But even some of the live recordings, I get chills when I listen to them more as a fan, not so much as a nostalgic thing. I do enjoy those songs more now; we had over a hundred songs and a lot of them got trashed, but the ones that sort of made it through and stuck, I like listening to them now and relearning them [laughs.

It's funny because Wilco and Son Volt came out of Uncle Tupelo, and when you mention Uncle Tupelo a lot of people say, "What?" Some people kind of heard of them, but the main guys of those two bands were in a band together called Uncle Tupelo, but they didn't cut it for anybody. Then they splintered off, and Son Volt has had its certain amount of success and Wilco has certainly been very successful ever since they collaborated with Billy Bragg for…

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we listened to the same type of music or were into the same type of music as those guys were. Dana [Monteith] was a good influence on me as far as listening to that kind of music. He always had a bunch of different bands like the Meat Puppets and fIREHOSE. He would always have these great b-list bands that may have had a minor hit… like Butthole Surfers and so forth, and if we were traveling in the van or just around he'd be playing this stuff, or he'd say he'd just written a song that was influenced a little bit by this, so in order for us to get a grasp of what it was he was trying to get at he would play some of these records. When the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers put out Blood Sugar Sex Magik that blew us all away. That was when we just moved to Albany in 1991 or 1992, we just left Plattsburgh and we were all mountain biking hippies. We were sort of breaking away from the Grateful Dead, which was a great foundation for so many bands, but we were kind of finding our own niche because we were listening to the b-list music. Like I said they might have had some small hits but they weren't totally out there like a lot of the other bands. We almost fell under the same vein as Uncle Tupelo or any of those other bands. Like we had something going on but people weren't ready for it, we weren't pushing the right kind of vibe or anything like that. So it was interesting how the fans that we had were totally, totally into and they like got it. But I didn't realize that until years later as some of those other bands were percolating and starting to come to the surface, I was sort of like, "Wow, that's very similar to what we were doing." [laughter] It wasn't too far from what we were doing. It feels like you're walking along and it's very dark in the distance, but it does eventually come around. Wilco does their thing and it's great and they've cultivated it over a very long period of time. I mean, had they not become popular they still would have been making the same kind of music.

Yeah, I've always liked Irish music and my grandfather was a classical violinist. I had this violin and I got it tuned up. There were a lot of Irish musicians who left Ireland during the potato famine and they settled down in the New York City area, some Chicago, some in Philadelphia or up in Canada, but New York City is a big hub and a lot of musicians that left Ireland from the 20s to the 40s and were still creating Irish music but sort of downplayed Ireland itself. Generations of great musicians learned from these guys right off the boat who were actually writing Irish music but in the Bronx. The generation now, one guy I'm taking lessons with he was born in the Bronx. He won the All Ireland Fiddle Competition -- Brian Connolly. There's a female fiddle player -- Eileen Ivers -- that did Riverdance as well, he kind of came out of that era, but anyway, he's older now and he's who I'm taking lessons with. He does sessions and so forth so I sort of learn music by watching Irish sessions with other big Irish musicians who are coming into town. So, I practice Irish fiddle for an hour each night when I'm watching the ten o'clock news [laughs]. But yeah it's good. The good thing about Irish music too is when you're playing it by yourself, it's the whole song. I don't need an ensemble for the song, like I would for improvisational guitar, I can play by myself. My two oldest girls do Irish step dancing, so I play for them and they dance [laughter]. It's a family affair that way, I guess.

Yeah, the other cool thing is that it's had an influence on my guitar playing now. I don't play that much guitar but when I'm relearning the songs and getting into the areas where I have to improvise, it gives me a new way of playing some of the stuff where I learned Irish songs with triplets and so forth. With some of my solos I remember I got to a certain point where they got so old and I was sort of playing them or approaching them the same way every time, it cultivated over years, but I didn't have a fresh perspective when I kept playing them over and over again. And now I'm coming at it with a new perspective. First off, I can't play it as fast or as well as I used too so it's nice to have a new influence to come in at a different angle and play things differently.

Oh yeah, that's another person that Dana used to listen to a lot.

The guy has like the electric rake. He hooked up a rig to his guitar and just pulls it down on his guitar; it makes the most incredible sound. Yeah, Bill Frisell, he's definitely one-of-a-kind. He's pretty cool.

Yeah it's so true! [laughter] It was one of the first reunions we had with the Seapods, I told the guys, "I cannot play as fast as I used to." I was listening to old records and everything and I don't even know why we played that fast. It's like we played it as fast as we possibly could. [laughter] My vocals aren't as strong like that anymore. I don't have as much testosterone as I used to have. I just can't do it, you know? So I was like, "Okay, here's the pace," and I remember Ted's [Marotta's] eyes just like widened, "Oh my god, that actually feels so much better." We almost wish we could go back and make the songs a little bit slower. Yeah, so the trick is to just slow down and it helps you settle in a little bit. You hope they [the songs] don't lose any energy. The fast songs had energy, but if you go too fast it's almost like everything's lost -- all energy and no soul or foundation. You kind of want to keep up the energy, but you do it by getting in the pockets of each other and getting more of a soulful sound rather than garage band.

Yeah, it's nice to hear Bill Frisell say that [laughs] -- I don't feel like it's just me.

One of my favorite things to do when we were writing a lot of music and putting our sound together when we still lived in Plattsburgh, actually when we lived in Albany too, we used to hike and camp a lot in the Adirondack Mountains. We'd go to the High Peaks, the highest mountains in the Adirondacks, and what I used to take from that was this sort of residue of it, I don't know a better word for it than that, but it would still be on my person and those experiences would still be sort of dripping from my head. And if you look at the flow, there's some kind of jaggedness of the peaks, the mountain peaks, and some of the little note progressions I would play would sort of describe that thing that I saw.