Do you put in really long days when recording?
It’s definitely long days, for sure. It’s all about putting the time in, it’s a lot of hard work. I mean, especially the music is done, Aaron doesn’t even write a word or melody until everything is recorded. In a sense, he has got a lot of hard work, because he tries to come up with that stuff in the studio after the music is done. Even with all the over-dub guitar parts we did the same thing, besides that you spend hours sometimes just trying to get the right sound or the right combination of guitar and amp or the right effect for the right part.
There would be days where we would spend hours trying to get the right sound, and what I would have to record would take 15 minutes. There is a lot of that that is time consuming, trying to make the best record you can.
You have so many chart toping singles; do you isolate yourself from that fact to alleviate the pressure when writing?
We always feel like we have to top it, but it isn’t necessarily as far as singles go. I mean, that is something the record company puts on us. For us, it’s really trying to grow the band, that’s where the pressure comes from. In my opinion, anytime that you finish a record, you have to feel like it’s the best thing that you have done. You have grown as a band, you are not just rehashing things that you have done before, that’s where the pressure comes in as far as trying to do something a little bit different.
It seems like a daunting task when you first come together as a band who hasn’t jammed in a couple of years, because we have been on the road the whole time, we haven’t written a song since we did the last record, which is three years ago. We get together in a room and as long as there are ideas there, we don’t really seem to have a problem. We have never really had a problem in writing songs, it’s something that we have always really been able to do, and I feel this time around, the songs that we have written are the best ones we have done.
