What have been your personal highlights from the touring cycle for ‘Handwritten’? One of the big things that happened was Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam) came on stage with us down in Florida. It was a cool day anyway because it was a festival that was right on the beach in Pensacola, Florida, I mean, literally the stage was like built into the sand. So before the show it was one in the afternoon and we were swimming in the Gulf of Mexico on this beautiful day and then sound checking in swimtrunks so that was awesome. We knew Pearl Jam was playing obviously, and we’d had brief interactions with those guys before, but nothing real, you know. Our friend Danny Clinch who’s a great photographer, came up to us that morning and said ‘Hey guys you should add State of Love and Trust, the Pearl Jam song, onto your setlist tonight’. We were all kind of like ‘That’s super cheesy to play a Pearl Jam song at a Pearl Jam show, so we don’t really want to do that’...and then he said ‘Just trust me, put it on’ so we were like ‘Oh so that’s what’s happening’. We wrote the setlist and put it in, we had no idea if it was actually happening or not and then about a song or two before it, we see Eddie Vedder side stage just chilling and I’m there thinking ‘Oh fuck, I guess this is really happening’. Before we know it the song came up and he jumped on stage. I’ve loved that song since I was a kid so the idea of playing drums to that song with Eddie Vedder and my friend Brian singing it together just blew my fucking mind, it was a cool experience.
Brian has said that Pearl Jam are having a bit of an influence on you as a band, so what do you think about this? It would be impossible to say at this point without using rubbish cliches so I’m not even going to bother really ha. We’re definitely a band who like whatever we’re listening to and whatever we’re inspired by seems to find its way in, hopefully not in a rip off way but we definitely write from the place of feeling so I guess when you write music like that you’re going to write material that you’re influenced by and that you really love. Our career has taken a different turn and with a major label behind us things have gotten a lot bigger so Pearl Jam are a band that we look to not only as a musical influence but also almost as an ethical influence and as a business influence. We really like the way they think outside of the box and try to do things differently. They play the game a little bit but at the same time they kind of do things their own way. I kind of dig the independence of bands that big. Basically, there have been bands over the years that we’ve tried to model ourselves after and they’re definitely one of them.
How would you say you’ve progressed musically as a band since the early days? We’re way better, I mean not as a band but as individual players. I listen to the drum parts on Sink or Swim and they’re awesome and they’re exactly what I wanted to do at the time but it’s material that I would never write now. I feel like I’ve grown up as a musician, and that there’s more things I know as well as more things that I can do, so that’s one of the cool things. We never wanted to make the same record twice, and we always want to keep things moving in a different direction as well as moving forward at the same time. I think part of that is a constant reinvention and when you’re already learning how to play different types of music you just get better at it. I think that back in the day the music came from a rawer and less intellectual place than it does now with the big time producers and studios. You have to kind of change the approach a little bit, as you’re not going to sign to a major label and make the punkest record you’ve ever made because that’s not being honest to anybody. So yeah I think that’s probably the biggest change, but the way that we look at things and approach things is pretty similar, I just think that the biggest difference is the style of music we write and the way we’re able to deliver it.