failed to do their jobs and give us full, complete information. |
We do hope people like what we do, but you certainly can't expect people to buy your record. But we've been pretty lucky. I'm not complaining. |
We played with Superchunk on our first American tour. We've always liked the records they release. They're a good, classic indie label, and they're genuine fans of music. And they're really just as enthusiastic about it as they were when we first met them. |
We're pretty happy with the level of success we have now. |