The touring thing is such a huge time commitment. I'm really feeling like I want to start writing and recording music again. But I have to leave for tour tomorrow. That's kind of frustrating; at the end of the day, you're plugging into this lifestyle. It's the "band lifestyle," and that's weird! I would like for touring to be creative in its own right.

I've thought about doing a subscription service, where people pre-pay and then we send them 12"s as they're finished, with one song on each side. That would be really fun. But we'll need a significant time off from touring to be able to fulfill that.

As far as the music being inspired by Seattle, I think it's in some of the songs. Seattle is a really beautiful place in the right light, it's perched on a pretty unique geographic setting.

Our day-to-day lives recording and touring aren't that different from those of Metallica, even though the perceived worldview is totally different. So that can be a difficult thing to reconcile sometimes.

The only thing I think about is doing something where I'm the only person making all the decisions - I think that would be fun to do, just to get it out of my system. And honestly, I kind of got it out of my system when I recorded three songs and put them online. That was enough of a solo experience for me; it scratched that itch.

The lyrics to me are a result of the emotional and creative climate present while making the record as well as personally going through a sort of mid-twenties stock-taking.

Our vocal harmonies started to feel like a cop-out: all group-singing, all the time.