Yeah, I used to listen to baseball on headphones in the dark as a kid, and it’s funny because if you think about “the sound of baseball,” it’s like a tree falling in the woods, right?
Right! There’s the quiet murmur of the crowd, and Vin Scully talking about it, that’s what it all boils down to. And then he was doing the game of the week, and even when I wasn’t around my grandfather, in the ’70s, when I was kind of following the Reds and the Pirates, then Vin Scully was announcing those games every now and again, and I still hear Vin Scully in my head when I think about baseball.

One of the songs on our new album, “Genuine Lullabelle,” has a long talking part in the middle. There’s like the music part at the beginning, talking part, quiet part, and then another music part, and in between the music part and the quiet part is this talking part, and in the talking part we have interwoven, with me doing a sort of character study, there are other people’s voices making commentary on it, and those other people’s voices are all voices that we have very strong memory associations with.

We wanted to get Vin Scully, and his son, acting as his manager, told us to fuck off. But Vin Scully would have been a real coup. Studs Terkel sort of agreed to do it, but then he went into the hospital. He broke his back, and he didn’t feel up to it. Then we got other people we liked, whose voices trigger memories.

It’s interesting that at every show you guys do, and on every album, you have at least one song like “Genuine Lullabelle” that’s really an emotionally heavy downer where the rock action subsides and you kind of take the music somewhere else for a while. Even on songs that aren’t that much of a meandering bummer on album.
I know what you’re talking about, and I kind of feel like we have that option available on quite a few of our songs. We can throw a bummer in, especially live, almost anywhere. Part of that is that just in the conceptual framework of the band, we think that all of that stuff is fair game. We think that we can bum ourselves out, we think we can be jubilant, we think we can be triumphant, we can be slapstick, all of that stuff is fair game, and it doesn’t really feel complete, as an evening, unless we’ve at least taken a stab at most of them. Sometimes you can tell you’re going to get nowhere with the bummer, or the comedy or whatever.

Are you trying to get somewhere though, with the audience?
Oh no, no, no, not necessarily with the audience, but with respect with the way that we’re playing, the three of us. Like sometimes we’re just not in the mood to do everything, so we just want to blast, song song song, explosion, and then done. And then sometimes we just feel like we can play all night, and we’re not at all interested in getting through it quickly, basically we want to relish it, so we end up stretching parts out, even the bummer parts.

You guys played a show on 9/11/01, right?
We did. Super bummer.

I imagine. What was the setting of that?
It was scheduled to be the last show of a European tour. We started in Italy with Uzeda, and then we made our way north, finishing in Berlin. And we were in the hotel in Berlin and we all watched the towers collapse live on television. And we were all so bummed out, and whether we played or not seemed a trivial matter, and we realized that we weren’t going to feel better if we didn’t play. The next day is when it sunk in. There was a moment of silence, a public reverence for everyone that got killed. I didn’t know it was happening, but I walked into the big train station as this moment of silence was beginning, and I saw the whole train station, hundreds of hundreds of people, everybody standing there with their heads bowed absolutely silent, and it was one of the most affecting things I’ve ever witnessed. Those people don’t know us, they don’t anyone who was directly affected by it, it was a genuine display of sympathy for a huge calamity.

We ended up being stranded there for almost two weeks, and we got into a kind of routine: we’d get up, go to the train station, get the English language newspapers, read everything, watch CNN, bum out, and go to the Internet cafe and send emails to our girlfriends, and that was basically life for the next 10 to 12 days. And every single person we encountered there was enormously sympathetic, and the feeling of comradeship with those people was so genuine. I think that’s why I was so furious that that goodwill was so squandered. Not that it’s, generally, a bad idea to create enemies out of your friends ― I mean, those people were 100-percent on our side, and our callous and ignorant president managed to turn them against us, managed to take their enormous compassionate empathetic generous nature and nullify it, somehow.