Joe Faustin Kelly: This summer.
Joe Haege: Yeah, we're still finishing the album.
Jay Winebrenner: What's the tenative date? August?
Joe H: Well, we want to have it done by the beginning of August. The sooner, the better.
James: Did you find a label to put it out yet?
Joe H: Yeah.
Joe K: Yeah.
Jay: Yep.
Joe H: It's kind of, you know, not definite.
Joe K: No, it's pretty definite. From what I've talked to them, it's pretty definite. So that's pretty much all there is to it. It's not like we have to pass a loan application or something.
Joe H: Yeah. But I don't know. I guess I don't want to bank on it, just because it seems like everything you bank on-
Jay: We also have a history of getting screwed over.
Joe H: Yeah. Our last record was going to be put out by this guy. He was up front about things in the beginning, and then he just made false promises, and it fell through.
James: So did you self-release it then?
Joe H: Yeah.
Jane: I noticed that your offering on Insound.com is co-released by Jealous Butcher.
Joe H: Oh, on our record? It's on there? I didn't know that.
Jane: Yeah.
Joe H: That's nice. Well, Rob was doing some distribution for us, cause I talked to him about helping us. That's the one thing I just cannot- I can go so far with doing the business stuff in music, but when it comes to promotion and distribution, it's too draining. You can't hustle all the time like that.
James: Especially when you have one thing to offer. It's not like, five bands.
Joe H: Exactly, yeah. They know we're just a band putting out our own album. And Rob was super helpful on that.
Jane: What stage of production are you at with the forthcoming release?
Joe H: Pretty much just overdubs. We've got to do overdubs, which we're doing next week. We're going to have a bunch of friends record stuff on there. We all agree we want to make it bigger than just our live show. Sort of have other instruments that we always have ideas for, but can't do with three people.
James: Like keyboards?
Joe H: Some keyboards.
Joe K: Horns. Violin. Cello.
Jay: Maybe cello.
Joe H: Who "maybe cello?" (laughs)
Joe K: Um, Sam.
Joe H: Oh yeah. Does he have a copy yet, so he can work on something?
Joe K: Uh-uh. He needs to get a copy of it
Joe H: (jokes) That's a flaw in the works!
Jay: I think it's such an ambitious project, it's fucking hard to get it all together.
Joe H: Especially when you're broke.
Jay: Yeah, we're also just so fucking broke.
Joe H: We've been taking our time, and it's been really nice to sometimes space it out because we have no money. We'll record two days, and then a month later, do another day. One day in between, we've mixed down some of the first stuff that we did, and we decided that a couple of the songs didn't turn out, so we re-recorded them. But it's to the point now that we're just antsy.
Joe K: Right. We have a back-catalog of about over thirty songs now, and so it's like, "What the hell?" you know? It's so irritating.
James: I've heard from Brad about you guys ---- for prog rock, and how you're non-ironic. Talk about the end of irony.
Joe H: Oh, um, you mean the song or the whole concept?
James: The whole concept.
Joe H: I don't know. We just wrote a- it's just, we have a couple of longer instrumentals that are just kind of, not super typical of what we do. But some of the parts that we came up- like there was the beginning part we worked on. (turns to Jay and Joe K.) Wasn't it?
Joe K: Yeah.
Joe H: It kind of has this funk element to it. And we were joking about it when we first played it, but then we all agreed that we liked it. So why not do it-
Joe K: -without ironic posturing. It's like, fuck it. It's pretty cool.
James: So it's not a novelty?
Joe H: Yeah. There's no tongue-in-cheek element.