Right, because some people/most people are into abuse if the right distance is there.
Well, yeah, if it’s somebody harmless enough like Andrew Dice Clay, well then it’s charming. It seems like it would take a special kind of an asshole to try to get away with ventriloquism though. It would have to be a goal of yours to be insulting all the time and also not have to take responsibility for it. So you’d have to be not just a dick, but also a weasel.

Well, if you look at depictions of ventriloquists in popular culture, movies and television, etc., they’re usually creeps, and dramatically it never ends well for them.
Right. Well, that’s just an example of one of the little minor obsessions that the band fell into at some point

So how did the Fake Italian obsession get going?
Well, it was Fake Italian for me, and then Todd bought this dog, this Italian greyhound, Uffizi ― awesome dog. And he started talking to the dog in sort of Fake Italian, but it was sort of a pet language, it wasn’t really normal Fake Italian, if I can claim authority on what is or isn’t normal Fake Italian. And he would praise Uffizi, he’d say [in fake Italian accent] “Excellent Italian Greyhound”. And then that phrase became kind of a shorthand for anything we wanted to compliment or demonstrate approval of ― “Excellent Italian Greyhound.” Like, you know, “that was a nice meal ― Excellent Italian Greyhound.” And like I said, we just get stuck in these loops.

So would you say that a lot of your lyrical preoccupations are almost in-jokes?
Oh, 100-percent. It’s not that they’re almost in-jokes, it’s that they are in-jokes. And I like to think that there is something beyond just the fact that it’s an in-joke. It’s not like The Spaghetti Incident [as in Guns N’ Roses’ quizzically titled 1994 all-covers album of the same name], you know, something of no value, you know?

So in the sense that your in-jokes are solvable rather than completely inscrutable?
Yeah, but not just that they’re solvable, but that the little turns of phrase of the perspectives have some utility outside the band, you know? Like, there’s a picture of Uffizi, the greyhound, on the cover of out new record. And there’s another illustration that [illustrious illustrator/show flyer maven] Jay Ryan did, which is this army of Italian greyhounds sort of bounding over the hills, and then inside the gatefold there’s another illustration, a sort of decampment of Italian greyhounds, sort of “at ease.” And the dogs, they all look awesome, they’re really cool looking dogs, and I kind of feel like if you can foster an appreciation of these dogs somehow, that’s useful. Like, reading the expressive quality of a dog’s face you’re encouraged to see it as a person’s face. It’s sort of like those things you see on the internet all the time, where there’s the owl saying “O RLY?”

Right, the cats with Hitler moustaches.
Right! Those things, I think, are just fantastic. I think they’re great. They’re incredible. Like that site CuteOverload.com , it’s all just little fuzzy ducklings, and bunny rabbits, and kittens. Just recently there was this video put on there where there’s this really fat cat laying on a sofa, and bunny rabbits are crawling over him and he’s licking them on the head, and like being mother hen to all of these bunny rabbits. And you really can’t tell if he’s cleaning them or tasting them, you know? So there’s actually kind of this sinister edge to almost everyone one of these things. And the way that these cute pictures are almost always used in internet conversations as kind of putdowns or insults. But totally adorable.

So I like sort of creating articles of language. Like there’s a brand new one that I’m really fond of. I don’t know if it started there, but I discovered it on this poker forum that I’m a member of. Really super analytical poker geeks arguing with technical details of poker playing. There’s a thing called a “Rick Roll” now, where if someone posts a link to something that appears to be part of a discussion, some aspect of the conversation that’s underway, right ― but that link is actually a link to a Youtube video link of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up.” And that’s a “Rick Roll.” If you click on a link that’s going to take you a spreadsheet page or a relevant article or something poker-related, instead you’re actually directed to this hideous video of Rick Astley, dancing in his ultra-dorky way, singing this song. It’s like someone throwing a stink bomb in the middle of a conversation, and it went from happening once to happening over and over again, and if you look up “Rick Roll” in Wikipedia, it sends you to the Rick Astley video. And if you look it up, there’s a definition of “Rick Roll” on the Urban Dictionary site. And this whole thing appears to have happened in the last week. I think that’s awesome, really fantastic. And if we can make some contribution to the cornucopia of gentle insults and accolades that circulate around the world, we’d like to.