By Martin Popoff
So then, are you more comfortable with this new old school sound that Bobby Rondinelli brings to the table?
"I definitely have to say that I love Bobby Jarzombek. He's one of my best friends and he's a great guy. But I mean, it's really hard for me to find a groove when he's playing those crazy rhythms (laughs). Because I like to sit in the pocket. And when I'm with Bobby Rondinelli, it's really easy for me to do that. He's just very open, he's very sparse, he just lays down the meter and that's it. And I'm free to do what I want to do. So for this record, it was a lot easier for me to express myself. One thing I'm seeing with the interviews I'm doing, people are saying 'Oh, the vocals sound really good on this record' and everyone is really happy with them and they're all telling me how much they enjoy them. And I really appreciate it, but at the same time I think that what happened is that I'm just much more comfortable."
In terms of a production philosophy, Mike says that there really wasn't anything overt or stated. "I don't think we tried for anything. We just wanted to be happy with the sound with respect to the overall mix. We tried to stay away from the mistakes made in the past, too much reverb and too much echo. We tried to stay clean, maybe a little bit too clean. Paul Orofino, the guy who produced this record, he tends to be a little bit dry in his mixes. We might have preferred a little more ambience, but I think we achieved overall the good production we were looking for. I don't think there's anything too wild we did. I know Mark had some trouble doing the George Harrison cover. I think what happened is that originally, Mark recorded the guitars in upstate New York and he had some sort of problem with the tape and he wanted to add guitars to it, but he wanted to do it on Long Island for some reason. From what I gather, this is what happened. He took the tapes to Mike Flyntz' house and he had to dump it into the computer, and the way it got dumped into the computer, it was playing at another speed. So he had to play the guitars at another speed, and when they re-recorded it, they had to record back at regular speed and dump it back onto tape, some crazy thing like that."
