I get more excited about like, "How nice is the piano?" or "How does the room sound?" I don't really see the gear so much anymore.

The nice thing about being a band that nobody knows about is that you can do whatever you want, you know? Without catching hell for it. That's sort of how we felt about the re-recording, too. I thought, "Well, you know a few people noticed this record the first time around but not so many will really protest if we do it again."

I certainly think there are things that impressed me as a child about the church. The smells and the sounds and the pagaentry of it remained with me. The aesthetic I really love. I think a lot of my sense of melody comes from singing those hymns and doing the renaissance music and stuff.

I feel like we've kind of gone through a transformation in the past year. I don't know what happened but we've somehow gelled in a way that we never have before. The live show has become much more powerful and interesting to me. I really feel like we're learning to negotiate the dynamics of it and keep it interesting. It feels like we're becoming much more comfortable and in tune with one another.

It may be a product of me being raised in episcopal church, but I have a love for ritual and theater and the significance of doing the exact same thing over and over. So I really love knowing every little thing I'm going to do during a show.

I still get stage fright every time. I also feel very, very sleepy about a minute before we go on. Like I feel like I'm going to fall asleep. I can't explain it. It's sort of like, "Where's the energy going to come from to play this show?" Then all of a sudden you step up and there it is, it's like it's waiting for you.

You feel the camaraderie that you're all driving around in vans, you know, engaged in musical enterprise. It's pretty much the same for everybody except for the 40 minutes that you're on the stage. Other than that, I do feel like we're off on our own path. It's sort of exciting.