When you're in a band and write a song on your own, it isn't fully realized until it goes into somebody else's ears.
Ian MacKayeYou can hear a real shift. You listen to the late 80s recordings, you'll hear us engaging with the audience, dealing with the issues surrounding punk shows at the time. Back then, people thought you had to be a skinhead and beat the crap out of everybody when you went to a punk show. Come the early 90s, when you had this so-called grunge stuff and when videos became so dominant, you had this totally huge shift in the culture of shows.
Ian MacKayeWith Napster and the sharing of music, of course, there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there's a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn't let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music.
Ian MacKayeGuy Picciotto had a really sound point: Live albums basically have bands playing songs that are available on studio records, and what example can you think of where the live album is better? What are the great live albums? I have live albums of bands, but I wouldn't listen to them for the most part. So we thought, instead of spending energy trying to puzzle out how to create a live record, let's just write another studio record.
Ian MacKaye