I was into jazz even when I was a kid. My parents would play Ella Fitzgerald, George Shearing, and Dixieland music. I loved The Monkees, The Beatles, The Eagles, and America.

We went to South America on a trip and all I had was a Robert Johnson album. So that's a definite influence on the album. My bandmates John [Stanier, drummer] and Henry [Bogdan, bassist] were interested in expanding their roles as writers, so that had a positive impact on the record.

People keep asking me if recently performing the Betty album will influence the song-writing and I think it might. There's songs on that record that I forgot about and it's really nice to have that variety in the set along with tracks from Strap It On, Meantime, Aftertaste, Size Matters, Monochrome, and Seeing Eye Dog.

. I did an interview earlier and somebody asked me if I [knew I] was onto something back when I was first writing. I said, "Yeah. I always thought I was good." We're not the Beatles or Led Zeppelin or AC/DC. But Helmet always sounded like Helmet, and we sort of developed our own sound. There's a vocabulary that's kind of universal now that's very simple. My friendDavid Sims, [the bassist] in Jesus Lizard, said, "I wish I'd thought of it." When you first hear it, it's like, "Oh duh." But that's cool.

People are always going to have favorite albums or songs and you know that's more the listener's personal bias than basing it on anything musical or actual. I'm the same way as a listener.

I was into jazz even when I was a kid. My parents would play Ella Fitzgerald, George Shearing, and Dixieland music. I loved The Monkees, The Beatles, The Eagles, and America.

We did a really cool video for this song [Milquetoast] with Alex Winter from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure fame. He's an extremely intelligent guy. Butch Vig also did a mix for The Crow movie.