I wanted to go back and talk about something you touched on a little earlier, and that you touch on all over the record, obviously. It’s an incredibly rare thing, especially nowadays, for a band get to the point you guys are at now, where you’ve been a band for a really long time and are making a living at it. Now that you’ve established that this isn’t just something you all had to get out of your systems before going and getting real jobs or whatever, in what ways have you had to reevaluate your relationship with what it means to be a rock band?
Yeah, entirely. When you’re younger, it’s more of a party, and it was this thing you really cared about and you wanted to do it. We all knew we were really serious when we were kids, but it was still a wild time. When we had jobs and we were younger, you still did it on a Friday night and then you’d all go out and party afterward. Our first tour was just kind of a boys club on the road. But then when you get older, you definitely start looking at it, like, “Are we just a joke? Is this the kind of thing I really want to be doing for a living on, you know, weekdays, day in and day out just entering the next rock club?” It’s hard to strike a balance. You see all your friends doing a lot of other stuff, and you don’t know if it’s the kind of lifestyle you want to live. We never really doubted that we wanted to do the music, it’s just all the stuff that goes along with it that can be really taxing and really redundant and it can really sort of drive you crazy. I think we got to a point where we realize it’s easy to complain about stuff, but it’s just like any other job. There’s a lot of bullshit you have to do. About six years ago, we were just flat out tired of it, and even though we all had some desire to do it, we just weren’t interested to the level where you really need to be to be doing something that’s worth doing. It’s hard to explain, but I guess when we did our record You & Me, we felt like we were doing something we could be proud of again, and we… I don’t know. We were able to find a balance and find our own niche and do it the way we wanted to do it rather than just endless touring. I think we finally started doing things our own way and it didn’t feel as ridiculous.