Athens, Georgia is a college town. College towns are often somewhat fertile when it comes to musical talent, or just about any other talent, for that matter. Austin, Texas is a college town, and the music scene there is a rich stew of everything from blues to swamp to country and rock. Seattle's a college town, too, and we all know about the music there. Different towns, different scenes, different themes. And then there's Athens. What is it about Athens?

Let's flip the history book to the chapter on the early 1980s. We see that Athens was quite the beehive of activity. In fact, the B-52's made the beehive hairdo legit again. Almost. One thing's for sure, despite John Lennon's claims that they were doing Yoko's act, nobody sounded like the B-52's. Around the corner and down the street you'd find R.E.M., at that time quite a bit more powerful and sincere than what we see today. Somewhere across town another band, Pylon, was getting together a kinky dance beat and a unique mixture of pop fun and vocals designed to stand the hair up on the back of your neck. All of these bands had one thing in common, and that was that they had nothing in common.

Well, if you want to nitpick, they did all have vocals.

One band didn't have vocals. They were art school students with their minds on -- what else -- art, and yet there was something in the drinking water in Athens that seemed to turn kids into musicians with purpose. These kids saw their purpose clearly: make art through music. They took the name Love Tractor and began gigging around town, playing their instrumental compositions that many believe were only instrumental because the band couldn't afford a PA system. That's what I always thought, myself. Over the course of the interview to come I learned that the secret to Love Tractor is simply this: if a song doesn't absolutely need something, leave it out. They know what those somethings are. I would be at a loss in the producer's chair.

That we're even discussing Love Tractor in the present tense is quite surprising to many. Their last album, Themes From Venus, was released in 1989, after which the band fell off the radar screens and out of the public eye. After a decade of silence, you assume a band is done. Then this brand new CD, The Sky At Night, shows up, and after some phone calls and a little bit of sleuthing I find out the band never broke up. They just got sick of the music business. The industry. The pressure, It's what Mark Cline refers to as the "outside pressure," something far worse than an annoyance in his estimation. How strongly he feels about that is a clear indication of just how tight knit this band is. Cline (guitar/keyboards), Michael Richmond (guitar/keyboards) and Armistead Wellford (bass/keyboards) are the core members, but the Love Tractor family extends to a small handful of others, including Tom King (drums), Doug Stanley (lap steel guitar & several other instruments), former R.E.M.drummer and early Love Tractor member Bill Berry (percussion), and Phil Costello, whose important role will be discussed during the interview.

With The Sky At Night on the shelves, the band is back on the radar scopes, and the press moves in with questions like "where the hell ya been for the last twelve years?" I tried not to word it that way. Mark Cline, being a nice guy, probably would have answered it anyway. Instead, we began by cruising the Internet CD sales spots to see how they were being packaged.

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Cosmik: Let's see how well understood Love Tractor is. I'm on a CD sales website right now looking at one of your CDs, and they have those things that say "Fans of Love Tractor also like..."

Cline: Uh uh... I'm sure it's horrible stuff.

Cosmik: The Rolling Stones...

Cline: (Laughs)

Cosmik: Smashing Pumpkins, Johnny Cash...

Cline: Oh my God...

Cosmik: Beck and Sonic Youth.

Cline: That makes no sense whatsoever, unless it's just people who bought us and bought those albums also. The critics always have a heyday saying "oh, they're like R.E.M." No, we're not! "Oh, you're like this..." No, we're not! It drives us nuts.

Cosmik: They only say it because you're from the same town.

Cline: I know, and it drives us nuts, although we're good friends with all those people. And now the new thing is somebody called us a jam band. No, we're not! It's just because the jam band Widespread Panic has a song named after us, which we made a joke and named a song after them. But whatever. It's amazing, the misinformation of the Internet.

Cosmik: I think it's interesting that the towns that have actual scenes, which are far and few between, have a sameness about the sound between bands, but what happened in Athens when you came up was totally different. There's an artistic excitement but you can't hear a thread.

Cline: Athens has no sound. The only thing that's shared among all the bands is a dedication to artistry. Of course there were always kids that would move to Athens because they were fans of R.E.M. and they'd want to sound like that, but they all disappeared. But it's just a complete dedication to artistry for the majority of the acts. And you see it now with great bands like The Glands and all that Elephan 6 stuff. There are a lot of great bands out of there.

Cosmik: Do you think it's still happening the same way? It's still artistry?

Cline: Oh, very much so. Although there are so many bands there now, I'm sure there are a lot of them that stink, just like anywhere else, but all the ones I hear are phenomenal. Just really good.

Cosmik: How did this happen in Athens? It's not like there could have been a big meeting among the musicians where someone banged a gavel and said "we will pursue artistry" or something.

Cline: I have no idea. All I can talk about is in the first person, and we were in art school, so we were never doing it to make any money or go anywhere with it. We just always did it because we were driven to do it because we enjoyed doing it. One of the reasons it took us so long to do this album was because basically it took that many years to clear the drek out of our... sort of... aesthetic closets, so we could go make the kind of records we wanted to.

Cosmik: What was the drek?

Cline: You know, after so many years of traveling and touring and doing records and reading reviews about yourself, it seeps into your psyche -- your writing psyche -- and affects the way you work. And it had definitely affected the way we were writing and working, and the only way we could get back to writing the kind of records we wanted to was to just leave off it.

Cosmik: So at the time the fans thought Love Tractor was disbanding, they weren't. It wasn't an official breakup.

Cline: No, we never did. In fact, we wrote and recorded three albums in the 90s that we decided never to release because we didn't like the work.

Cosmik: The term I heard was "finished and tossed." Is that true? Tossed?

Cline: Yeah.

Cosmik: As in destroyed.

Cline: They better have been.

Cosmik: So these can never pop up on a box set someday.

Cline: No, it'll never happen.

Cosmik: Sorry for belaboring that point... but isn't that tragic?

Cline: Well... you know, for collectors who want some weird out take or something, yes, but it's not something we would want to live with. It's like a painter who does a painting he doesn't like and just scraped the paint off the canvas. It's not anything we liked that was representative of what we were doing. It was a stage on a journey to a destination, and with this new record, we finally reached the destination where we wanted to be in order to write properly again. And of course we had to go through basically 30 or so songs on those three records to get there.

Cosmik: Did you hate the songs while you were recording them?

Cline: Mmmm... in retrospect, yeah, we did. In retrospect I see we were just lost and very misdirected because we had people around us telling us how to do stuff, what we should do and this and that. You know, we were worn out from basically twelve years straight on the road. When you're tired and you're sort of aesthetically worn out, you start to listen to people you shouldn't listen to. Now, who knows? Those records might have been hugely successful, but it wasn't anything we wanted to put our names on.

Cosmik: When you came off the road and said "that's all," didn't all that pressure and all those outside influences back off? Because everybody, inside the industry and out, thought Love Tractor had called it a day, and we all know the industry pulls up tent stakes real fast.

Cline: We had a management contract, and we let that expire before we started recording anything, but we didn't book anymore shows, we didn't allow anyone to book anymore shows, people would call and we'd say "we're not doing stuff," and eventually people stopped calling. You know, you don't have a record out and you're not doing anything, and it wasn't like we were in super demand after a while. It was perfect, ideal after a while, but then it took us a long time to get to this place where we wanted to be. And it's very scary for us now because we have another record out, we start reading reviews and people say they like this song and they don't like that, and it affects us. I don't read things about it because I don't want to know what other people think about what I already know something about. It's not that I'm insecure in my thoughts, but it tends to creep into your subconscious and affect you.

Cosmik: And you're afraid it'd affect your future writing?

Cline:Yeah. Oh, totally.

Cosmik: For example, if a song that was more radio friendly were to be picked on in a review, that could affect you and make you uncomfortable about writing something with that kind of potential later down the road?

Cline: It could. Or possibly someone saying "Oh, the record sounds like this" or "sounds like that" and you say "well no it doesn't... why would they say that?" and it gnaws at you, and perhaps you over-react. I've found it's better for me, personally, to ignore it all.

Cosmik: I really want to know... when you say "sounds like this or that," what's an example of what they say?

Cline: Sounds like Britney Speers.

[both laugh]

Cosmik: Maybe early Britney.

Cline: That's just an example. Someone read me one of these things that was written in Entertainment Weekly about the record where it described it as meticulous, which was hilarious, because the way we write songs is we basically write, then go to the studio the next day -- and our studio is a 30 year old 16-track with 2-inch tape -- and then we just roll tape and cut and cut and cut, then leave it for a few weeks and come back to it and clean it up. The last thing it is is meticulous. So it affects the way you think about your own music, which in turn affects how you work on your future music.

Cosmik: When you first said "meticulous," I assumed you meant complexity in the compositions.

Cline: It's funny, because we are the wealth of all of our years of writing music, and one of the things that we wanted to do was distill that so that when we would get together to write back in our studio, we wouldn't be influenced by anything outside of the band. Just us. We're each other's biggest influences.

Cosmik: And that had been taken away from you.

Cline: That had been taken away from us. It was like everyone was bringing something in from way outside, coming from a very different -- to use the hippy term -- place, which was affected by people within the industry in particular. We had so much pressure on us, at one point, to be the next R.E.M., and we said "wait a minute, we've always just been a freak art band from Athens, Georgia, with no commercial aspirations whatsoever." Although our new music sounds, to me, very commercial. The only record that we really succumbed to it all was that record for Bigtime [This Ain't No Outer Space Ship], which was a record we really never liked. I mean we liked the material, we just didn't like a lot of the production on it. They were trying to turn it into something it wasn't.

Cosmik: Do you ever go back and listen to your old records?

Cline: Occasionally, just as a reference point.

Cosmik: You've been talking about how, as time went by in the band's career, you were being pulled away from the influence of each other and exposed to other influences...

Cline: Which were unimportant influences.

Cosmik: And definitely unhealthy. When you go back and listen in chronological order, can you hear that progression of influence?

Cline: Oh, yeah, definitely. Right up to the last studio album we released, Themes From Venus, which was very much a reaction to This Ain't No Outer Space Ship, because our hands had been so tied on This Ain't No Outer Space Ship that we reacted by doing Themes From Venus produced the way we wanted the prior record to be produced. And then the label ran out of money and we couldn't do the remixes on the record the way we wanted, which really affected the way we did this record, because we really did it all ourselves and wrote and recorded it all in Athens.

Cosmik: Was that far enough away?

Cline: If you've ever been to Athens, you realize it's about as far away from the music industry as you can get. Not so much a place as a state of mind. Athens is just a very inexpensive place to live, and it's so far off the beaten path that it's a great place to do whatever you want, especially artistically.

Cosmik: Maybe that's another one of the reasons the bands came out the way they did.

Cline: Yeah, it's kind of the nexus, you know? If people know how to take advantage of it. And not all people do.

Cosmik: I always found it fascinating that the B52s became a band one day sitting in a diner, drawing on napkins and coming up with a concept before anyone knew how to play an instrument.

Cline: Oh yeah, I remember Pylon did the same thing. I remember being at this house over on Cobb Street in Athens, and Michael and Randy from Pylon coming in and saying "hey, look what we got. Here's a guitar and here's a bass. We're going to start a band." (Laughs) And it was because we were all so bored at the time. We had nothing to do except make our own fun, so people would make their own bands and have these band parties just for fun. There was literally nothing to do in the town. There was like one bar. So we'd drink, do drugs, write rock and roll and go to school.

Cosmik: That was art school by this time?

Cline: Yes.

Cosmik: Is that where you met the rest of the band?

Cline: Yeah, except Michael Stipe introduced me to Armistead. Before the band started, Michael and I were kind of art school pals, and he introduced me to Armistead, who was in Michael's color theory class.

Cosmik: When you were first playing, and even for the first album, it was all instrumental. Was that a result of having no singer, or artistic design?

Cline: There was no need for it. If there'd been a need, there would have been vocals. When Michael [Richmond] and I started playing together, it was just the way the guitars worked together, and the intertwining of them. It was just... there it was. There was no need for it. Then by the time of our second album [Around The Bend], there were songs that sort of needed it, that dictated some lyrical input. Then we would hear things like "well, they're instrumental," and we'd say "what do you mean?! That was just our first album!" I mean certainly we'd like to go back someday if we had one in us... although this new record is probably the closest we'll ever get to that, because it's exactly that sort of mix. As you know from the record, there are songs that have just one phrase of lyrics, where the song just dictates one piece. Some songs are fully vocal, some are not, and truly all of our music is instrumental even if there's singing on it.

Cosmik: The one I felt was radio-friendly, if you'll pardon the expression, is "Tree." Is that getting airplay?

Cline: I have absolutely no idea.

Cosmik: You really don't care, do you?

Cline: Uh uh. It's something I can't control. There are commercial concerns that we always take into consideration when we do a record, which in this case is that we figured that was probably the easiest song for people to listen to, so we put it first, you know? I mean, of course, duh! But I have a really good friend who helped sequence the record, and we just leave it to him because he really gets it and understands how things should go into a sequence.

Cosmik: Okay, here's a strange thing: it felt to me like the songs were written in a sequence.

Cline: Well... pretty much. A friend of mine, Phil Costello, who also plays on the record, did the sequence. We were still sort of mixing and recording and doing stuff when he came up with the sequence so that it affected how we mixed the songs and how some of the songs went into the next ones.

Cosmik: Production on the fly. Wow. It's so flawless. It flows in a way where I'd sometimes have to catch myself and realize "oh, the song changed," because I'd floated right along with the current. That's something I personally like.

Cline: We always try to write an album rather than try to write singles. I, personally, and I think everyone else in the group, have a preference for albums or a certain length of music rather than the single format. It's just a personal preference. There are a lot of people who write great singles. Certainly The Beatles.

Cosmik: The Jam.

Cline: Ancient Brian Eno, of course.

Cosmik: Naturally.

Cline: The Seven Deadly Sins.

Cosmik: Brand X.

[general snickering, guffawing, etc.]

Cline: But it's just an evolving process. We had a lot of out takes on the record, too, though none of them were out takes in the sense of "oh no, we can't use THAT!" They're very good and we'll probably use them on the next record. Maybe. We'll see how the writing starts on that one. It'd be nice to see if we can do a 1-2 punch.

Cosmik: Songs in the can already, huh? Pieces, or complete?

Cline: Some of them are complete. Some are definitely complete, some are in pieces, and some have to be re-written, but we don't take long. We take a long time to get up steam, but once it's at a boil, it just happens all at once. We write and we record. We just do it. Then we might let it all sit for a while and let it all digest. Then we'll go in and mix it or work on it some more. What's also different about this album is the fact that we were recording it as we wrote it. We'd write a few songs and then go cut them. So if you listen closely to them you'll hear that it really helped our writing, because we already had it on tape rather than sitting in a practice studio with a cassette and putting it down on a tape that sounds crummy. We could really hear what we were doing and see if it was working or not.

Cosmik: And recording it on an analog machine, too...

Cline: Yeah but... Hmmm.. Either way I don't really care, you know? The recording process and whatever technology is involved is for the gearheads to worry about. Me, I just sit back and if it sounds the way I want it to sound, that's great.

Cosmik: I'm not a gearhead by any stretch of the imagination, but I said it because of the warmth of the sound on your album. I've been fooled before by cool digital tricks, but I'd bet big bucks there's analog happening here. It's very warm sounding.

Cline: Actually, the engineer we used for all the mixing went way out there to get this analog stuff... What did he do??? He did some sort of big, heavy-duty analog process. I was like "yeah, great, sounds good." I can tell if it fits my ears, I'll say that's what I want. If it doesn't... I mean, there was one point I wanted to dump the whole thing down to Pro Tools.

Cosmik: Are you serious! You wanted to dump the entire album down to your PC?

Cline: Yeah. The thing is it doesn't matter. It's the music that matters, not the technology that surrounds it. Pro Tools would just make it easier to facilitate some of the work in the mixing. Although we're schooled in the old way, which is just a lot of analog tape and cutting and splicing, which is very familiar to us, so we feel comfortable working that way. But I have no problems with technology whatsoever.

Cosmik: Maybe technology's gotten past the coldness of digital.

Cline: I'm sure there's somebody who can tell you what that coldness is and how you can compensate for it. I don't worry about it. There's always that ghost in the machine that tells you. If it is sounding cold, then you do something to compensate. It spurs you in another direction. I've discovered that you just can't get all wrapped up in that. It's like these guitar players that can't write a song when they can play every Eddie Van Halen chop on the planet. It's like "why are you so worried about all that technique? It doesn't serve you." It's the same with the technology. Why worry about it. Just make it serve you.

Cosmik: Some become so obsessed with the technology that it rules them and the music becomes unimportant. They still make records and have teenage fans learning their chops, but it's all tech.

Cline: Yeah, and it's just like why bother? That's why I'll just have some engineer and let him worry about it. There's always going to be somebody coming up to me saying "this is better, we've gotta have tube mikes and this and that," and I'm like "who cares?" The funnies thing like this I remember is sitting with the guitar player from 10,000 Maniacs, and he was talking about how he got this great guitar sound, and he said "oh yeah, I duct taped the microphone to the bottom of an aluminum chair," you know? (Laughs.) Instead of saying "well the proper miking technique is to do this and that.." and other stuff that makes no sense whatsoever. Nothing grows unless you do it your own way.

Cosmik: That can be said in all aspects of the music, too, can't it? Duct tape to creativity in music?

Cline: Oh yeah. I was just at South by Southwest. Vic Chestnut was phenomenal. He was doing a whole new thing with just acoustic and piano. And there was another Athens band called The Glans. But then I heard all these bands, hundreds of bands, all using music as a vehicle to be stars. Celebrities. They didn't have anything musical or lyrical to say. I can't tell you how many times I was there just yawning, and that's too bad. I can go to Athens and see a myriad of fabulous bands. There's hundreds of bands in the town now, and they're obviously not all good, but there are a good 15 that are phenomenal. Very interesting, very good music, and they do it their own way. Unfortunately, we exist in a time when the industry doesn't really care about the development of rock and roll as an art form. And I use rock and roll in a very general sense. Basically popular music. It's very much like it was in the late 50s and early 60s, before the British invasion, with these songwriter/producer teams, then they just hire the [talent]. Look at Britney and all the boy bands. I mean... it's great. I'm so happy those people are all making money off it and they're filling a market niche, but the sad thing is the industry is shooting themselves in the foot because they're not doing anything to develop the history of music and push it forward. They're creating a generation of numb, deaf listeners. It was different for us; we're the same age, growing up in the 70s and 80s, where artist development was such an important part of music.

Cosmik: Does it remind you of anything? Seems like a cycle at the low end to me.

Cline: It'd be great, yeah, everyone says "oh, God, we need punk again," but I disagree with people who believe that everything is a cycle that repeats. Everything grows on top of everything else. The other sad thing about the industry is that there are so many great bands out there who will never ever be heard. I feel that in the last five years there's been a lost generation of rock and roll because the industry has turned its back on it. I had a conversation with someone in one of the bigger bands in Athens, and we were talking about how what's really wild is that kids in high school don't even listen to rock and roll; it's all hip-hop. We were wondering "is it all over? Is rock and roll dead?" Is it like when we were kids and our parents put on a swing record and we'd be like "what's that square stuff??" It's a concern. Is it dying? Is it gone? Is the last gasp the short hair metal bands?

[At this point there is a 13 minute conversation about the musical choices of the 70s, why Kraftwerk was cool, why Mick Ronson was far cooler, what kind of musical equipment DJ and Mark had in common back in the day, and other things that would drive you nuts but they obviously enjoyed. We move forward to just past this and begin with a new topic.]

Cosmik: The way I heard it, your schedule for the recording of The Sky At Night was kind of strange. You'd come together and record for a little while, then you'd all go off in different directions for extended periods of time, then get back together for a while and record, and back and forth. Keeping a schedule like that, did songs ever get left partially done and then you'd have to come back to them?

Cline: Oh, definitely.

Cosmik: If that's the case, how difficult is it to come back to a song and continue the original vision? Or is it even possible or desirable?

Cline: I can answer that easily: if we came back to it and we weren't interested in it, it might not have been a good song to begin with and we'll just move on to something else.

Cosmik: So there isn't a song on this CD that was done over two periods of time, like a year apart?

Cline: Oh yeah, there are. "Elevator" was something that I had around for a long time. Keith Strictland, from the B-52's, worked on it with me. He kind of coached me on the guitar licks on it. And there's some stuff no one knows. I'll give you this one. (Pauses for a long moment.) I'm kind of giving it all away by telling you this, but the next to the last last song on the record, "Float," is exactly the same song off out last record called "Satan's New Wave Soul Losers," and we loved the chord change so much we slowed it down and rearranged into another song.

Cosmik: Step into the Cosmik Confessional.

Cline: We said "God, it sounds soooo great slow. Let's do that and make another song out of it." It's different lyrics and slow, but it's exactly the same progression of chords and choruses. But now everyone will get that. (Laughs) See, a lot of them were worked on over a long period of time, and there are some that didn't appear on this record, also, that I'm lumping in...

Cosmik: Kind of jumbled together in your mind?

Cline: ...in my mind, yeah.

Cosmik: It must be pretty hard, though, because after such a long period of working, it probably seems like a whole.

Cline: Well, you know, it was because when we were trying to assemble the record, we started pulling, really, over a period of two years where we were assembling it like "what needs to be put here" and "what doesn't go there," and "how should it be mixed to fit in with that?" The title wasn't even going to go on the record until maybe three months ago, and then Phil's like "nuh-nuh-nuh-no! That's gotta go on!" "Okay, I'll go mix it."

Cosmik: What was the working title before that?

Cline: Galaxy Sound System.

Cosmik: Can you give me an idea of what a typical week was like during the recording of this record? I'm assuming it wasn't a rigid schedule or procedure.

Cline: Heh... Not with us. It might with everyone meeting and going to our studio, or meeting and going to have coffee or breakfast, hanging out and talking about what we want to do. We sit around and get each other worked up and excited. (In an excited whisper) "What about this? Yeah, let's do that! Oh, that'd be fun!" And then we'd go to the studio, and whoever shows up will start working and writing. If we do something we're really excited about, we'll say "let's get it on tape." We'll make a little cassette of it just to hear it. Then we'll work on something else. This is all just in the period of a day. We'll get the next thing to a certain point and then say "well, let's go to the recording studio tomorrow, carry a tape in there, set up and just start cutting," because we'd be really excited about something we'd just written that was in a form that we knew could be cut and we could work with later. Usually, during the day while we're recording, everyone has different ideas for surface textures or melodies that might have already been sussed out. Like a song like "Balthus" was basically written in ten minutes. I had this chord change and these riffs, and Mike had this set of lyrics, and Armistead had these other musical ideas. So we said "let's do it, yeah that, okay THAT! Yeah and THAT! Okay great! Oh and THAT! Oh that works!" Then finally you say "we can't do any more on this or we'll over-work it."

Cosmik: That's always the danger, isn't it?

Cline: Yes, and one of the reasons we recorded the way we recorded, with 16-Track, was to keep it that way -- though it doesn't sound like 16-track -- and limit ourselves. We don't need anymore than that. If you do, you're not using your ideas properly and thinking yourself through, you're just throwing the kitchen sink in.

Cosmik: Are there songs that were a long time coming that worked out well?

Cline: I think everybody in the bands' favorite song was "And The Ship Sailed On," which we worked on over a period of over five years. We built it, then added the part where the strings come in halfway through, then there's one little tiny lyric and a huge break breakdown at the end, and we were just distilling and distilling and distilling it. I knew it needed strings on it, and the night before I was going to mix it, I was up here in New York sitting with my friend, Phil, and I'm going "I've gotta come up with these string arrangements, and it's gotta have this, and it's gotta have that..." and Phil says "oh, I've already got the string arrangements." (Laughs) Which was great! "Here, let me show them to you."

Cosmik: What a luxury. Bang, here it is.

Cline: You know, we work with so many of our friends who really know our music and know how we work -- I mean the three core members -- but we always have these facilitators around us that help us get some of the things that we want and can't necessarily do ourselves. Especially with this project. I mean, we could not have done it without Doug Stanley and Tom King. Doug became the fourth instrumentalist on the record, and Tom playing drums; It might not sound like a drummer's record because the drums aren't that prominent, not pushed up front, but the Tom has everything to do with the sound on the record. The way we played and the way we wrote. In fact, we really kicked into high writing gear when Tom and Doug came on board.

Cosmik: Doug's credited with a lot of lap steel on the record. That added an interesting texture.

Cline: He's credited on every song with something. Lap steel, koto, keyboards, bass, a lot of different stuff. I always play synthesizers and guitar, and I get really tired of switching back and forth, so when I write all these different parts I need someone else to play them so I don't have to jump between the instruments. So I'd say "Doug, why don't you play this?" And he'd play it and it'd take off and sound way better, but he'd say "well, I don't want to play that, I want to play lap steel guitar, like on "Tree," you know?

Cosmik: I love what he did on "Tree." In fact, I think the steel part set it all off.

Cline: Very much so. It really reminds me of that cover we did of Kraftwerk's "Neon Lights" a gazillion years ago. Same sort of mood to the song. But we could not have done the record without them. It's a sort of family, and they're definitely members of the band. And we got Dave Spalding from Pell Mell to come in and play on a few tracks, Dave Berry from R.E.M. plays, and he's from the old Love Tractor family, because he was with us at the beginning. My buddy Phil Costello, who is this really this brilliant artist... We're all just a family of musicians... or I'd rather say artists rather than musicians, who share the same vision.

Cosmik: I definitely understand that more than I did at the beginning of this interview. I'd like to take a single track and take a close look at it. "Bright" is my personal favorite on the CD. I was telling someone about it and I called it minimalist, at the time, because it has so much open space. It seems like each part is very simplistic on first listen.

Cline: It's very distilled, which was one of the processes on this record, was to keep everything on this record distilled down to it's primary rather than "there's a hole there, let's fill it." It was more like "what can I NOT play" rather than "what CAN I play."

Cosmik: Use space as an instrument.

Cline: Yeah.

Cosmik: Then when you listen to it again, though, each individual sound may be very minimal, but together they're making an orchestral fullness.

Cline: Exactly.

Cosmik: How much time goes into arranging piece like that?

Cline: Uuuuuum.... twenty years?

Cosmik: (Laughs) Twenty years experience, you mean.

Cline: Twenty years experience. We had to make a huge effort to keep that song spare, because there were some points where there were synth noises I wanted to add, little background noises, and I had to do everything in my power not to do that, to hold back, and everyone else did too. We kept it very minimal. We listened to everyone in the Love Tractor family, too. We'd ask "what do you think?" "No! Don't play anymore than this!" The only other person who wanted to add anything was Bill Berry, and as it turned out, the percussion he added just made it. That out of tune percussion he played.

Cosmik: Yeah, what IS that?!

Cline: It's this actual metal copperhead of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. He holds it between his knees, stands up, and hits it with his thumb, and then he has this sort of egg thing that he shakes, also.

Cosmik: Sounds almost like a cowbell.

Cline: Sounds like donkeys walking with bells around their necks.

Cosmik: Yes!

Cline: Which I loved, because he gave a strange pastoral feel to the song.

Cosmik: It was already wide open and minimal, he that took it outdoors and gave it more space.

Cline: Yeah, very much so. When we were mixing, we made the drums sound like they were recorded on the side of a hill. You know, not too spacey. The synthesizer I'm playing at the beginning, which is that sort of marimba sound, later I said "I want to redo that because I found a much better sound," everybody said "NOOO!!! You CAN'T! That kind of dorky sound is the way it has to be!" That was a first take.

Cosmik: That was a one taker?!

Cline: A lot of the songs were one take.

Cosmik: It seems to me that song would be so hard to get exact because it was minimalist and left very much exposed. Any glitch, you know?

Cline: It was hard. The hardest thing was making the vocals fit properly, and what kind of mood to sing them in. Mike tried all these different ways, and finally it was just done really flat. It's easy for Mike not to be passionate, but there was very little passion in the performance so it became more lyrical than it becomes sung. That was the most difficult thing to lay into the track to make it sort of ride into the track into where it needed to sit. And finding the right sort of bass tone was difficult, too, because it starts with that marimba sound and the bass and the drums. Then, of course, Doug brings in those great slide guitars, and the only guitar Mike plays he plays in a funny way, because he had it turned in a funny way and he hits it and turns the volume on and off on the guitar and gets that "ramp - ramp" sound. And Doug has that Vietnamese Koto, which he cut in stereo. Two different tracks, which we panned, and it's just phenomenal. Doug is just one of these brilliant guys, and he's always been a fan of the band who could just step in and know exactly where our heads were, musically, and we could say "Doug, do something right here." And boom, he'd do exactly the right thing. That song was written in ten minutes.

Cosmik: Written in ten minutes. My next question was going to be what was the time span of that recording, and you just told me it was 6:23, because it was one take, and now we find out it was written in ten minutes on top of all that. Wow.

Cline: I'm exaggerating. It was all there in front of us in ten minutes, with the chord changes, this is how it goes, and everyone says let's jam hunt. And that was it. It was done. We took it and recorded it the next day. But that's what took us ten years, was to get to that point.

Cosmik: What was it written on originally? I just can't hear that song being written on an acoustic guitar.

Cline: Marimba.

Cosmik: Marimba! Well, I wouldn't have guessed THAT, but...

Cline: I had this chord change on the synthesizer (sings the part), and then it goes down through this change I like. "Fly" was written over a long period of time... Oh, wait, it's not called that anymore. It's called "Birthday Of Time." That was a track that took forever. Armistead and I sort of had the initial chord change years ago, probably even in the late 80s, when we had this little chord change for this song. That one existed for a long period of time and now I just wanna remix it. (Laughs)

Cosmik: I think I've heard this album like 14 times in the last 3 days.

Cline: And it gets better each time.

Cosmik: (Laughs) Definitely. It does. So you want to remix it. Is there some worry there that maybe outside influence has worked its way in again, that the pool has been contaminated again?

Cline: Yeah, once again. But some of those concerns are just mine. They might not affect anyone else.

Cosmik:Have you talked to the others about it?

Cline: Oh yeah, we talk about it all the time. Some people are more insular than others, like Mike is more insular.

Cosmik: What do they say about it, in general?

Cline: "Don't read anything!"

Cosmik: So they're just concerned that you don't read anything critical...

Cline: And themselves.

Cosmik: So they have the same problems with that.

Cline: Yeah. "Don't read anything!"

Cosmik: Has that always been an issue for the band?

Cline: Yeah. We tend to read stuff about ourselves if we're insecure about what we're doing. "Oh yeah, I need that! I need to know what's good!" Or like "I should have know it wasn't any good."

Cosmik: Are you afraid you'll see things like "they're the Moody Blues of the new millennium?"

Cline: Oooooh!! Oooooh! Aaah, I'm just gonna jump off a cliff. God.

Cosmik: Well, you're not, so don't. (Laughs)

Cline: God... Or people think it's too mellow or too this or too that... It's odd right now, because it seems like there are more writers and critics out there right now than there are listeners.

Cosmik: Well, the Internet's done that. I'm living proof.

Cline:

Cosmik: How many people were actually involved in the writing of that song?

Cline: The general gist of the song was written by Mike and Armistead and myself, the basic chord change and melodies, but then there was Tom with his great groove, the beat, then Bill and Doug, so that's six people.

Cosmik: That's a lot for writing a piece like that, when you consider how quickly you put it together.

Cline: But then again I have to stress it's not what you play, it's what you don't play. That's very, very important. And believe me, nobody's playing very much of anything. (Laughs) "Should I play this? Or is this too much?" "No no, that's fine, just don't play that other part."

Cosmik: It sounds like you had a lot of fun making this record.

Cline: Oh, we had a blast. There's stuff we have to sweat over, too. Times we say "I really believe in this song so we have to work hard on it" and we really sweat over it. I mean, "Christ Among The Children," the second track on the record, what you hear now is just the ending of what was once a much longer song. We just scrapped the whole front of it. It's hard to scrap something we've worked hard on, but then we realized that the song was being dragged down because the beginning stunk. So we just took the ending and kept that and made it the song.

Cosmik: Which made a great bridge between tracks one and three.

Cline: Yeah, it did.

Cosmik: The first several times I heard this album I was really distracted and it was background music. It caught my attention, but there was too much going on because we were in the middle of getting an issue out. Then I finally had a chance to sit back with no distractions, the stereo cranked and nobody in the house. Now I admit I'm slow on the draw, but somewhere about halfway through I says to myself "hey... I think this here's a CONCEPT album!"

Cline: (Laughs) You can't tell from the cover?!

Cosmik: I wasn't really looking, ya know? So in your words, what's the concept?

Cline: Gee... I don't know if I can answer that. I don't know if I should answer that.

Cosmik: Rather let them find it for themselves?

Cline: The concept is obvious in the fact of the amalgamation of the music, how it works together. But to make it concrete, as to say "this is the concept," I can't do that because it ruins everything. It pigeonholes and categorizes something that shouldn't be that way. Any kind of art should be left to individual interpretation. But it's definitely a concept record, as are all of our records.

Cosmik: All this time's gone by. You've grown up around all this. I don't know how old you were in 1980, but from the pictures I'm guessing you were just kids.

Cline: Kids.

Cosmik: How much has maturity changed things.

Cline: Totally. It's completely changed things, just like it always does. You're never the same person you were a year ago. But album production and writing as an artist is very linear and you're always building on top of yourself. It's like an ancient city. You tear it down, but you build on the foundations of what you've torn down. So in that sense, it's a hundred percent different, but as the analogy goes, we're a city on top of a city on top of a city, where we've torn down one and rebuilt on the foundations of the previous. We couldn't have made this record if we didn't make our first or second record, though those are completely different. We still are the same people. I keep thinking of the analogy of the cities. You think of a place like Ur, where the city existed for 7,000 years, then it was destroyed and a new city was built on top of it, then destroyed again after a few hundred years and a new city built on top of it, then destroyed after a thousand years and a new city built on top of it. So the archeologists dig down through five, six, seven thousand years of a city. Instead of what we do in modern times where we take a bulldozer and haul it all away, they used to just demolish it and build on the ruins of the previous. And that's what our music is. It's time to do a new one. What are we going to build on top of what we did before? Some of it is a wreck underneath, but some of it's a great foundation we can just keep building on top of.

Cosmik: Do you feel the maturity has changed the way you deal with each other?

Cline: Not at all. It's always the same. We get in a room and close the door, it's exactly the same as we were when we were kids, which is really awful (laughs). But what's helped is that we've been able to get hold of our lives outside of that room, which, in a sense, affects the music because we can make the time. You know, we all live in different places, and we can make the time to get together. We've done it over the past ten years and we get back together every few weeks or every few months, no matter where we live. So the maturity in our personal lives has affected our working relationship in that sense, but when we close the door in our music lab, we are still children, tinkering and playing and having the same attitudes toward each other, which is hilarious. Same bickering. (Laughs)

Cosmik: Want it to keep going on?

Cline: Yeah. What we've always said is we'd keep going as long as we still enjoyed it and what we produced was good. And hell, in the 90s we produced three things we didn't like, and we didn't have to put it out. We weren't under contract to put it out. We do it for ourselves.

Cosmik: You finally made the record you liked and THEN you went and got the contract, is that about right?

Cline: Yeah, (laughs) it's pretty funny in retrospect.

Cosmik: It's pretty shrewd, considering your feelings about outside pressure.

Cline: It's exactly the way to do it. It's pretty funny with us, because we've always been presented with opportunities to sell out and make a lot of money, and we've always been like "why?! It'll really ruin everything, and we won't be able to write the kind of music we want to write." I mean certainly it'd be nice to make as much money as R.E.M., but they're so very good at doing what they do. You know, they're great rock stars. (Laughs) We wouldn't make great rock stars.

(C) 2001 - DJ Johnson