To passively get up and play a bunch of old songs wouldn't have really motivated us. So we are bringing the new material into the set and it goes down really well.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm now comfortable playing a lot of the old songs, and I've gotten out a lot of the old equipment.
I am always most excited about the newest material I am doing, and other songs get put back on the shelf or dropped.
The older ideas are rendering more and more bland music.
Actually, the funny thing is, after all these years, I've got all these new songs to learn for the show we're doing at Joe's Pub, so it's kind of fun to get down and rehearse new things, and also rethink some of the older songs, how we're going to do them.
I hardly ever listen to any of our old stuff now. Once the songs have been recorded and put on to vinyl they become someone else's entertainment, not mine.
It's hard to write new stuff when the songs you have written before are still changing and evolving. It would be like building something when the foundations there are not really solid.
There's a certain kind of motion and pacing that our music has, and this just doesn't have that. We just kind of rushed to the conclusion of most of the songs. I just would've preferred to done them over.
I don't think there is anything hard at all about having a lot of songs. It makes it easier to be less precious about them, and know that everybody's going to want to work on some of them.
The music technology scene is changing so fast it's hard to keep up.
Old music is the same as new music - it's just a different way of delivering it.