It's been 8 years since the last Soul Asylum record. What came about after Candy from a Stranger that necessitated a break?

We sort of hit a wall and I decided to make a solo record and I guess it just didn't seem to make sense to put out another record with the sort of atmosphere that we had created, if you will. It just was the band had reached a point where we just needed to take a break and needed to step away from it. And that's what we did. We sort of just took our time to get this record together because there wasn't a real pressing demand for it. And I think that we didn't really want to put out a mediocre record or just keep on cranking out records just for the sake of cranking ‘em out. It just took a while to get it right.

That's actually kind of honorable you know. To take your time anyway. Your 2002 solo album Faces and Names was quite a departure from the Soul Asylum sound. It kind of had a lot of R&B flavor to it. Was it hard to switch back and make straightforward guitar rock again?

No actually, it was kind of a relief to return to form, if you will. It's kind of what I had to do in order to miss it, you know. I sort of painted myself into a corner with the whole loud loud loud guitar thing and sort of exhausted it for the time being. I really really needed to take that departure and see how it would go and was sort of noticing that that was more of what I was listening to. I wanted to make a record that really featured the rhythm section and I wanted to make a record that didn't sort of bury itself in the wall of noise that we're so obsessed with, that we love so much. So actually coming back to it was great-the way I equated it with like putting on a comfortable pair of jeans on. I sort of had to miss it.

Any band that has had the big time success that Soul Asylum had is kind of pressured to repeat that. Did the time away from the band kind of lessen the burden of that for you guys?

I mean, yea, I guess it definitely did. It was some kind of strange winning-back-my -anonymity for me. The kind of feeling like that thing that you were talking about was very uncreative. It was like "we don't care what you do. Just give us a smash hit man." There wasn't anywhere to go from that other than try to appease this plateau-it didn't feel very open-ended, it didn't feel very creative. It's more of what I am and what I like to do which will always be shooting off in all different directions...too restricting. I think that it's what we had to do; it's what we needed to do. Because it just wasn't what we started out doing. We just kind of wanted to have this rock band and write a bunch of crazy songs and we had the success that actually sort of surprised everybody. And ....... it just seemed like a drag.

Did the break make things easier or harder for the group to record again?

Oh it definitely made it harder. It definitely almost made it obsolete. At the time of the last record it was like, "Alright, oh, go back in and make a live record and then we'll do all this stuff to keep trying to kind of saturate the market" and I just feel like we got kind of over-saturated it. The longer you stay away from it the harder it is to come back to it. We weren't really avoiding the issue. We were still doing gigs and we were still making demos, but again, I just think it was putting out a record just for the sake of doing it. It didn't seem to be the right thing. So yeah, it's made it more difficult. It's kind of a band that typically does not take the easy way.

Your band is permanently linked in many people's mind as that kind of early 90s rock sound, yet the new album is filled with songs that are more timeless, guitar based classic rock. Was this a conscious decision or just a result of time going by?

Well, I think that if the goal is to be timeless, which for a lack of a better way of putting it, it is. For me, I hope to create something that is not a trend or of a moment or whatever. It's nice to hear you say that, because I think in a lot of ways, the new record sort of embraces every element that the band has managed to touch on. If it sounds like a departure of our last record, at one point, parts of it sound like a return to things that happened a long time ago, so I guess that we always hoped to be there and not to try to fit into a niche or try to appease a certain aesthetic. We sort of have this music that hopefully won't seem dated at any particular point.