Andrew: The June Brides....I usually think about Men at Work. Remember they had that little guy who played keyboards and saxophone" A lot of times we'll be playing and I'll look over and I'll see you [Rob] switching from guitar to trombone and I'll think, that is just that guy in Men at Work.
fM: What's an ampallang? [This is not idle curiosity, exactly, but refers to the fifth song on Exploder, which begins "Ampallang I know was wrong..."]
Andrew: It's piercing.
fM: A kind of piercing" An object with which you can pierce yourself.
Rob: I think it describes the style with which the...
Andrew:... willy...
Rob:...thank you--is pierced.
fM: Oh....I found myself wondering where all the heterogenous parts of Exploder came from--there's this one 70s song, and there's this one song that has all these experimental electronics. Do you just get together in a studio and do something and then," Hey, Andrew, this is the experimental electronic piece that's going to be on our album and now let's do some songs?"
Andrew: I had to really push to get those on the album.
Evan: Those were homework assignments for this class I'm taking, was taking, but those are things I'm doing now, and I don't know if they'll ever be on albums again. I don't know if that's really pertinent to Eggs. It fit in with Exploder.
fM: You play "March of the Triumphant Elephants" live with guitars. But on the record it's not that; you wrote it as a synth thing and then learned to play it live?
Evan: That's Rob piece.
Rob: That was a synth piece to begin work, but the thing we like about it now--I like about it now anyway--is that it was sort of set up as a jazz format, which we have no experience with. It was something called a head--none of us are jazztrained--and then each person gets a solo section and is allowed to improvise, and then it comes back to the head again and ends, which is totally different from a pop song. Which is great for me. and it's kinda funny because if you all end it together you're successful--there's no measure of "did the distortion pedal turn on and cause the right noise you wanted? It doesn't matter--it's different thing. I'd like to play more with that stuff in the future.
fM: On the more serious, "song" side: "Evanston, IL." Andrew?
Andrew: That was about the first time that we nearly died in a van....we were just driving, it was last year and we were driving to Kalamazoo, Michigan and we got in an ice storm and the van was sliding all around the road and we pulled off and went down this scary exit; we were slipping and sliding all down it. It was the first time we realized that we could possibly die doing this. And we thought that was a big deal until we wrecked the van the next tour.