No, it's simultaneous. I'm pretty sure we're playing almost exactly the same thing too, so it's kind of like this blur. It's not like a point-counterpoint type bass thing. We're both playing exactly the same thing. I mean, the whole song is just this one part, like that's what it is.
Right. It's that and then, like, all the ring-mod stuff and everything else coming in. And it does evolve, especially with how the production changes. It's fantastic. In the beginning, you know the first thing I think of is just like how proud you would make Mike Watt. But then as it evolves, you know, I just started thinking like, "Wow man! You're sort of out-Watt-ing Mike Watt somehow!" And then it goes into this Sonic Youth territory and then by the end of the whole thing, it's just like wow, this is just great, you know it's the kind of thing that you could just listen to over and over again. I really, really love that song.
Well, that's cool. I'm glad you like it. That's the oldest song on the album. That's probably like four years old or something, but we just never found the right place to put it, until this new album. But we'd had a bunch of different versions of it and we were toying around with which one we liked best. And basically, the first verse is a completely different take. Like that first take had a more retarded feel. [Laughter] And then the other take that we were thinking about using was the more together kind of faster version and we couldn't decide which one we liked best, so we decided to use them both.
OK, so that's why it changes there.
Yeah.
I love it. And I actually like the change. I like it because it sounds like the whole recording quality changes, the tempo changes, but it sounds like a conscious choice you guys made in terms of the production, to change everything sonically.
I think it makes it more interesting. We've been playing that song for three or four years live, but always just from that point on, say if you chopped off that first part and just play it from the faster tempo on, that's normally what we consider the length of the song, but now we have this whole new beginning part. I don't know if that's going to change how we play it live, but it makes it more interesting to me. I think it's awesome.
No, it's killer. So you guys have a few festival dates coming up. Have you played Fuji Rock before?
No. We played a different festival that happens on Mt. Fuji but it's more of like a… I would say it was like an electronic sort of almost rave-based event. And this is the first time we will have played Fuji Rock. I feel like it's going to be more exciting. I think there's going to be more music there that we feel in tune with.
Yeah, it's a fantastic festival. It's so well organized and it's amazing. We were there a few years ago and I couldn't believe the energy of the people there and just how clean and nice it was [Laughter]. You know it's still nice to have 40,000 people gather at a festival but to have everybody recycling to the point where like these folks were actually like pulling the labels off of their plastic bottles and like putting the labels in one pile and the plastic bottles in another pile.
Wow!
And then everybody's saving their cigarette butts in like these personal ashtrays that they would keep in their pockets and then they would dump them in like these giant piles at different stations. And the whole festival kind of had that whole mentality. Even if you walked around at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning to the different late night shows and rave tents and stuff, I mean people were up late at night, but everybody was sort of maintaining, you know--it didn't have that sort of sketchy atmosphere that a lot of festivals here have.
Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. I mean unfortunately I feel like we're gonna probably be pretty jetlagged.
[Laughter] Oh yeah… I'm sure.
We're not going to be in Japan for any significant amount of time before the festival or after the festival, so it's going to be kind of an exhausting in and out for us. But I'm looking forward to it. I think it's going to be fun.
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