Rob: On this record [Dave] also tried a few different things technically that he'd never done before. There are solos on this record where he would perform a solo and then go back and record and have that one muted, and record a whole totally different one, and then go back and have that one muted and record another whole totally different one. And then, on a computer, we would sit and listen to all three solos and pick the parts that he liked best, or that everybody liked best, and splice them together.

You were using a Pro Tools-type program?

Rob: Yeah. And so, on almost every song, there was what we called a "Franken-solo." It was sort of like taking the best parts of every solo and sewing them together into one. He said over and over, and I think it's really funny, that his biggest challenge in the whole thing was not coming up with any of the material, but being able to translate it to a live performance. He had solo work on the record where he'd be on the very top of the fret board one second, and then literally have the one of the next measure be way down at the bottom of the fret board with a totally different voicing. And to find himself doing it live was so much more technically challenging than he had thought...but it ended up sounding really good, so...

Rob: And he does. Which is a great tribute to him.

"Exiled" has also got an interesting riff. It seems almost Spanish influenced.

Rob: Yeah, that guitar riff was just something he was playing around with for months, and when "Exiled" was kind of...turned into a song he said, "Hey, this is a great place to install this riff I've been playing around with." So we said, "Great. Throw it in there."

Are there specific ways the band has written music that may have changed over the years?

Rob: Well, it's weird because we really don't have a method of coming up with material, I think we have more like, probably four or five methods. Every song seems to have its own conception and birth in its own way, and they're pretty much all different. The solid, unchanging X-factor that is always there is Peter. His input, his style, his influences have been the same since Day One as they are now.

David has definitely come to conclusions about himself as a guitar player and what he wants to achieve, and what kind of sound he's going for. He's really made some changes over time and that's had a big influence on our songwriting and what our sound has been.

When we first formed I put up want ads looking for a band because I had 20-some songs written, and they were not to the point where I really wanted them to be, where I felt like they were totally complete, but they were done enough to record. So I ended up putting the band together and saying, "I want to make this record." And that was the goal of the band, to make Sink. So we practiced the material I had written, and we recorded the record.

Then for Glyph what ended up happening was there were six songs left over that were already written for Sink, and then a bunch of song ideas I had that hadn't really gone anywhere. So half of Glyph was just material that I had written before I'd even met anybody, and the other half was a blend where I would say, "I've got this chorus, and I've got this verse...I don't really know how long the chorus should go, I'm not sure what to do with this part of the verse, I don't have a bridge," and then we would just free-form jam to see what would happen, and record, and record, and record and take the best stuff and edit it down into songs.

So Glyph was kind of this hybrid, then with Angels it was kind of a return to the Sink concept where I basically had 15 songs and said, "This is the album I want to make." And for Sosobra it was, again, kind of like the Glyph idea where it was much more so the whole band jamming. It seems like it goes back and forth between me just writing, and the whole band loosely coming up with stuff...and anywhere in between.

Rob: Yeah, some. Not all, but some. I would say, if you were going to take the top couple of influences for each of us, they would be different.

Have you noticed evolving musical tastes in the other members of the band?

Rob: Dave has definitely evolved in terms of what his influences are, and what his tastes are. Pete, I think, is just the same guy he's always been. He's just...he's like a rock. A lot of my influences have changed, but that's primarily because I'm always influenced by whatever I'm listening to at the time. And I am always listening to something new, so I'm always influenced by something that's not the same as what it was two or three years ago. I think that's true for everyone.

Would there be any bands or music in specific that you would mention?

Rob: Well, way back in the day, I was pretty heavily influenced by Jane's Addiction and Failure and Bauhaus...not to say that I'm not influenced by that anymore, but I was listening to that a lot and I don't really listen to it that much anymore.

Yeah, there's only so many times you can sit through "Jane Says" and "Three Days."

Rob: Exactly. It's hugely inspiring and influential for the first year, and then you just sort of find something else that really grabs your attention. In a lot of the era before Angels I was just listening nonstop to a lot of mellower music. I was listening to a lot of Pink Floyd, and a lot of Elvis Costello, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Dead Can Dance, Peter Gabriel's Passion, and soundtracks, stuff like that. As a result, I was into much more experimental sounds and things being a bit more soothing rather than confrontational.

Confrontational, like "The Face of Order"? Rob: Yeah. I mean, if you're listening to a lot of Pantera and you have a few beers, that's the kind of stuff that happens. And I definitely would not want to ever distance myself from [that kind of sound]. "The Face of Order" is a great example. There were a really horrific series of police brutalities in my hometown of Eugene. Little six-year-old children getting tear gassed, I mean really, really awful. So many people were so flaming angry...not to say that that's changed a lot in Eugene...but those kinds of times create that kind of material.

Rob: It's definitely faster paced than, like, Angels.

There's a lot more energy. The first cut is a lot different. I'm used to a Floater album opening with a mellower tune, and here we have "Here Comes the Dog."

Rob: It's part of the whole Burning Sosobra concept in throwing out some of your old baggage. It's weird, as a songwriter I tend not to write individual songs and then move on to something completely removed. I tend to write concepts. Whatever is happening to me in my life is what I'm writing about, for the most part. So stuff like Sink and Angels, these story albums come from that. You write a song, and then the next day when you're writing another song, what's happening is some kind of logical expansion on the first one. With Burning Sosobra there's a degree of a theme, in terms of stylistic and general emotional feel, but there's really not a story or anything; it's really just a collection of songs.

Not a rock opera.

Rob: Yeah, it's not at all a rock opera. And besides that, there's a really strong feeling--like I was saying, with throwing out the crappy baggage and everything--that we really wanted to push ourselves to do something that didn't necessarily just drop out naturally. I think that the analogy I used... I was talking to some guy from the Register a few days ago...I said it's sort of like working out. When you decide that you're out of shape and you want to make a positive change in your life and improve your attitude, and you start lifting weights. It's not that you hate doing it, or that you love doing it because it's like a massage or something, it's just you pumping iron to burn out the bad and make a change. So we set to work with this really "kick-ass" attitude, and the way it came across...it doesn't start with some big long ambient sample, and is not really... I mean, most of our records in the past have been very "take a bunch of acid and lay down on the carpet" kind of records [laughter].

So this is your aerobic workout video album?

Rob: Yeah! [Laughter] Yeah, the feeling is more proactive. I think it's a great record for somebody who's just sick of it all, who's been working a shitty job for five years, or just has a crappy family, or just got dumped by their ex or whatever. It has a very active, take charge, grab life by the scruff of the neck kind of feel to it, I think. It's very different. None of the songs are very long, which is very different for us.

I'm used to you guys putting a couple nine-minute songs on there...

Rob: Oh yeah, at least. And you know it's funny; we're friends with King Black Acid who have this 20-minute song that they always run into. And we were all talking about this after a show, and I said that writing a song that's three-and-a-half, four minutes long, for us is a total work out. Because basically what it means is that we want to try to get everything that would be in a nine-minute to have happen in three-and-a-half minutes. So you end up with something like "Here Comes the Dog," where there's a change every 20 seconds.

It seems like a real shift in gears.

Rob: Yeah, and it's incredible how much of a challenge that can be. "Here Comes the Dog" originally, when we were first jamming out and playing with it, was ten minutes long. And we would go, chop that, chop that, shorten that, shorten that, and we'd push ourselves.

The idea was more like, this groove is really cool, and we do want to give people a chance to sort of sit on it, but for this record--for what we're doing--we want it to be high energy. We want it to be fast paced, we want it to be rippin', and we don't want people to sit back and trip out on it. We want it to make you move. To kick ass, y'know? And the way to do that is to make your changes come and go quickly. It's funny watching the mosh pit, because if they don't know the record real well, and most of them don't, you hit a groove and the second they've caught on to where you're at with it and their heads start moving, we're on to the next thing.

Maybe even the next song.

Rob: Really, and it's different, but when you get to your fifth record it's good to do different things. We really pushed for quick and hard-hitting. The album definitely has a few take a deep breath/slow down moments in it, but it wouldn't be us if it didn't.

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