It's a very different feeling just sitting around the side, playing piano, and dancing around as opposed to standing in front and singing.

I really want to try to protect as much as I can, to safeguard peoples' first experience with a record. Because I want you to get the whole thing as one integrated piece, because it's not like I'm narrating stories with music behind them.

The only problem with Shearwater as a name for a band is that people sort of think that it's this amalgamated word like Pushmonkey or something. Doesn't have an actual...you know, like Clearwater or Stillwater, they don't realize that it actually is a thing. It seemed like such a beautiful word, I was so suprised that no body had named their band that.

It's not like I'm narrating stories with music behind them. It's all kind of one thing. You hope you can provoke a specific emotional reaction, but in ways that aren't quite plain.

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.

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."

One of our very favorite shows of 2008 was our Slowtrain instore. We drove straight from San Francisco, pulled up to the back of the store, dragged our entire setup inside and played our new album, Rook, start-to-finish - and they let us get away with it.