The Spine comes out tomorrow, and you’re also selling The Spine Surfs Alone EP online too. Why did you decide to put out the album and the EP as two separate releases?

You mean instead of putting it all on one record?

I guess we felt like the stuff we put on The Spine was about what you’d want to listen to in one gulp. There’s a lot of material on The Spine Surfs Alone that is more for the people who already like us. This is very old fashioned I think, but we still think of the album as something that you listen to in order. It’s like a single thing. I realize that most people nowadays don’t listen to records like that, but we’re kinda stuck in the past in that way. The Spine Surfs Alone material is a little more difficult to listen to, I think. It’s stuff that we like a lot, but I don’t think we’d want to inflict it on everybody, as sort of the first wave of what they might hear by us. I love The Spine Surfs Alone, but I think a lot of that material is more challenging.

I’m not sure. At present you can get everything online. You can buy everything from us directly. You’ll be able to buy The Spine pretty much anywhere this week. The Spine Surfs Alone I imagine it’s gonna be marketed in the same way, but it’s an EP and it won’t be as prominently displayed as The Spine.

We always have extra material. We’re always doing a lot of work. Some of the stuff on The Spine Surfs Alone was stuff that we cooked up possibly for the album, and some of it is just material that we have in addition – not just to spill over, it’s the other thing, it’s more stuff.

At the time it didn’t seem that we were particularly ahead of the curve. There was already a company called eMusic. There was this thing in the air that eventually everything was going to start moving this way, so they came up with this proposal that we do an on-line MP3-only release. We had all this material that we thought would be good for this. It just felt different from something we put out as a hard CD, I don’t know why exactly. Obviously it was very undefined even then what an MP3-only release was supposed to be. One way of looking at it is it’s a more flexible medium. You can take the whole thing and then just pick out the parts you want and put those on your iPod or whatever. It’s not as of whole cloth; it’s more like a grab bag than what we think of as a CD.

Yes. It’s good new for us because we always say we got a bigger slice of the pie when we sell it ourselves. We’re trying to make it as efficient and pleasant a record-buying experience as you would have elsewhere. Yeah, it just seemed like an obvious thing. It’s not that complicated apparently to set it up.

I think it is to the extent that we are. As long as we’re around thinking the way we do about stuff, we’ll probably keep promoting ideas that are maybe considered old-fashioned by younger people. We do a kind of music that’s already… I think, it already sounds like music by older people, to some extent. We’re really blessed with a young fan base. I don’t know how to account for that, because we haven’t changed what we do to try and get younger people interested. We keep getting high school and college-aged people coming to our shows. Even as we get older and older, the crowd still stays the same age – which is great and amazing. I think the older fans are still into it but they just don’t go out as much. Like I said, we established this thing that we do a long time ago, and we have kept doing it. I don’t think we were ever really in fashion in the first place, so maybe it’s not that we’re out of style now, we’re just continuing to do the thing that we’ve been doing all along. I feel like the way we think about what we’re doing is strongly rooted in the 1980’s, even as we’re perfectly happy to sell stuff on-line and do whatever it takes to keep the ball rolling on this thing. The way we think about songs is probably even more old-fashioned than that. John and I were influenced by not just The Beatles but sort of popular song before that. That probably has the biggest impact on the way we think about music, of anything. The people who think that way are mostly our age or older.

What makes you decide on when you want to actually put out a song? For example, "Thunderbird" is on here and that’s an old fan-favorite. I think I first heard it four or five years ago.

It’s one of the ones that didn’t make it onto Mink Car, but it was beloved enough that we kept it in the show and we felt that it deserved to be on a record. There’s always a song on every record, at least one, that’s from a few records back, from the era of several years earlier that hangs around. I’m very happy with the version that wound up on The Spine of "Thunderbird." It was good that it had all that time for us to think about it.

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