a pretty good description of the things we've been writing about, the dualities of the day-to-day. |
Cooley and I have been together for 20 years now. It hasn't exactly been an overnight success, ... We're the poster children for stubborn persistence. |
I don't think people are going to be calling it 'Southern rock,' |
I write a lot of songs (about the South) and will continue to, but we wanted to do a record that wasn't so specific in the geography. We're from the South, but that's not all we can do. |
I'm not having to come home from tours and wait tables for the next three weeks to make ends meet. We're paying our bills, ... Unfortunately, we haven't gotten to the point where we can take any real time off. |
It in no way denies the horrible things that happened in the South during the civil rights struggle, ... The KKK and church bombings - all of those things did happen, but at the same time there were people like my father making Aretha Franklin records, these southern white boys who made their living playing on some of the best soul records ever made. |
Most everything on it is real new. Lord knows I've got a backlog of songs, but when we went into the studio I pretty much ignored it. Everything else we've written since we started recording. |
The biggest thing this has in common with almost all of our records is the dualities are still there. We kind of stripped down the other things we were writing about, and that's what was left. A lot of good things have happened to us in the last couple of years both as a band and in our personal lives. But something as wonderful as having children also brings along these new fears and terrors and responsibilities. |
The downside is that critics get their records for free, |
The record's not without its dark moments, but hopefully there's a little bit of a happy ending too, |
To me, it's an easy record to listen to. But it's not an easy-listening record, |
We wanted to make a record that was strictly song-oriented and wasn't attached to a bigger narrative. We almost had more of a list of what we didn't want than what we did want. |
We were supposed to be taking it slowly this fall, with putting together the album, |
We're all big Big Star fans and fans of pop and power pop, and we wanted to experiment with those influences a little more than we have in the past. |