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'Close to the Edge' is the album where we first attempted to do the extra-long-form piece of music, having one song taking up the whole side of a piece of vinyl.

I think it was probably down to the fact that we weren't together personally as a band. We weren't pulling in the same direction. I always feel if you're having a good time in the studio it actually comes across on the tape and that was a bit of a miserable album for us.

The funny thing is, the music that I'm writing now is probably some of the most cutting edge we've ever done. The music that I'm thinking about putting on our next album.

I always had to wait until something hit me, and I could write it. But when I would cut an album, to me it represented the time that I spent since the last one. Just the way I was looking at the world.

I can see that if this was an album done 10 or 15 years ago we could see we were moving on to some place else.

The last album, 'Falling Faster Than You Can Run.' I was really proud of, but then I didn't actually know whether it was going to come out on any label at all. So I didn't know if anyone was going to hear it. Then of course we ended up doing another EP after that called 'Closer.'

On record dates like that I never felt too nervous because everything was really overdubbed. When we did that album, we were in the studio for probably a week, so you had a lot of opportunity to fix things.

We didn't rehearse or play the songs to death before we recorded them, and that let us catch a freshness and energy level we've never really felt while making records.

I didn't know how well my first album had done; it was enough to get me to do the second album, which was a continuation of the music I'd worked on and perfected.

I couldn't have recorded this record 15 years ago. My voice didn't have the depth to pull these songs off.