INTERVIEWER: I've only seen glowing reviews of your album. Have you gotten any negative feedback? How much of your writing comes from you, and how much is exploited from your unsuspecting friends. How much is made up?

JOHN: We've had a couple of people who don't like my voice, I'm actually suprised there hasn't been more people turned off by the vocals...other than that everything's been really positive. As far as where our stuff comes from, I don't have many friends and those i do have don't write music. In general, I get inspired (motivated is a better word) to write songs when I hear a really good song. I try to listen to as much new and different types of music as possible, so Bacharach is a big influence, as is Leonard Cohen and Sonic Youth and basically everybody. To me, the lyrics and vocals are what makes us "original" or at least different from most other punk groups. I think I told you before, I smoke a lot and I have a pretty horrible singing voice, and I wish I didn't. So when I/we write a tune, I always pretend that its us doing a punk cover of a pop song. If you play "If I just could Make it on my own" on a piano, it sounds like a Bacharach tune, which is exactly what I wanted. The new stuff we're working on is more in the same vein as that tune...very poppy, but gruff and evil as far as the vocals/music is concerned.

We aren't very connected to the music scene in NYC, its just a royal pain in the ass to bring equiptment around in the city, so even though I'm moving there this summer, we're much more connected with Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Long Island New York. All of these places are very cool, very non-competitive and supportive, and we've gone over really well with the suburban kids.

We are sort of not into doing a big tour, and YES, labels have balked b/c of that. We've come close to signing with a few labels, we actually did sign once with Strictly Rhythm (a big dance label in NYC that was making an ill-fated foray into punk), but that fell through (long story...but we did get to meet John Cougar Melloncamp). We're gonna try to make our way out to Chicago, as well as down South (Atlanta/Florida). We also have a growing fan base in Arizona (of all places), and my dream is to rock the sun belt.

Ok, now for the Medley or ponk rock opus. Its a really interesting story. We had an idea to throw together a few tunes like in a Broadway Musical type thing a couple of years ago...in fact right when we were supposed to record with Stirctly Rhythm...however, our old drummer was a punk rock purist who never wanted to do anything but 1 and a half minute punk tunes, so he was totally against it. Originally, the "opus" ONLY consisted of Tokyo Japan, 21 reprise, undressed and starstruck. I wrote Starstruck first. The problem was although I really liked Starstruck (which is still my favorite tune), it just didn't go anywhere, I couldn't think of a way of extending it beyond like one minute, and even then, it sounded like a half-written song. So I took the solo part at the end of Startstruck, and wrote the song "Tokyo Japan" from it. At first it was gonna just be two songs together. Undressed was based on a riff that I had written on a piano. It was just this pretty little slow peice, but me and Ed decided to work the tunes out and link them together (much to the Chagrin of our old drummer).

After we got dropped from the label and our old drummer left, we decided to dive head first into doing a Broadway Medley. I took a bunch of songs which (similar to Starstruck), I really liked, but they suffered because they only had one or two parts and really couldn't stand alone as complete tunes. Someday was one such song. Guillotine was actually the closest to being a "real" complete tune. I actually have like 10 versus written for it, however I could never get a chorus that I liked, so I changed the key and linked it to Someday. Tragedy Will Someday Pay My Rent was originally a complete tune. It had a really heavy/slow beginning and the ending (which is the part that appears on the revord) just came out of nowhere. The song was originally based on this old furniture repair man in my neighborhood. We gave him our chairs to re-appholster (sp?), and when we went to pick them up we saw him along/half naked/drooling in the store. He had arranged the chairs in a fort-like structure around him. Later EVERYONE in the neighborhood told us he was totally crazy b/c his wife killed herself. So the original song is based lyrically on that dude. But for the album, I dropped the heavy/slow part, and changed the lyrics to the ending part. Asleep on the Guillotine was thrown on as an afterthought.

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