We have a lot of fun. We play a lot of rock songs and yes, we're going to dance for you.

We wanted to make an album that sounds like our band, and not a heady, self-conscious studio project. Everyone tells us rock and roll is a shadow of itself--a sad old milk cow smiling at the farmer every morning. We still see a bucking bull smashing around the stable.

To me this album seems more energetic and raw, with more space — unlike the first one, which was about stacking up 50 guitars and 80 backing vocals on each track,

We were weary and shell-shocked from two straight years of touring on our first album, three of us had broken up with long-time girlfriends, two of us were discombobulated from moving across the country, and then George Bush won the fucking election while we watched in dismay from a tiny apartment in Sweden. So the record itself wound up being about little disasters.

It's not like a challenge to the Stones, but more of a revision, ... Tim was playing this riff and he needed it to feel sleazy and dark, and I was trying to figure out what it was about. I remembered the time Tim and I first made a concerted effort to write songs together five or six years ago when we took a week off and drove to New Hampshire. I remember on this 18-hour car ride, being way over-caffeinated and buzzing, I realized that I was trying to figure out if you would know if you were the devil. I got Tim to quit his job for a week and go to this cabin, which seemed like the sort of thing the devil would do.

You have 20 years to write your first record and only six months to do the next one. So people often just completely fold under the pressure. I'm much more proud of our second record than our first, so I'm happy to hear that people are responding to it well. We sort of cheated in that there were almost three years in between both records.