-I watched the freakin padres blow it in extra innings! ok so this wasn't so great. Hoffman, they know your stuff man. yeah, that was rough. No playoffs, for SD... so I guess I'll go for the Redsox...

The rats. The race. The "in" and not "of" this world are often hard to separate in my mind. But maybe that's where the real difference lies after all- in your mind, your heart... your spiritual being. That your physical body is in a specific place and time but your treasure is somewhere else. But sometimes the "nowness" of here starts pulling at your heart, away from eternal rewards. For a moment, the flashlight in your eyes looks brighter than the sun. For the moment...

Air 1: You’re going on the road with Switchfoot this fall on The Appetite for Construction Tour. That’s going to be amazing! With two huge bands, who’s going to open up?

Matt: We’re opening for Switchfoot. They had a record that sold 2.2 million copies, so they’re the big boys, the big fish. They also put on a killer show and I wouldn’t want to follow it. I think both of our bands draw very similar crowds and both draw some people who might not necessarily to come see one of us, but they’d come to see both of us. And both of our bands are pretty different to watch. Even though it’s going to be a rock ‘n’ roll show, it’s going to be really diverse. There’s going to be a ton of ups and downs. Even with both bands having heavier songs and some chill songs, it’s not going to be boring. I think people are really going to like it.

Air 1: You’d been talking with the guys in Switchfoot about how you could incorporate Habitat For Humanity into your fall tour to help people who didn’t have anything. Then your bus burned down and you found out what it was like not to have anything.

Matt: Yeah, and it’s cool. It was right around that time when they (the Switchfoot guys) were asking, “Hey, will you guys take less money on the tour if you could donate a certain percentage of the ticket price to Habitat. And after the bus burned down, it was an easier decision to make. When you’re going through that yourself, you say, "Heck, yeah! If we can help people out, that would be awesome!" It’s not like we wouldn’t have worked with Habitat anyway, but it was nice that it came a long at that time to teach us all a lesson.

Air 1: You’re giving a $1 from every ticket people buy on your Appetite for Construction Tour with Switchfoot to help Habitat build houses?

Matt: Yeah. There are a couple of other things we’re trying to do to kick them some more money, too. We’re talking about recording a song and selling an EP or selling a single and all of the proceeds of that single would go to Habitat.

Air 1: How did you get interested in Habitat?

Matt: It’s a Switchfoot thing. And everybody is always asking us what kind of mission work we do, and what kind of charities we work with. We’ve done a few things with Invisible Children in the past, but we’ve never really invested as much into the church or other people as we should. It’s honestly, really difficult because all five of us live in different towns. We have two guys living in Nashville, but we’re spread out all over the place and when you’re not on the road touring, doing band stuff, you go your separate ways. You don’t have time to sit down and discuss things that go beyond the band. So it’s kind of nice that this came up. It fell in our laps. And Jon (Foreman of Switchfoot) has always been a mentor to me.

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