You guys seem to be always recording, always pushing toward the next release.  Anything you can tell us about the next band album yet?

The reason why I love music is because it has this intangible spark, this once-in-a-lifetime urgency that breathes down the neck of my soul and makes me cry or laugh or throw something. So you dive into music and begin to learn how things work, the mechanics, the rules. And suddenly it becomes math instead of magic. 

I feel like the most dangerous place for us to be as a band is to be comfortable. The rule for this record is that if you’ve done it in the past you can’t do it again. We want the music to move us. I heard somebody say -- “If you ain’t crying, why you playin’ it?” I like that…
 
We recorded 14 songs with Charlie Peacock [producer of Switchfoot's initial trio of indie albums] this summer. Our first approach was to take a song and play it for an hour or two and then listen back to what we achieved and move forward from there. It's completely new for us -- we've never "jammed" before.

A columnist in the New York Times wrote recently about the fragmentation of music, how it’s all genre-driven now and there are no more universal acts like the Beatles or Led Zeppelin or U2 that everyone listens to.  To me that argument both rang true and paralleled your lyric in “Lonely Nation.”  The more choices we have, the more we’re able to customize the world we come in contact with, the lonelier we get, because we’re no longer sharing experiences in a communal way.  How do you react to that idea?

If I understand the comment correctly, I feel like the columnist got it wrong in some ways. With the death of radio and the birth of the iPod, nothing is genre driven -- what’s the difference between rock, or alternative or indie? James Taylor is in the rock section at iTunes. Most big “indie” bands are on a major. And alternative is even more confusing. Everyone listens to everything; it’s all Jack.fm.

I do feel like the universal experience is dying, however. There are too many options to have an Elvis come on the scene. I suppose hip-hop is the closest thing to universal. And yet community is a huge part of the human experience. Even in cyberspace we’re searching to belong somewhere, looking for community. But often things are moving too fast. Even in music, too many choices can lead to mediocrity. Every good record was made by the restrictions placed around the music, i.e. time, budget, ability, ambition.

Aside from life expectancy, who’s to say that our modern human existence is fundamentally better now than it was two thousand years past. War, famine, disease, greed, murder… machines do many things but they cannot save us from ourselves. And I haven’t found one that cures loneliness. We have created a modern day serfdom of sorts: we slave away, chaining ourselves to our devices and giving the first fruits to the global corporations.

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