Today Is the Day frontman and longtime producer Steve Austin is one of the most frequently misunderstood personalities in the metal scene. Our own Drew Ailes gave him a call in September to discuss a host of topics, including Austin's new label, Supernova Records.

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I'm psyched. My son's first day of school was today and he started kindergarten and blew my mind. I was actually crying all this morning and missing him and what not, but it's been a good day so far.

No, I took him to school, but I just love that kid like no tomorrow and really didn't feel that good about turning him over to anyone else. We have a pretty close family. He seems like he did real well. Hank's a smart kid. He can operate a Mac G4 laptop and all that. He's only five years old, so he should do good.

Yeah, it seems like it, man. I walked up to him after school and I was like, "how are you doing? everything cool?" He was like, "I had a great day today," and I go, "what did you do," and he goes, "well, I didn't get to do too many things that were fun but I still had a really good time." I was like, "wow, well, good, I'm just glad that you're happy and that things are working out good."

Well, not as much getting older as just getting around other people. He's spent so much time being around me and you know, it's just so crazy. Just try to keep him together and not get tainted by society.

Oh yeah, no, they do. They've all gotta go out there on their own and fall down and pick themselves back up. Thankfully, he's a really smart dude and he's really good-hearted, so, I think he'll be just fine.

Yeah, I got another one named Willi. He's named after the inventor of the 2" inch tape machine. He's a real sweet kid. He's like, two and a half years old. He's just got to talking in the last while and so forth.

Yes we did, we had a hypno-birth. My wife used no drugs or anything to kill the pain and basically she put herself in a trance, more or less, using hypnotism music. The guy, Steven Halpern, makes music specifically for hypno-birthing. She went through it just fine. She did it for both kids.

You know, my wife's pretty smart and she into a lot of this new-age technique and holistic medicines. When we were getting ready to have the baby, she knew that she didn't want to be sedated. A lot of times it can cause complications in the delivery and affect the kid and stuff like that. So she wanted to go for a more natural way. We read about this guy, Steven Halpern, and...Steve Halpern is this piano, like, neo...new-age type of...dude who makes this super peaceful music. Even if you weren't hypno-birthing and you were just stressed out of your mind or anything like that and you wanted to kick back and chill out, all you have to do is put it on and it's...it's hard to explain. He makes really magical music. It's like, the extreme opposite of Today is the Day or whatever, as far as unsettling and disturbing. That stuff is like you're in the heavens or something in the clouds above with raindrops made of gold on you and stuff. It's some interesting music.

Well, it's kind of an extention of where that one came off. Kiss the Pig was an adventure into trying to somehow take what was going on with Earache in the early 1990's with bands like Napalm Death and trying to push the limits of speed and destruction and anger and hatred. We, on purpose, made sure that there were absolutely no light dynamic parts on the whole thing, except for the very end. Almost all the parts of all the songs had the distortion on the bass guitar all the time. It was more of a direct hit procedure. With the new one that I'm doing right now, I'm trying to blend an element of psychedelia that's maybe reminiscent of some of the clean parts that are on Temple of the Morning Star or Willpower, type-stuff. Like, psychedelic passages and kind of get you into a trance and then right about at the moment where you're in the grasp of that, it blasts off into some super-destruction metal and so forth. I'm really psyched with what we're doing. It's not one album of all the same thing, but yet, it's all under the same roof. I can't get away from the complex and heavy stuff, but at the same time, we've tried to make the setup for each of those parts we go into be brought on by something else. It depends on what song. I mean, the song, "Axis of Eden" is mostly the way I just described it. But then, if you slip into other songs like, "I.E.D. - Improvised Explosive Device," that song is exactly that. You turn it on and it blows up your speakers from beginning to end. "No Lung Baby," is another one I think is a pretty dark and just, pushing kind of song, where there's constant tension building and so forth until the end of the song when it breaks right open. One of my favorite parts of the whole album is during that when it goes into this almost like, noise, free-jazz, metal spectacular in the middle of it. It's really hard to explain other than it's just, I think it's some really mind-opening rock. The album is called Axis of Eden. I'm trying to explain a parallel between religion in the world right now and how it drives wars and destruction and death and hunger and all these things. At the same time, we have the "axis of evil" labeled over in the Middle East and North Korea with what's going on up there. It's a military album, it's a heavy album, so all the themes about it have a lot to do with stuff going on right now. Myself, I'm a huge, I guess you could say, machine-gun enthusiast. I collect machine guns and destructive devices. So I'm trying to like, fuse all the passion from that, crossed with my views of what's going on in the world today, and um, just try to make something that people can somehow feel or find something from.

I think we're living in a really cutthroat day and age. It's one of these deals where trying to find the good guys is kind of hard. Everybody is so money motivated with the things that are going on. For instance, I have no obsession with war or anything like that, or wishes to be at war, nor am I on some prototypical movement where everybody who plays music has to be defiantly against war or defiantly against whatever. The bottom line is, our country has entered into something that really should've never have gotten into. I think that area of the world is like an old world area where cutting people's heads off, old traditions of women not being able to show their faces, killing your own people occurs...there's a lot of stuff that goes on over there that we'll never be able to turn around. We'll never be able to change it.

Nah, it's a living bible, really. Even the people look like that. When you take a look at some of the folks walking around, it's not language, it's customs and culture that developed from over thousands of years. Our culture, even though it's been around a little over two-hundred years, America, we've got our own basic culture and customs. I think somewhere in the middle of one major tragedy that happened to be a fluke, which was the 9/11 incident, that was basically an angry guy with money in the Middle East who wanted to get back at some shit that he didn't like. And then made that happen. And when that happened, it just basically dragged us into a false sided war, meaning it'd be nice to think that like, John Wayne and all the guys that we got into that to go over there and do some good or whatever, but you know what, I think it's obvious now that we got into this to also go over and control some oilfields and stuff like that. If in the path of destruction they took out a leader or two that's supposedly a bad guy, then I guess that makes it right. But now the only problem is, just like messing with a hive of hornets, you basically created about a billion more of them. I think the proof is in the pudding. Those people believe in what they're doing and they don't care about military might, and they don't care about the outcome of what happens to themselves as far as suicide bombers and stuff like that.

Oh, exactly. And another thing is that it'd be different if it was the way they described it, where it's like, "oh, those guys are just crazy Islamic terrorists," but well, the funny thing is, the day after that war ended, they were passing out hundred dollar bills to people and stuff in the street, trying to uplift and rebuild what was going on with the people who got destroyed that live around there. When you see our country with a tragedy like Hurricane Katrina where it takes like, a week for one can of beans to make it down to New Orleans to help somebody, it puts us in a bad light to the rest of the world. I'm pro-America as fuck and I love my country and I love where I'm from. I would never want to live anywhere else because in the end, we are definitely more free here than any other place on planet Earth. But at the same time, I think as a nation, we have a lot to learn about leadership and about what's going on. I've toured Europe over the years many times and I've went over there from the early 1990's where people would do anything to see an American band, and then now, I can remember I went over there on the Sadness Will Prevail tour about a month after the Iraq war started and ended, and it was a completely different thing. It's like, everybody there hates you over the actions of what's going on. People think that we're way deep into it, that every single person is lamenting 9/11. You know, it's like, the tsunami last year that killed my man from Nasum...

Oh my god, stuff like that, freakin', Hurricane Katrina. How many fucking people were lost? Even those two things...

It is. It's just fucked up. It's really put us into a strange place to where like, now, it's ruined travel, you can't enjoy anything about going anywhere, as far as an airplane goes. It's really weird, man. I wish there was some way our government could turn things around and be like, "you know what, lets take care of America." Number one thing that we need to do, and taking care of the Earth. Taking care of America, taking care of the Earth, and fucking sorting shit out for people that are having a hard time is a way better practice than worrying about liberating people who don't give a fuck.

Yeah. I mean, North Korea, maybe. Even when they speak of Iran I think of that to be jokish, too. It's like, we're talking about a fucking country that's like, the size of a state. It's not even that big. Then the nuke-war gets thrown in there and it takes us right back to the 1950's in the cold war when people were constantly fucking freaking out about nukes and talking about people using them. We're just in a different day and age and I think that now we've made us an open season target for just about anything that's going on. And who knows what the next chapter will be? I think that suicide bombing is something that's going to end up coming to America. And when it does, we're going to really start experiencing what terrorism is really all about. Driving fucking planes into buildings and wiping out part of downtown Manhattan in New York is one thing, but when you start having it happen in shopping malls and little kid schools and all these places like that, it's going to make people stand back and start asking, "why are we the target? Why are people doing this to us now? They didn't do this to us before." It's kind of like the same reason, why is gas fucking $3 and something right now? If you fucking piss off the baker that bakes the bread...

Yeah. Dude's going to shit in it and he's going to charge ten bucks a loaf. He doesn't give a fuck because he's going to fucking get you back in any way he can. If it's economically, then that's what the hell they're going to do. That same money that we pay into the gas pump, that goes right back into the hands of people over there doing shitty stuff and supplying arms and all kinds of shit. So we just can't figure it out that number one, we need to get off oil and get like Brazil where we can run ethanol. I mean, when Willie Nelson has a fucking tour bus that runs on french-fry oil, c'mon. This guy is a stoner fucking reggae/country artist at the moment, but for some reason, he's capable of running all of his vehicles off of french fry oil. My mechanic that works on my car back home, he runs his on french fry oil. It's just nuts because there's so many of these different options that we as a country could take to better ourselves and help ourselves out, but we're just focused on these other ideas. In the end, what is done is legacy for both the Bushs and the Halliburton man here, Dick Chaney, for the rest of their lives. I think that was also an economic decision made long ago even before the buildings got hit.

My dad worked for Chrysler for thirty years, working on cars and stuff like that. Even my own family was a part of the Detroit, motor city, like, running through making vehicles and wearing yourself out working for the company. The oil companies and the tobacco companies have a huge grip on what's going on in the United States. The lobbying and the money they spend makes things happen that generates what's going on. If you've got enough money for it...all that lobbying means is just going up to Washington with a lot of cash, take them out to dinner, get them wasted, throw them shit like a yacht, stocks, bonds, whatever it takes to get somebody to vote or do the way that you want them to do. The voice of the American people is just not heard anymore. That's where Kiss the Pig pretty much came from, as far as, I'm just fucking sick of all these different idelogies going on. I'll be honest with you, again, where I say I love my country, I think it's really a cheap ploy to use George Bush as a platform to be in a band. The minute that it came out, the shit of 9/11 and the Iraq war and everything, there was a punk wave, which is cool. A lot of folks started donning George Bush t-shirts with like, one-eye out or whatever, and everything else. A lot of lyrics, a lot of representation, all about George Bush. It's so weird. In one way from being an old-school punk, I totally understand and I feel the same way, but I also feel like we need to be a little more advanced and ahead.

Well, they're not giving any kind of solution. It's almost like, somebody comes over to your house and you ask them what they think of something, and they go, "you know, I think that color of paint sucks." As a friend, I would want, if I was to give a criticism, I'd say, "that color of paint sucks, but maybe orange would look good." Instead, there is no solution offered up. A lot of Americans take this apathetic approach to protesting, which is like, "okay, let me see, I get it. Bush...bad...America...kind of bad...but me and you...okay." Uh, what about how we're going to fix all this stuff? "I ain't got answers to questions like that, but I definitely know Bush is bad and that guy sucks." That's great, you know, but we've gotta somehow come together as a nation to focus on the solution to all this shit. It might not be found in the dude who says he's our president right now, but...here's how I see it. Millions of fucking people who work jobs, pay taxes, and work hard, and a lot of them are struggling having fucking nothing and on WIC and on fucking welfare and all this kind of shit. And that's with them trying. You can't put down a nation of people who fucking simply just work their jobs and fucking try to live their life and provide for their families. Obviously if those folks could change it and turn it around - they don't want three dollar gas. They don't want all this bullshit. They don't want their kids to day. Again, that's the modern government in the United States. All the people in charge of doing shit are over fucking 40 years old. I don't know what the phrase is, but never trust anybody over 40 or whatever it was. And there's a good reason why. We're only as good as the fresh young minds that are coming up and to me, the younger people and the younger generation...what they think has a great bearing on what's going on with the future. One day, they'll be the dudes who are over 40 years old and hopefully everybody has learned from the mistakes we've made, maybe we can progress to some form of better society where we care about other nations and we care about them being free, but at the same time we keep ourselves in check. We're not supposed to be playing god. We're not supposed to be sorting out nature. To me, that's all it is. The cobra and the mongoose or whatever it is, you're never going to get those two animals to stop fighting. You can try all you want to, but it's kind of like Ireland and Great Britain. The Protestants and the Catholics. The only way you're going to stop that is to start a new religion called...Protesatholics...or Catho...fuse the religion together as one thing. They won't get along. There's that adversity and it's built in. You look at other countries, like Switzerland, they're a good model. They're a a pretty clean country.

Yeah, yet, they have a heavily armed military.

Yes. They are totally - and I think that has another thing to do with the way things are run. Most of these lawmakers and most of these government officials who run shit...in the United States, those guys aren't worried about carrying out any type of military act of war against anybody because they know that their family members are at Harvard, and at Yale, Columbia, Cornell...they're never going to put on fatigues, they're never going to grab an M16. It's the same thing. In Switzerland, if you're 45 years old and voting to blow somebody up, you've got it in the back of your mind that...

Yeah. This could be my kid's cousin, or my son's nephew. How many family members are going to get killed if I do this shit? That keeps it real. In the old days when we were tribesmen and shit like that. Everybody was a warrior and you go into battle and lose family members.

Oh yeah, they do. They're another one of those self-policing societies.

Yeah, more or less. Yeah. There's not really an overflux of police where there's a martial law of state, but pretty much everybody themselves, defends their homes, and their economy does well. They produce quality things. They create precise instruments and all sorts of good shit like that. In no way has their country suffered or been in some sort of third-world state because those dudes don't want to play ball with the rest of the world. At the same time, there's certain countries I have a huge respect for with their craftsmanship and the things that they get done. For instance, Germany's a great country. They build so many things that are just high-tech and ahead of it's time. There's a certain amount of giving up your power to the U.N. that I can't really dig. Those guys are like France and stuff, they're beautiful people, again, because we keep it real we know it's not all the fine people who live in France or live in Germany, it's the Jacques Chirac and fucking leader people who get them into whatever it is they're doing. Maybe it's not so representative of the rest of their nation the same way it is us. I feel for the world right now. My whole life has kind of changed a lot since this shit started. I never used to worry about hardly any kind of bullshit of any kind, but it's almost as if ever since the 9/11 morning when my wife woke me up and said, "hey, you've gotta see this on TV," ever since that happened, I have a different vibe about what's going on in my life and what I should be thinking about. Not so much that I'm worried about terrorism or doing some suicide bombing out on my farm or the cattle farm down the street, but at the same time, it's really opened me up to thinking, "wow, it's a different day and age. It's not me pushing the buttons, it's the rest of the government." What we get thrown back is the by-product of the people that we let be in charge. I just try to speak out a lot to people and try to provide an opinion that's never really shifted hard-left or hard-right. It's just somewhere in the center, where I think most real people are. We all want to live, we all want to survive, we all want to be productive and enjoy our lives, hopefully create things that are good and have families and whatnot, but at the same time there is a whole world we live in and we have to find a way to somehow work within it. And it's like, yeah, through our minds of how many people we have, we may be a superpower and we may be able to sort things out, but I think a lot of work needs to be done on relations just overall between people. The bully in class is only a good guy as long as he's saving someone for the right reasons. The minute the bully in class beats up on the little guy, who's a spiritual freak or whatever, that's when people start disliking him. I think that's where we've gotten to. It all just summates into one big, you know, America: The Bully. It's not the country. America is a beautiful country with a lot of good people. I think it's a joke that Dick Chaney is even allowed to be involved in politics with as many business connections as he has going on.

Yeah, and I think there's a lot of stigma put to the kids, getting back to the George Bush bashing, you go to a punk show or a heavy metal show and like, if you were to stand there and say, "I love America, I think my country is the best country on Earth," even if people believe differently or not, just the popular opinion of what people think is cool or uncool, people would react to you in a completely fucking negative way. I think that's fucking wrong. There's nothing wrong with being ethnocentric about your country. That's where you're from and that's who you are. You can have problems with it. You can discuss it in a public forum to find a way to make things better. I just think it's ridiculous how the lines have been drawn in the United States where it's like, "I am completely liberal," "I am completely republican," "I am completely for war," "I am completely against war," "I completely hate George Bush," "I completely love George Bush." It's like, fucking stop. Let's all be real about it and figure it out. Let's not worry about what sides we're on so much as like, do something about it. I don't mean just, a bullshit protest that goes nowhere. How about some real lobbying called, "put your money where your mouth is". If you want to fucking change things and you're either extreme right or extreme left, get together and organize. Get your funds together. Put money into doing what you want to do. If that means running full-page spreads in newspapers to put a statement out there about what you think about things to motivate public opinion, then do that. But half the time, nobody does that. Everybody takes the cheap protestor route of like...

Yeah, and just shit on the internet, and then maybe get together with a few people, throw some tomatoes at some cops or whatever, get shot with some rubber bullets, fucking, get knocked out with a water hose. Some shit is so fucking pathetic, man. It's hard for me to really jump in on the rally when I feel like it's just a false role-playing shit. A lot of today is some off-shoot shit of like, the 1960's, where people want to do something and they want to make things change, but they're reaching for the instruction manual. "What can you do? When has this ever happened before? Oh, yeah, yeah. Vietnam!" This is a lot like Vietnam. People going over to a place that's a little tiny country that didn't really matter and somehow we were supposed to be saving the South Vietnamese from the North, and in the middle of all that, we were there for a long time and a lot of fucking people got killed and finally we changed presidents and we brought them back home. It's all about being obnoxious and causing some shit, and like, that's cool, that's the ugly side of doing it and that part has to happen. When things go up against one another, that's what's going to happen. I think we need to instead of being visible about it with action like that, I think we need to use our brains on a cerebral level a little bit more and really try to make a fucking change, which I don't believe that our generation of people have gotten together leadership-wise enough right now to be able to do that. I think everybody is just caught up in their own lives and one minute they're driving their fucking beamer to college and the next minute they've got a tye-dye on down in the middle of the street, screaming "pig" at somebody. It's hard to really buy into that shit when materialism is such a big deal. You can't have an Ipod and fucking act like you're an anarchist.

I dare every person out there to take your Ipod and fucking sell it, if you care that much about what you believe in, and take the $300 and give it to a left-wing party, if that's what you want to change. A real change, that's like talking about people who are handicapped and have cancer or something. It's one thing to sit around in a group of friends and go, "yeah man, it's really fucked up when people are handicapped and can't walk and stuff, or like, they can't talk or hear anything." And it's like, "oh, really? That's cool. There's this thing called a center downtown where you can go down there and meet someone and change their fucking diapers and change their underwear where they shit on themselves, and they ain't got nobody else to do it for them." So if you really want to make a fundamental change, then go do that. That's a positive thing to do. I think that's where the line gets drawn. The internet has opened up this invisible identity to where everybody wants to blow their opinion out, and they've got goofball fucking names like, "Ravenstrike999," and it's like, "I think the fucking United States sucks and we're shitty for everything we're doing," "well good, then next time they're having a vote, go vote, and do that. Better yet, don't just vote, how about go to fucking Kinko's and print out a thousand fliers of who you think should win and write down why, and then put them in all the places that you think you should put them at." Then to me they'd be like, "well, what the fuck is that going to do? What's a thousand fliers going to do?" How many young people do we have in the United States of America? Millions. So if you have enough fucking paper of anything going around where people start reading propaganda, maybe you'll start changing lives. It's a strange day and age we live in. Even though we've advanced and we have cell-phones and wireless internet and every other fucking thing on Earth...we've got all this shit that's somehow advanced us, as monkeys, to the next level of, "check me out, I'm watching a fucking Bon Jovi video on my fucking Ipod right now, it's fucking insane," and meanwhile there are people who are bleeding out of their mouths somewhere who need money for surgery or help. Or they need government assistance and can't get it. Those same people tripping on the Bon Jovi video on their fucking Ipod can't pull it together to understand that social change is about doing something and being an activist is your own right and activist doesn't necessarily mean throwing a fucking molitov cocktail at a cop car. It's got to do with using your brain and taking some of our smartest together and having them try to do shit that, politically, can change things.

I've read that. I've heard them speak in different seminars on NPR and stuff like that. You know, it's really hard for me to draw an inference about that. I find it terribly hard to believe that that was an inside job of any kind. The main reason why it's hard to believe is that if there could've been any chance that they would've gotten caught with it, someone would've stopped and said, "wait a minute, if they trace this, to this, to this, to this, we're fucked." Because that's just as bad as Saddam Hussein killing Kurds. What I truly believe happened is in that good ol' money world of doing oil deals and shit, I think somewhere along the lines there were probably some promises made about different kinds of things that were given in trade for whatever was given in return, whether it was oil or money, and then when it didn't work out, they Saudi Arabian community and family said, "hey, do we have any criminals in our family? Do we have any bad guys in our family of any kind?" "Oh well, you know, Osama's completely fucking off the hook with Islamic insanity, and he's so extreme with the inside that it's creepy. We could sic him on them." It probably had to even do with his own family. Just as much as people can be motivated by one thing, you can use them to get things done in another way. Whatever happened to cause that, it was funded by money, and it was funded by a lot of money. I think it was a definite revenge trip, like, big time, over whatever we did. I don't think that happened to us without doing something. If people get fucking mad at me about saying that, I don't care. We have fucked over Indians and every other fucking people, stole the buffalo and their fish and every other thing, why would we stop there? We'd cut deals with the Middle East on business and then when pay-off time was supposed to go down, we just go, "see ya." There's a retribution for fucking everything and I think that those dudes basically took the outlaws of their community and said, "you hate those dudes? Tell ya what, I'll give you enough money so you can get this shit done the way you want to. Get together a plan, we'll fund it all, and go fucking do it." I don't think they ever happened what was going to happen was going to happen. Instead of going to Afghanistan and going full-on after Osama Bin Laden, changing gears and going to their next-door neighbor for some fucking reason and getting into it with them. That, to me, is what blew the whole fucking conspiracy theory shit, because it's like, if we would have strategically went after Osama Bin Laden immediately and had a, "we won't stop until we find that fucker," attitude, then it would've appeared that we were shooting straight from the hip.

Which is completely fucking nuts because that dude is way more dangerous than any of the other turdheads in Iraq. The dudes in Iraq were basically like the Sicilian mob. I'm sure fucking Saddam Hussein is not...you know, they don't seem to be any kind of caregiving government that puts people first. They just seem like the kind of dudes that were like, "alright, I'm the Master P of fucking Iraq. Here, I need a gold faucet, I need a gold toilet, I need gold guns, gold teeth, anything." They were their own mob. How many other places are like that if you look at it? How many hundreds of different countries are run by a dictator who benefits themselves? Theirs a relentless amount of them. Again, it's another thing that makes us look bad is that the place where that cat lives is in the place where God or Satan decided to stick all the fucking oil. When you blow up the king's house that's got all the gold in it, you make shit a little bad, especially if the guy didn't really do anything directly to us. All that bullshit about weapons of mass destruction, people saying, "oh well, they moved them." You know what? I don't even doubt they did have shit like that, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if they had the fucking sting-ray that killed Steve Irwin strapped with bombs ready to drop on the White House. It doesn't fucking matter because the end result of what you do and the primitive people that don't deeply understand, they just add it up simple: "oh, the Arab people have the oil and the American people have too many people in their country and need more, so that is why they're doing this. That's why they did not go after the guy that did the fucking wrongdoing." I don't know. It's funny, this morning I was sitting here and when I came back from taking Hank to school, I was watching on TV and George Bush was having a speech and he was talking about stuff, and I couldn't believe the rhetoric of stuff that dude was going off with. He's on TV basically talking the same gameplan that we've been talking now since 2001 and I'm sitting there going, "dude, you need to hire me to get on your fucking speech-writing shit because I could totally tell you exactly what angle you need to come at instead of this one." If you think that you're going to tell $3 a gallon gas-paying fools of America that this shit is important and it's all about freedom, and it's all about making them free, and we're winning it, and it's all going on how it's supposed to...you're talking to fucking deaf ears. I think the first few years, people had some resentment about knocking those fucking buildings down and people definitely bought into it and were willing to go overboard to fight those fucking bastards. But after so much of it has been on, I think that everybody's had enough and it's too bad. If you notice, Israel got into it with Hezbollah and it lasted a little over a month. Because Israel had nothing to gain by keeping on doing it. If it would've been an easy win to go in there and do what they were doing, those dudes would've kept going on. But Israel, as far as taking care of their own, they realized, "hey, we tried to do something about it and sadly, they have so much money coming from the other side that this could really turn into a major onslaught if we keep going at it." And again, I'm really scared for our nation about that shit because I think right in that area that fucking dumbass that runs Iran and that fucking guy who runs North Korea, those two guys are definitely eccentric in the way that they're behaving. I think that they have a bigger master plan than what's really being shown right now. The combined forces of both money and physical manpower between those two entities, add in China, add in Russia, then you're starting to talk about a world war that would be able to compete with the United States in the amount of manpower and money. Let's just hope that it doesn't come to that. Not to draw it back to my album, God knows this isn't a marketing ploy to get the album out, it's just a testimony of a normal man living in the United States trying to survive through life. That's where it all comes back to. It's the Axis of Eden. Our axis of evil is somehow the religious right getting control of the legislature and politics and driving it home where it's like, "Muslim: bad," "Christian: good," "Freedom: good," "No freedom, bad." Life is not black and white like that. There's a lot of grey areas, especially where it comes to culture.

There's a few that we're thinking about having on there. Rob from Most Precious Blood might contribute vocals on some of it. I'm not really looking to have this album be as much of an experimental extravangaza in terms of having a lot of outside players on it. Sadness Will Prevail was such a long tapestry with a lot of stuff going on it in, so we wanted to weave in different people that we're really close with to have them be a part of it in that way. In this one, it's stripping it down to where it's...you almost have to be involved in an inner-circle with what we're doing to be a part of it, so it would feel kind of strange to ask outsiders to perform on this one. Something that's really weird to me, that I guess I could go on record saying at this moment in my life, for the sense of speaking out and having a message to say, it's the most important one I've ever worked on. That's one reason it's taking so fucking long for me to basically get it done and get it out there. We basically got freed from the corporate game. We were on Amphetamine Reptile, which is a truly integrity-driven label.

Oh sure, and my heritage with them I'm 100% proud of. I love Tom Hazelmeyer to death. He's one of my best friends and one of the most respected people that I think has ever been in the music business. You know, and then we did a step-up, exposure-wise, with Relapse Records, and the first two albums we did with Bill Yurkiewicz on board, the guy who basically started Relapse Records and the guy from Exit 13 - he was a creative elemement of Relapse. He's the guy who put album covers on top of meat and stuff like that in their catalogue. He had strange concepts of how to sell music and how to get it out there to people. I think that period of time was a really great time and we were really able to expose ourselves to a lot of different audiences that we had never played to before. By the time he quit from the label, which is around the time Sadness Will Prevail came around, the label had kind of changed gears towards, in my opinion, becoming a little bit more of a friendlier Relapse. A little bit more fitting in Relapse. To this day, I still have a huge amount of respect for the label of Relapse Records because they put out underground bands that are trying to do it and trying to make it and trying to say something. It's just one of those things where, for us, what's the next step going to be? Me and my band got offered two different major label deals when we got off of fucking Relapse Records and I thought about it. " So a lot of strong consideration went into thinking, like, "what is the next step for Today is the Day?" Is Today is the Day going to be gay, or is Today is the Day going to be real? Today is the Day keeps it real in the sense of, are we out to make a million bucks? Because we've never made a buck, just to say on record. I've been on Relapse Records since 1997 and I have never been paid one royalty dime. Not one penny since I've been playing. That's a God-founded, definite, as sure as the blood running in my son's veins, truth. We're not the only one. We actually were, considering the stature of the label, getting really tiny sized budgets, but yet, lots of exposure and lots of media coverage. That's great. If you're into playing music and you really love playing music, then someone like myself and the guys in Today is the Day, we were cool with that. We're not out to be on MTV with Ricky Martin or whatever, we want to present ideas to think about and music to contemplate. So when you take grown men and you stick them on a fucking van, and you make them go on tour with absolutely no tour support and absolutely no money behind them, you never get paid royalty dime or anything like that or get any form of thank you for what you did, it's like, eventually dudes that have real lives are resentful. And they get pissed. They're like, "hey man, I was going into this thinking this was loads of pussy and tons of drugs and life on the tour bus, just going completely fucking crazy." When you're in a fucking Ford Econoline van or whatever, that's like a 1989 or something, if you're supposed to be representing on some full scale tour of the United States, and one week into it the motor blows out or whatever else, you're sitting in some fucking town and like, nobody is pleasant. Nobody is psyched. Nobody is in a good fucking mood. Keeping band members is fucking really hard. I don't play music for money and therefore, I'm still in Today is the Day. But I will admit that if I was one of my own band members, if it would've kept going the same way it's been going, I would've fucking not been able to last that long either. Because I love my kids, and I love my wife, and want them to feel okay and have shit to eat and a roof over their head. I look at it also from a punk rock Jello Biafra perspective. It's all what you want. All the stuff I just said is not complaining, it's just an explanation of like, you make out of it what you want, and you've gotta take things for what they are. You can't get into stuff and have expectations that are completely unrealistic to what's going on. That brings us to the positive part of this, which is, I tried to figure out what I want to do after Relapse. Am I going to sell out Today is the Day to a label that says, "you know, if you play a certain way and you could tone things down, and shit could be this way and that way, then hey, we've got a place for you,"?

Right. And I couldn't see us doing that. And that's an evil thing to lure young artists with, because you're basically saying, "hey, if you do this in a certain way and give up the artistic aspect of what you want to do, you're going to make it." It's weird because like, I feel like, one turning point for me was trying to figure out what's going on with our band and what we want to do, hanging out with Tom Hazelmeyer of Amphetamine Reptile and Jello Biafra of Alternative Tentacles. I worked on an album for him last year for a band on his label called Disaster Strikes. You know, it's so strange because when you play with, I guess you could say, a lot of high-profile bands and a lot of them today are super hooked up and you see the end result of what the machine can do, you start thinking, "wow, man, maybe that could be for me." After running into those dudes, the people who were involved in the deal that was offered to us, I said to myself, "you know what the world needs right now? It needs a new record label and it needs one that's unafraid to put out shit that's just not filtered. No censorship." We want to call it like we see it and we want to put bands out there that are real, that are new, that are different. Not one fucking band on Supernova Records is like another one that's on the label. Last but not least, I sure as fuck didn't sign any band on the label for some sake or purpose of them sounding like some other band, which is a bad-buzz that a lot of labels do. They get one thing that sticks and then they get five more just like it to try and ram that shit down your throat.

I believe we have seven, total, right now. I'm just really, really, proud of them. You've got Christine, from Nashville, TN. They have a female front-woman. She's totally powerful on guitar, she's super-talented. Her band is like if you crossed PJ Harvey with Neurosis. They've got this really heavy-metal sound crossed with hardcore. Her guitar playing is very intricate and noisy, and the bassist in the band has almost like, Dave Edwardson, low-type Neurosis voice. When you put it all together going on as one thing, it's just a new kind of sound. It's a different kind of band. And then you take The Orange Man Theory, from Italy. Completely and totally different thing with that. That's like, an old-school AmRep band, almost, crossed with like, Trustkill, like, demented-hardcore crossed with Bad Brains crossed with some form of melodic content in the middle of all that madness. You can't really define them. Then you've got Defcon 4 from Boston, like, the Jesus Lizard of 2006. They sound nothing like Jesus Lizard but they've somehow got that, fucking disturbing, "I don't understand what's going on, what is this shit," kind of vibe. Their lead singer smashes his face into everything. A friend of mine is professional skateboarder crossed with a human destructionist in their band, and I think it's going to flip people on their ass because when they see that band play, those dudes are disturbing. Then you throw in Roanoke, from Portland, Oregon, and they sound like Satan's fucking answer to doom or something. Oh god man, it's like if you took Sleep's Jerusalem album and fed it crystal meth for about two months in a row and then took away it's wonderbread. They're just so fucking angry and hateful. The music is detuned and low, and a lot of stoner/doom bands have a passive style of approach crossed with heaviness, where it's laid back and there are pockets of heaviness; instead, this is like a whole frontal assault type of band. They don't just want to be stoned and stand there and drone on. They want to fucking pummel and beat you into submission. In the end, it's not the catchiest thing in the world that's supposed to be a sing-a-long and it's probably hard to take for some people, but you know, I think the fans that are into detuned heavy madness will now have something new to listen to. I could go on and on about the different ones on the label. The least one I ever speak of, to tell you the truth, is my own band, because to tell you the truth, the label is more important to me in the aspect of what happens to them.

Christine, The Orange Man Theory, Roanoke, Presley, Defcon 4, Diesel Theory, Taipan, and Today is the Day. Presley, those guys are like, shit, I don't even know. They sound like The Flaming Lips a little bit in a sense of like, just really creative noise. Really cool...fucking...if you crossed The Flaming Lips with the band The Church, from the 80's, atmospheric, clean-guitar, psychedelic Sonic-Youth sounding stuff. In the midst of all that, sort of like the way King Crimson has it's own label, I look at it like, this label is designed to release new music. We're on it and Taipan is on it, but that's not the biggest priority. When I talk to Curran [Reynolds] (Supernova Records & Today is the Day's publicist), 98% of the time I talk about all those other bands instead of my band. It's not my driving force in life to be Mr. Big Balls or whatever. Right now, I'm just chasing the game and trying to expose new music and I'm trying to expose the challenge to those different players in those bands to let people hopefully have a new avenue to go down. I think the state of the underground in the United States is twisted by TV, basically. We were doing just fine until about the time Headbanger's Ball came back on TV. Now that Headbanger's Ball got back on TV, though good bands, it's like, somehow turned everybody into The Black Dahlia Murder or some off-shoot of that My Chemical Romance band. The era of music right now is just a sad fucking shape of music.

Right, because it's like, you've got people who make money who are demanding perfection at labels, who are like, "I'm not going to stand for that kick-drum out of place, I'm not going to stand for this sounding like that, we need pitch-correctors on vocals..."

Well, it's like looking at Pamela Anderson. Okay, yeah, she has giant boobs. She has big lips. She has blonde hair. She is a curvy, beautiful, not-real fucking woman!

Yeah, even though it's got all the bells and whistles of what we think of with beauty, it's not really what you want because you can tell there's a certain insecurity like a lack of self-pride or low self-opinion thing where it's like, "I've gotta do all these things just to appear attractive," or "I've gotta do all these things to like, being accepted because those are the traits of a society that make me want to be beautiful." It's the same thing with music. I listen to bands I really respect and now in this day and age is being done with Pro-Tools, and don't get me wrong, over 50% of the work I do is in front of my two-flat panel monitors with a G5 terrabyte rig, doing digital mixing and digital mastering. But, the name of the game when I do it, is not copy and paste. It's not MIDI mapping every single fucking thing going on, because it's like, I'm a realist engineer and I base my shit off the old-school engineer thing called, "we need to get it right in reality first before we can even record it." I won't roll on something that I think sounds fucked up. Me and my clients or me and my friends that work with me, it's professional and it's together in sense of seriousness, but really, what it's all about for me, is trying to work with a band and do things smart. Make sure that the gear is serviced, make sure everybody has practiced what we're going to record a million times before we record it, make sure that all the words if you sat down and listened to the music instrumentally, make sure that the lead singer takes paper and has them written down like a bouncing ball. Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh. If you can't do that, then it's not written. It's not done. Improvisation is cool, but that's a whole different style of music. If it's in jazz, it's one thing.

Right, and half the time, it really sounds undone, where you're trying to put something together that's not put together. I try to tell people all the time, some people who aren't as experienced in the recording field. They'll think, "oh well, you're the able to do all this shit, you're ahead of the game, I'm sure you'll be able to make us sound like God," and I'll be like, "you know what, man, I want to make you sound like you at your best. Be you, for real, playing your music the best that you can, put all the feeling into it that you can." As far as quality control freak, what is it that you're doing, judge whether or not you're on, judge whether or not you're finished or not, and approach it from there rather than just one big corrective effort. Where it's like, "oh shit, my kick-drum sounds really shitty, but I'm sure you'll work it out in the end," my answer would be, "no, I don't want to work it out in the end, let's go out there, let's listen to your kick-drum and get to the bottom of the cause of whatever it is that makes you feel like it sounds like shit, and if it takes tightening every screw on that drum or even throwing that fucking drum out of the studio and using a different one to do it with, then that's what we need to do." It's all about the real. That's is where it's gone wrong. The studio budgets are under force of the record labels where they want it done, bap-bap-bap-bap, copy and paste comes into play and it's like, "oh, I fucked it up right there, couldn't you just take that one and copy it eight more times?" The answer, of course, is "yes, we can do anything, it's 2006, I'm sure we could do it, but do we really have to? Can't we just do it right?"

Basically sending me tracks and letting me hear what's going on. None of the bands that I dig did I go out and do, "oh, well in this town, these guys are drawing this many people." It's all about just whether or not I like what you're doing. I can tell you different stories of different ones at different times of bands that caught my ear and it made me realize, "wow, you're pretty original. You're writing shit I've never heard before. Wait a minute, you have a lot of drive and you're really into your band and believe in it as much as anybody else in the world? You're willing to work hard and give your all for it?" Those elements are all that matters to me. If X band and Y band do so many units and another one doesn't do as many as the other one, it's not like I'm going to come down hard on anybody about it, because we don't have expectations like that. "Oh, you're only selling this many records, so we're going to put this much into you." No, obviously from being a living, breathing, human being, I can tell which ones will probably go over more maybe with a mainstream population versus the other ones and no, those bands won't get any more help than any other band on the label. The one we think the selling power isn't as strong as the one that's going to be the strongest is going to get equal push. It's not fair to do it any other way. I can't dictate what people are going to listen to. People dictate what they want to listen to. The easiest way for me to give them something to listen to and them wanting it to buy it from us is to give them something they haven't heard before. So that means it can't be pre-tested, pre-market research, it can't be ripped-off from other bands, and we don't want any bands to sound like a bunch of other bands on some other label. Why would you want to bother with that? We're hoping that the open-minded listener out there that wants to try something different and hear something new will look at what we sign and go like, "you know, I don't understand this shit, but I think I like it and I want to listen to it more." And they might be in trouble if they like it because they'll come back to the other label and go, "gee, I bet they've got lots of other shit on the label just like this," and maybe in the sense of originality, but no. If you like Roanoke you're not going to be able to come back and find another band just like that to dig on. We're doing it on purpose to keep the label from being too stylistic and to really let it come as it goes. Whatever it is, then that's what it is. It's funny, because a lot of these labels now, I get so turned off when I see this shit of, "we don't accept demo tapes, we don't accept unsolicited demo tapes," and one label, who I'm good friends with who I won't name, they had something on their website that was like, "don't even think of sending us a bunch of shit in the mail because we will absolutely throw it away, we have no interest in listening to unsolicited stuff," and I think that is absolutely ridiculous. I have found more cool things from people just offering to let me to listen to something or giving me a CD or tape or something and going, "hey, man, when you're hanging out and you want to, or you're just hanging out with your friends, listen to this shit here, it's pretty cool." Next thing you know, I'm sitting around listening to it and I'm going, "I bet nobody on fucking planet Earth knows who these guys are. You know what? I'll bet lots and lots of people on planet Earth would love this shit." The people out there don't even know that right now. We all get surprised at what the next thing that you get into is. You can't really do a stock market kind of thing when it comes to the record business. I think you've got to go with your gut and do what you think is right and take the people that you feel that are worthwhile to work with, and do it. Try to push as hard and give your all for each band in whatever way you can. They step up to the plate and throw their rock down and practice and tour and get some quality art and quality music together and present something new, then in my opinion, in this day and age, with the over-saturation of common bullshit, it'll stand out.

Yeah, and then hopefully, they'll create their own.

You know, it's so wild when you just said those different names to me, because I hadn't thought about a couple of them in a while. I'll give you a little bit of background on the different ones and what they were doing and what's been going on with them. A long time ago, when we were right at about the beginning of starting the In the Eyes of God period right after Temple of the Morning Star, basically, I was sitting around thinking about trying to do a side-project that would be a more mechanical approach to technical metal. One of my really dear friends, Dave Witte, who played in Human Remains, he's an awesome guy and an amazing drummer. He lived not that far away from me and I got on the horn and started talking to him. One thing lead to another and at the time, he was actually my friend who helped me find Brann Dailor. Brann came up and jammed with me and I loved Brann's playing and so forth, and Brann had just started playing in Today is the Day with me, and we got together and had a big jam with Dave Witte and Brann and this other friend of mine named Aaron King, from a band called Metatron. The four of us did a jam with Aaron on bass, Dave on drums, Brann on drums, and me on guitar. I still have all the tapes for that stuff and one day, if the other guys are cool with me putting it out or doing something with it, I'd love to release it because it's some of the most chaotic drumming in the history of the planet.

Yeah. Cyclops was that line-up. That was Dave Witte, Brann Dailor, me, and Aaron King from Metatron. Two songs that I wrote and played with Cyclops, which were "Possession" and "Spotting A Unicorn", at first were designed to be on the Cyclops album. It was weird. Dave was kind of going through a transition from Human Remains and trying to find his way, and I think at that time he was in Black Army Jacket. They were out playing and we played Milwaukee Metalfest with them, doing a lot of stuff, but I think he wasn't still set quite on what he was doing. As a side-project thing, I was way interested in Cyclops, but it seemed like the motivation...the other guys, they weren't really worried about taking it any further. So that basically went down as a one-time, get togther, jam session that was recorded and multi-tracked, and never released. KGB was a one-time jam session between me, Rob of Most Precious Blood, Chris Debari, me, and a friend from down in Boston, Jonah. We got together and jammed and we recorded the session. I still have the tapes, but it's something that's kind of just on the back-burner. Taipan is kind of an acid-metal, Today is the Day, that kind of a deal with me, Chris Debari, and Pat Kennedy. We got together for a couple of different sessions and just cranked out a bunch of songs that I had written way back when I was 17 or 18 years old. We recorded the songs and a few covers of people like Johnny Cash and a few others.

Well, it's kind of a different style of sound than the music in Today is the Day. All of Taipan is more of a simple approach, almost like from an AC/DC, crossed with Big Black, crossed with Butthole Surfers. It's a strange kind of band, it's hard to really...describe. It's more of like a different sound with lighter dynamics and the songs are just powerful. I don't know, I never really envisioned those songs to fall in the Today is the Day range. I always thought they would be better for something else.

I have all the master tracks. Alien in the Land of Our Birth was a band where, basically, I moved down to Nashville after trying to find people to start a band with and whatnot. Didn't really come up with any dudes at that time, but I was ready to start something and I was really wanting to get a line-up together to do something. I went down to Nashville and jammed with some guys down here and shortly after I met these dudes in a band called Alien in the Land of Our Birth. They were playing like, a detuned kind of punk, so I could understand what they were doing. They had a death metal edge to what they were doing. So I got together with them and we wrote a bunch of songs, and one of the songs I wrote was called, "Going To Hell," and later on that song appears on the Live 'Till You Die album. Alien in the Land of Our Birth had an element of space rock to it a little bit more than say, Today is the Day. Had a little more of an atmospheric sound to it. It was a different kind of thing, definitely. Eventually, Brad Elrod and me started I different band, so we started Today is the Day. The other two members went off to do different things, like, this guy played with a band called Porch that had the guitarist from Primus, Todd Huth, in it. They were on Interscope Records. So basically back in the day, that band played around here. Another band was Hank III's band, called Buzzkill who was always playing shows around here.

Yeah, I totally love Hank III. I've known him since back in the day because we were just both dudes playing in bands in Nashville. We played in the same music scene. We got to know each other well. I just hung out with Joe Buck and the other dudes in his bands about two weeks ago when they came out by my house in Nashville. That's where I am right now, I don't know if I told you that.

Yeah, I bought a house down here on a lake. It's a really beautiful place and it's got a building to put the record company and the studio in, so, I'm in the process of getting all that stuff moved from up there to down here. This is where I grew up and all that stuff. Me and my wife and kids, we didn't really have any reason to stay in Massachusetts anymore. Her family was moving to Maine and she had a business that was a tattoo shop called What It Is! and we have the two boys and the record company and studio. There's really no reason to be there other than the close friends we've developed over the years that we'll miss. The new place is great, I love where we are right now. Nashville is an open city even though you'd think it's mainly country music, where there is quite obviously...

Yeah, and I think it's kind of kicking back in here now. That band, Christine, that we were talking about is from here. I think they're a good example of something like that. I'm proud of being able to grow up down here. I think that it made me want to strive twice as much to be an individual and to do my own thing and be real and not be warped by society. Obviously down here there's huge religious overtones and a lot of conformity that tends to get a hold of everybody. In a lot of other places, like in Los Angeles or New York, a freaky person will walk down the street and no matter what nobody even looks twice. But in more conformed areas, it's harder to be yourself and be real. You've just gotta be your own thing and I think it develops a lot of character.

Sure, man, it's really funny how even coming back down here, not that me and my wife look super fucking creepy or anything, but we just go to go do different things and whether it be in stores or whatever, I kind of notice that the people have a different angle on us. Not scared, but interested. [laughs] I don't know. In Massachusetts, people don't get scared by it, it's just like, "I don't like you," but down here it's, "what's going on?"

On the new one there's only one. We have 26 songs that we recorded and we only released 13.

Yeah, you know, with Taipan we're going to do a full length cover CD of nothing but covers. Since we had so many of them, we thought we'd add more to it. I think we have 8 to 10 of them. But Today is the Day, we've performed "Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath," and that Chris Isaak song, "Wicked Game," and that "Feel Like Makin' Love," song. We've played that on a few different tours. Sometimes I think it wound up being on European tours or something. A lot of times in the United States we usually have stuck to just original material most of the time and leave the covers as more of a studio flavor for the albums and so forth. But I like doing them. I like playing them. If we didn't enjoy the songs and weren't into whatever they're all about we wouldn't have started playing them and gotten the idea.

You just can't believe it half the time when bands do it just like the original without making it better or different.

Yeah, we're working on it. It's going to be something that'll go on after...right now we've got our release schedule plotted out until next February of this next year. After that, I'm going to slip in a Supernova reissue, the very first Today is the Day album reissued and re-mastered, and then probably that retrospective thing and then a live at CBGB's thing was maybe another idea we had. These are recent ones. The live at CBGB's would include Kiss The Pig material and stuff like that. The retrospective thing would span all the way back to prior to being on Amphetamine Reptile and playing shows in Alabama and a lot of really early material that included a lot of the first 7" stuff. I'm excited about people seeing that because that way they can see the progression of the band from the very beginning all the way through now. The quality of footage obviously walks hand in hand with the time period. Straight-up VHS recorded and not the high end video, but the new stuff is some really, really, sick pictures and video. It's great.

You know, I think when we first started playing we had so many effects going on the first record. I had a different effect planned for every single section of every single song, foot-pedal wise. [laughs] I think we tended to be one of those bands that ends up standing in one place at the time while freaking out. We were a little more stiff, if you will, I think. Since then we've tried to modify our approach to where we can be as free as possible while playing, down to like, I remember the early days I ran a tape player, and now I run a Mac G4 laptop. It's come a long ways since the beginning but yet in a lot of ways, I think we've made it better by simplifying some of the effects stuff we do and just keeping it as real as possible. Right now, since in the last six years, ever since post-In the Eyes of God, we really haven't used any effects on anything live. My guitar sound is Mesa Boogie Mark III Head going to two pairs of 4x12 cabinets loaded with 25 watt Greenbacks and a 2x15 cabinet with two EB speakers in it. I have a pedal that changes the channels from a distorted to a super-distorted, and then I've got my vocals which is just the normal channel of...turning a mic channel up and screaming through it or singing through it. I don't know, for me, singing and playing guitar and focusing on the real sound of what I'm doing is more important to me than just trying to layer things for effect and putting all kinds of stuff on it to create a lot of noise. I like stuff like that but like, when it comes to laying down the rock or like that, it muddies up the mix.

And there's always things for like, if the soundman in a different section is going to be true to an album in the fact with effects on vocals or different layers and something like that. You've gotta work that out with the soundman. In the end, it's all about the songs that you write and knowing them well and hopefully trying to sing your own song about what you really feel. You do that and throw it down and nobody likes it but you, then it's no big thing because you're trying to do what you do.

I don't care, I don't care. Go for it. I'd rather talk about some things that are probably insane and open it out.

Yeah...

Um, you know, I think early on in the early internet age from being someone whose been written about or in magazines, or talked about prior in print, we've done a lot of stuff throughout the years. When the internet age opened up, it was a totally different thing. It's like, whenever you see anybody saying anything that's harsh about you or some criticism or whatever, you know, anybody who has feelings doesn't ever feel good reading someone putting you down or acting like they know you or something like that. That's the world we live in, though, right now. You've got a world of people with an opinion and a lot of people draw opinions from just about anything. A kid will look at one of our album covers and maybe he's super into Christianity or something and sees In the Eyes of God and doesn't like the idea of what that means or like, maybe some song says something that's off-color or some fucked up statement that I say, and that leads people to believe, "oh, well, this man must be insane!" I mean, if you look at the movies of Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese or like, a lot of different violent films with a lot of different adult themes...all these people you know have a serious opinion like, "what goes on in the mind of a person who thinks of such things," or whatever. That plays into, to put an answer to your question, straight on, is that basically it's like this: the band has been around for about 13 years. Three best friends started it and played in it until about 1995 after being on Amphetamine Reptile for about three years total. We did two albums and had a great time and whatever point in time, our bass player had a falling out in a sense of doing some things that we weren't really psyched with as far as dishonesty and stuff like that. It wasn't a big deal or whatever because we love the dude, but we were trying to play in the band and do stuff. So that was a simple case of the first time we lost anybody, and from there, at different times I think it was just really hard to find the right dude to do what we want to do. If you think about it, the first line-up of the band that we had was super-duper-duper-duper committed. And I mean committed. Practice fucking seven days a week for three or four hours a day, and really deeply into it where they would do anything for the band. Same with me. After Mike Herrell was out of the picture, me and Brad Elrod, who was also just as deeply committed to it as me, had a hard time finding someone. So hard that we ended up going with a completely different approach because we didn't want to do anything that wasn't up to Mike's crazy playing. So we got a friend of ours who played evil keyboards, and you know, it's like, we did a tour or two with him and it seemed like things didn't work out or whatever. No big deal, again, it's not like we hated the dude or anything. With the next album coming, Brad ended up wanting to move to the West Coast. He went and did his thing and I kept playing with other dudes and wanted to get an organic line-up going with drums and bass. I think that's what's happened is the fall out, from say, different people throughout the years that have played with us, they sit back and see Today is the Day maybe step up another notch and do another thing. "Holy shit, Steve records the Burn the Priest album, holy shit, Steve records the Deadguy album, holy shit, they go on tour with Helmet, Slayer, Melvins, Sick of it All," and who's to say that that shit doesn't build up a load of resentment? If it was me and I played in a band and I thought I was really giving my all but maybe I wasn't, then maybe later on I wasn't playing in that band, I'd fucking be pissed. I'd sit there and say shit to my friends and be like, "hey man, that dude fucking sucks at like...you know, this guy sucks." Who kind of organized the band, who runs it, who's the person who never gets the glory maybe but always takes the blame if anything goes wrong? It's the guy who runs the show. It's the guy who gets shit done, and that winds up being me. If people wind up leaving this band and they go to their friends and talk, all I can say is that I get results. Bottom line is, I'm just saying, whether I get it with or without somebody. Half the time I think some of this bullshit that I hear, as far as getting me going, it really fucks me off. I don't want to name names or say anything about anybody because pretty much, I have total respect for anybody who has stepped into a jam-room and ever played music with me, but when people walk away from this and make petty remarks to make that are just completely ridiculous, it makes me think, "cool, can't wait until Hank can read," you know? He's going to sit there and think about goofy daddy, down at the picnic where he's rolling around the park with a bunch of ducks, and birthday daddy whose got like, 25 presents for each kid, or whatever daddy that he's got in his mind going deer hunting with him and teaching him gun safety or whatever...it's like, he's going to ask me, "what is this about, why do they think you're crazy?" And I'm like, "I will tell you why. Your dad has done a bunch of seriously heavy shit. He's toured with Eyehategod, he's fucking hung out and played with the best of the best in the underground. The bottom line is there's a lot of jealous and stupid motherfuckers out there who get on the internet and run their fucking mouth and sit there and say stuff like they know me fucking shit or something. Unless you're my wife, my two kids, my mom, Chris Debari, or about maybe three or four people, then you really don't know me because I don't fuckin' hang out with anybody. The people I've played with in the band on a professional level, all I can say is, all we ask is fucking join the band and understand that you are in an underground band. That means we're going to be in a van, we're going to do some driving, we're going to do some waiting, we're going to do some not getting paid that good, and we're going to do some playing the music because we love it and we fucking believe in it. At the end of the day and you come back from tour and you're like, "oh man, I wish I could just play drums all day and not like, get a job or anything - this fucking blows. Fuck you guys. Oh yeah, and remember that time you argued with me? You yelled at me and it scared me and it really made me feel bad." And my answer to that is, "fuck you, you fuckin' pussy." What the fuck kind of world are we living in? I'd hate to be in battle with any motherfucker who can't handle me. I don't put my life on the line for fucking pink-panty motherfuckers that can't handle reality. If somebody tells me, "hey man, grab that fucking cabinet and get that shit on the fucking stage, it's time to fucking play," the answer is, "we're about to play, and guess what? I need to get the fucking cabinet and get it up there." It's like Pulp Fiction or something, where Mr. fuckin...Harvey Keitel. It's John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, and they've got this guy dead in the back of the car and Travolta's pitching some fucking bitch about dude telling them what to do. And dude's like, "cool, now pretty please with a cherry on top of it, can you get the fucking brains out of the back of the car?" It's like, c'mon, man. All I know is that pretty much all the dudes who have been in Today is the Day have always been really cool dudes and people that I respect and honor. Along the road where they've got life decisions to make, if anyone wants to leave this band and we have words or we argue about shit, it's like, I don't know. I just enjoy the band and want to keep it going all the time. If anybody leaves...I think that the major misconception that I ever hear about me that's really ridiculous is this: "who the fuck wants to learn the songs in your band over and over and over again?" You know what I'm saying? It's like, why the fuck would we let people go...half the time when somebody says that people have been let go or fired, they never were fired or whatever. They just quit and wanted to do something else. It just sounds better to make it sound like that. It's drama. I don't know. I don't know, man. All I can say is that I think it's fucking funny and the more that people talk about me and whatever it is, the people that really truly love the band seem to be deeply committed to the sound of the band. So it's those people that I care about what they think.

Yeah. And I think a lot of people see it, to me, not that there's anything to fucking...obviously it's not a money thing, because I'm not driving a hummer, but I think it's more like an integrity thing. You just can't stand to see me just keep fucking kicking ass on every single fucking album and everything be destructive in some kind of new fuckin' way and totally different, and fucked up shit that nobody's got the balls to say.

I'm on a health kick right now and I'm fucking probably in better shape than I've ever been right now. All I can say is that I don't really plan to go the other direction, so the better I take care of myself, the more fucking punishment I can lay on myself. I'm just planning on keeping doing this shit for life. I've got it in my skin and I don't plan on getting the tattoos removed, so that's pretty much my life. It's just one of those things where, I definitely feel the age, you know? I'm 39 now. I'm not 20 years old or whatever, but it's just all about taking care of yourself and making sure that you can deliver what you're trying to deliver. If you don't, then fucking get out of the game. To me, right now, I feel like I'm at the top of my form.

20 years old.

Yeah. I quit school. I was going to college at University of Missouri. I had an epiphany when I was driving down the highway after I had gone to see a U2 concert for fucking Joshua Tree. I was coming down the road and all of a sudden it came to me and I pulled out the road and jumped out of my car. The wind was like, blowing super hard and cold where it blows right through you. And I had this feeling and I was like, "I've gotta change what I'm doing right now." At the time, I was a fuckin 4.0 student. School was my life. That was totally what I was into besides playing music.

For finance and music. I had a double major in both.

What I do right now for a living. Recording and engineering. Because that was the other part of what I was into, big time. I had my own little recording studio in my fucking basement since I was 14 years old in a control room and stuff like that. I had a four-track when I was about 12 years old, working on one of those and making up songs. I had been doing that for a long time and by the time I was 20 years old I was making up my own songs and playing all the instruments on all of them and stuff. That's kind of what...I really didn't feel like I had anybody against me in the sense of family or whatever. Right after that I got home and I called them and I was like, "I'm going to quit school tomorrow," and they were like, "what," and I was like, "I think I'm just going to play music. I've just got to find dudes to play it with." They were like, "okay, that sounds cool, that's good."

So I got back home and they were like, "we were wondering when you were going to do this because you didn't seem happy going to school," and I didn't because, to be honest with you, there was really no challenge to it and I felt like that was a shitty thing because the rest of my classmates were striving and pushing real hard to do well at something they cared about, and I was just getting through it and not giving a shit. My heart really wasn't in it anymore. From there, I got a job in a Greek restaurant in Detroit, and I started waiting tables and saved money. I saved a shitload of money and tried to buy gear so I bought a sick amp, a sick guitar, and a bunch of other stuff, just so I could have the stuff to do my band. Through friends and whatever, we started trying to get together a band, and I ended up later on moving to St. Louis because I met these dudes down there and I played music in a band that was like, my first band that played bars and shit. It was called Conspiracy, no less. And then after that, I played in a band called Dorian Gray. Freaky fucking band that was like a cross between Jason and the Scorchers and Bauhaus. Had a metal kind of tone to it in a weird kind of way. I got more and more into progressive rock and heavy, heavy, metal after that. I made up songs after that and fucking, one thing led to another, and I started these other bands. At one point, I had a band with the drummer from Orange 9mm in that. He was the original drummer in that band and this was way before he played in Orange 9mm. We were just kids and whatever in Detroit, trying to play in a band. That band was called Mind's Eye. That was my first progressive kind of thing. After Mind's Eye, I think that's when I took off for Nashville and hook up with those dudes and then Today is the Day was next. It took a while. It took five or six years of moving and doing shit and there was a lot of sacrifice involved. I pretty much had the deal where it was like, "where ever the rock is, that's where I'm going to have to go," and if that involves leaving what band I was in, I was just going to have to do that because that's what was important. I think Today is the Day was the summation of all that sacrifice. Six years of trying to get together a band and shit. And it's not like when we got signed or whatever, like...Today is the Day formed and had offers from TVT, Earache, Alternative Tentacles, and Amphetamine Reptile within eleven months of being a band. Fucking, we ended up choosing Amphetamine Reptile because we believed in them the most as far as them allowing us to do our own thing and not freaking out if we changed out sound or changed the style of the way we played or anything like that. Basically, those guys were totally cool and I had nothing but a good time being on Amphetamine Reptile. I felt they really tried to push the bands the best they could on the level they were on and they got our work out to a lot of writers out there. The promo guy was awesome at that place and he definitely loved Today is the Day and helped it a lot. Tom Hazelmeyer is just someone...we're about the same age and he's really one of the top three most respected guys on Earth. He's such a true dude and a cool artist and good with music related stuff. The guy could do anything. Right now his thing is he's doing Flash design kind of stuff, totally created artwork in 3d Flash. I can't describe what it looks like but it's these strange drawings that are animated. They always have some form of bizarre psychedelic type thing. They're really cool. But he's a true individual and had a really good label and he was unafraid to take whatever kind of band that he really liked. That's what he was all about.

Yeah, maybe emotionally, a little bit. I've lived through some pretty hard things. My dad died in a violent car crash. We had just gotten back to being cool to each other after my teens and what not. Then my mom was alone so we had to kind of figure out how she was going to make it on her own, so I had to take care of my mother from that point on. The relationship I was in prior to Temple of the Morning Star and before was one of the more disturbing....[laughs]...dysfunctional relationships of all time. So a lot of it was pretty weird and insane. A lot of it is kind of private stuff and I don't put it out there because it's embarassing. Shit that I don't wish for anybody to have to go through. On the other side, I think the things that have made me as a person and allowed me to end up being able to create music that winds up reaching a lot of people that are feeling the same way a lot of times, where everything is black. If anything, I suffer from depression. I try so hard to be happy and try so hard to feel good and enjoy life and things like that, on a fucking chemical way, no matter what happens when you feel like that there's nothing that's going to make it change or make it feel any different if it always feels like that. The biggest change that ever happened to me that made me stop feeling so black all the time was meeting my wife, Hannah Austin, and having my two kids from there. Ever since then I feel like my life has become just an enjoyable kind of thing to get into. It kind of takes away a lot of the pain that makes you feel bad inside. It's like moving down here, after a major struggle of a 1200 mile drive with my wife and kids, I thought I was about to lose my mind just from the heat and the drive and the craziness. There were all kinds of things going on. We were trying to get down here and there were complications with the closing. At one point, the corporation was trying to buy the property out from under me, and I was freaking out on the way driving down here thinking, "great, I'm trying to get my kid into school and get things rolling, and meanwhile, capitalist America is at work trying to undermine me." And then we got here and the house closed and everything worked out. Shit's going great. It's funny because like, a couple days ago I wound up having a bad day or whatever, or a few bad few days. And now we're super happy and everything's cool, but you can't just feel like that all the time, especially if you're prone to not feeling like that. It's fucking...I think we all, to call some L. Ron Hubbard shit, have a reactive mind and a reactive memory and we all remember a lot of things and sometimes you realize things as you're walking around and doing whatever. A lot of times the things that people say and the things that people do will trigger things that you felt in the past that are harsh things that blow your mind. You shut down in a way and want to be alone and get down on yourself, big time.

I'm talking things that have happened to you that kind of run like processes in the background of a computer. Different things that happen to you kind of touch into that data where your brain references, "that person said that with that kind of tone, and oh, that reminds me of when this happened," and because you're in real time, talking, you don't really notice it as much because of what's going on in the moment your brain is thinking about doing. I think that background stuff where different files are being accessed all the time, with ones that you keep lower in your psyche, you don't want them on the table because they make you feel bad. I think of them like triggers.

Yeah, and you might not even be wanting to look at that process. Like, you'll have one window open on your main screen, and at the bottom where the things are lined up and you'll touch on it and it throws it back on top instead of down there where you want it to be. And again, I think as time goes on, hopefully, I'm getting older and so many times I thought about going on the route of getting on Prozac or something like that, but I don't know. I really worry if I was to do that, on a natural animal level, I wouldn't be the same way. There's a certain part of that that's good for me. It's kind of twisted and crazy, maybe, but I call that a drive. It's a certain something in my stomach or in my diaphragm or chest or whatever. There's a burning, big fucking, drill bit, turning and twisting around and it just makes you want to go. It makes me want to get things done. It's like, the whole element of Today is the Day. Gotta get out of bed, gotta fucking do some shit, gotta get some shit done, bu-bu-bu-bu. I think if I didn't have that going on with myself...I think that half of it, really, to be honest with myself, is just, I always don't think I ever meet up to what I want to be and it always drives me fucking insane. If I make a picture with graphics or stuff with photos, or if I make a money with Final Cut and watch it back, I'm always like, "aw, that could be cooler if I do this," and I'll always keep striving and doing it and changing stuff, editing it, fixing it, and in the end sometimes it's hard for me to just sit back and say, "well, that's what I did."

Yeah, I guess. It's really not driven because I'm like, "everything's gotta be perfect because I'm perfect," it's more like, "everything's gotta be perfect because I fucking suck."

Yeah, I know. I feel like that's one thing that people have to really keep in check with themselves when they feel that way. When to understand when your best is your best, and that's you at this moment on planet Earth at that time. That's a real hard thing to understand. I remember a long time ago, some kid was on TV, a little kid from Africa with AIDS who was dying. They were asking, "what's keeping you here," and he's like, "I've just got to be the best that I can at the place that I am, with what I have, with my life," or something like that. It really makes you realize like, wow, if you just look at it like that, then you realize that perfectionism is like, an adjustable level like, of really what your state of being and your whole life of trying and trying and trying. Sometimes you'll never get that mental image in your mind or trying to get something to sound like or look like. It's something that's not you at the moment, maybe, is another way of looking at it. What is you is what you're doing. That's why I try to like, in recording or whatever, I try to understand that sometimes things don't fit right or if they sound like, fucking tripped out or things hitting against each other, as long as the overall statement is what it was supposed to be and exactly how it's supposed to feel, then that's cool with me. And like, I've been a perfectionist freak sometimes. I'd record the vocals to an entire album and then come back in and re-record four tracks to every single song in about two hours, when if I just practiced the songs and knew them really well I could probably do it better or as well the first time around, also. So, I don't know, it's one of those things. Try to use art and sound and channel that shit that drives us crazy and try to turn it into something where you can look back and go, "oh, okay, this is me for the moment."

The first one said...I believe it said, "in my Dodge," and the next one said, "don't be afraid, Steve." I don't know. I mean, the thing is, that does that to this day.

[laughing] Yes, we get messages left like that and my wife knows it and I know it every time I hear one. It always sounds the same, exactly. Basically what it sounds like, it's like, audiable, but like, if you turn on your answering machine and people are talking and leaving a message, and then it comes on. You'll hear a regular white noise level of like, the electronic signal of the phone being on or whatever, which is kind of a low level white noise. And then you'll hear this...this...talking kind of shit, which sounds like it's like....almost, but not whispering. The volume of it is really, really, low. We came in one day from being out after we had kept getting them, and my wife's like, "it sounds like somebody's talking on there," and I'm like, "it does sound like someone's talking on there." We go into the studio and I've got a $10,000 vocal microphone and mic'd it up with my answering machine and fucking played that back and recorded it. Then I used a few mastering type plug-ins and so forth and removed some of the noise underneath it so that we could hear the mid-range part with people talking, and it was fucking quite surprising. It just had some coldness rot going on. It sounded like Mortiis or something as far as like, some fucking super dark-voiced individual...

Yeah, Mortiis.

Yeah. [simulates the voice] Some creepy fucking...weird black metal almost type of vocals. You could tell it was kind of like, otherworldly shit, where you're like, "this doesn't sound like a normal human". Then when we got the second message, which was "don't be afraid, Steve," and after we tied them together it was like, "in my Dodge," and "don't be afraid," and my dad got killed in a Dodge pick-up truck. So, who knows. Maybe it's him maybe trying to get a hold of me. I don't know. That's the main one. I basically got shivers and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Right now, even talking about it, makes the skin on my back feel weird. I just think back to when we heard that stuff and started thinking about it and then listened to it. It's so freaky. The voice doesn't sound like my dad's voice. It sounds sinister, almost. Sometimes they say that spirits can try and trick you and things like that, so, you never know. Maybe the spirit that's trying to talk to me is an evil one trying to make me think it's my dad when it's not. I don't know.

Dude, I used to go tape graves when I was like, 13 or 14 years old with my best friend, Greg Wolf, when I was in high school. Me and him used to take tape recorders and we'd go out in graveyards like, way out in like, wildlife management areas, like down here in Tennessee. Fucking...put the tape recorder in front of the gravestone and face the microphone towards the stone where the wind wouldn't get to it. Then we'd take off for a while and then come back and get it, and then do another one, and do another one, and do another one. We'd basically go back and play the tapes and check it out and see what we had. We only ever heard one and we only ever had one weird night doing that, too. The one that we heard was at the same time. [laughs] The other times, I was scared shitless going out and doing that because we were literally out in the middle of corn fields where you'd find these little Civil War graveyards that were left behind and turned into wildlife areas. So we go out there to do this and finally one night, we put down the deal on a quadruple grave of like, all these people and all these names and dates when they died, which were all exactly the same. So that means they all got killed on the same day, but we don't really know what killed them. Anyway, we put that on there and put it towards the gravestone, and we took off and we were standing in this fenced in area, that was like, a farm, type of fence. Not like barbed wire, but like, squares. All of a sudden the wind started picking up a little bit and we started hearing dogs and stuff. It sounded like a bunch of dogs. Then everything kind of changed, nature-wise. It was like, all of a sudden it was going to start pouring down rain or something. It was gusting wind and the sound of the fucking dogs was increasing and increasing, and all of a sudden, me and him and a feeling like, "we gotta get the fuck out of here, there's either a bunch of wild dogs or coyotes or something out here." So we thought we'd better leave, so we ended up fucking having a time getting out of that fence for some reason because one of us got hung up in it, and then by the time we got out of the fence and ran over and grabbed the cassette recorder, there was indeed a few dogs. There was like, eight or nine dogs, all running in a pack, and me and dude running through a corn field. We finally made it through that corn field and eluded those retarded dogs and we got to our car, and uh...we were scared fucking shitless and got back to his house. Then, we put the fucking tape on and put the headphones on and sure enough, in the middle of that, there was more than one person saying, "it's cold in here," at a low volume level with all the background noise going on. And again, it's like, "there's no way, man," but it's the sound of that voice that's different. I'm a recording engineer and I know what effects are used in the studio and all kinds of shit to make things sound like a one-eyed superfreak or whatever, but it's like....it's not the same. There's just a coldness to that type of sound of voice where...it doesn't sound like it's breath that a person's breathing. It just sounds like there's words being said out of a mouth, out of a head, with no heart. So, I don't know. It freaked me out. I really, myself, don't visit graveyards that much because I understand, you know what I mean? I think that there's some folks that when they die, that's pretty much it, but I think when some people die, if it's a disturbed death, that like, their spirit possible could still be hanging out or whatever.

Yeah, and it's so weird that you said that because it made me think of like, when I was a kid, another thing that was fucking freaky was that we lived in this house and my dad had to go to Detroit to work for a little while. So me and my mom were alone and we were out in the country and one night, I was sitting in my room and I was watching TV and eating food or something, sitting in a chair. My room had a bathroom connected to it, and out of the fucking bathroom, like, looking straight ahead at the TV over to my left, it seemed like an old dude walked right through the hallway and took a left turn and went right through my door. As far as being a haunted house or something fucked up, dig this: it gets worse. So I was freaked on that. That tripped me out. All of a sudden, I jump up and I'm thinking, "what the fuck is going on," so I walk into the other room and my mom is underneath the covers and she was fucking screaming and shit. I flipped on the light and if you want to talk about somebody fucking terrified, she was freaked out of her mind. She thought that I was like...like she was saying that someone was pushing down on her or trying to strangle her in her sleep. The next thing you know, she realized I'm standing at the foot of the bed and I'm nowhere near her, and she calms down and she's like, "oh my god, it was like someone was pushing down on me with the covers over my mouth," and I'm sitting there going, "our house is fucked up." Then I found out what it was. That house was built brand new for an older-aged couple and the two of them got killed in a car accident right after they moved there. So you could say that those fuckers were still trying to hang out there and were definitely pissed off about me and my mom being there. The only other supernatural experience I've had like that is, when I was a real little dude, we had a family dinner at my sister's house, and next thing you know, I went down into the basement and stuff and I saw this old dude down there that had work pants on and stuff or whatever. Kind of looked like my Grandpa - my sister's husband's father. So I just thought it was this old dude who looked like my grandpa, so I didn't think anything of it. So I went back upstairs and we were all talking and I mentioned something about, "it's cool that Grandpa is here and downstairs," and they're like, "what are you talking about?" And I'm like, "yeah, Grandpa's here, he's in the basement right now." And they're like, "Grandpa didn't come to the dinner, he's not here. No, Steve, Grandpa's not here." They immediately got worried and jumped up and ran downstairs and shit to see if somebody was in the house or whatever, but there wasn't anybody down there obviously. I don't know, it was weird even to this day. I was probably eight or ten years old and I could clearly remember what the dude was wearing, the way he looked, where he was standing and everything. He wasn't doing anything sinister. He was just there standing at the workbench in the basement. And I have no idea. I've always had some sort of strange oversensitivity to things where a lot of times I might be a little more adept than the normal person. I don't know, it's really strange. It's almost like some sort of tuning or something, so much that little things that most people might not pick up on, or see, or hear, or feel...I don't know.

I think so, and that's why I don't enjoy going to graveyards...hospitals...or anything where there's deep sorrow or sadness, or things going on like that. Shit really ultra-disturbs me. I think there's definitely a lot of stuff going on. The weird thing about life is that among everything that's going on, there's an electronic charge that's running through every single person that walks around on planet earth. It's like anything with a battery in it. You've gotta have something to make it go. That spark to keep it going, like a spark-plug. Another strange thing that's keeping it all going is magnets.

Yeah, I'm totally familiar with that. It's just a strange thing if you think about it, where the poles are opposite in polarity and so forth, and then we have that magnetic charge. It's like, all setup, keeping it running. Part of the expiration of that, when someone dies, that energy can't be contained anymore inside the body itself because it's pretty much just made out of tissue. The body decomposes, so, it's gotta go somewhere. I think that like, there's probably more than likely some form where if you die that energy goes off into where ever it's going, and who knows. Not that I'm totally convinced that this is the way things are, I wouldn't doubt like, past-life jams as far as people living through different things. People behave in a certain way, like, naturally, with things they have no idea about. Sometimes it's just a natural talent and they just have that knack. I don't know, there's been a lot of different cases with different things in the past that I've read about where it's almost too uncanny, the different things that some people know about that they've never had an experience with.

Last ten years...well, as always, King Crimson, Johnny Cash, The Melvins, uh...say...they were going on, it wasn't their best period, but The Laughing Hyenas, Slint, Confessor, PJ Harvey, Napalm Death, Slayer, um...that's about it right there. Miles Davis is the main thing that really rocks my world right now. Anything by Miles Davis, especially Bitches Brew. But those would probably be a good run of the last ten years.

Um...

The new CD will be coming out next spring. Probably May 1st is what we're looking for.

I'm just psyched to be alive and doing my thing in Today is the Day. We hope that the message of Axis of Eden will get across the whole world and hopefully give people something to hold on to in this crazy fucked up world that we live in. Pretty much, that's it for me. I really appreciate you covering up all varities of things and hopefully doing this interview we can give some different views and dispell maybe some retarded myths and so forth. And maybe uncovering a lot of different things.