By Martin Popoff
Tommy runs through the album, offering a few track-by-track comments. "Let's see, there's a song called Sunday, which was written on a Sunday, extremely hungover, and it's about being hungover (laughs). That was kind of fun. I re-did David Bowie's Fame. That one pretty much speaks for itself. Let's see, I told you about Body Architects. There's a song called Why Is It. Actually, when Nikki heard it, that was his favourite song on the record. The lyrics are pretty heavy. There's a gorgeous song called Blue on there, and I imagine that would be a single. Brandon from Incubus is on that track as well. There's another great song called Ashamed. Afterglow, that's a cool title. There's song I wrote about the fans called People So Strange, and that one's great. I thought man, I need to write about this because this is so f**king funny, and it happens on a daily basis. You run into somebody, a fan or whatever, and they'll come up to me and - I use the line in the song - one of the lines I hear is, 'Hey Tommy! You know my brother's mother's cousin's sister's boyfriend!' And I'm sitting there going, I have no idea what this person is talking about. So I just find that funny and I find the fans to be very strange, but I would never want them to change? Because that's what makes them f**king fans. They're awesome! So that's a fun song. There's another one called Higher. That one's definitely a f**king bad ass live song."
What is your modus operandi, when do you like to work?
"You know what? My favourite time of day is sunset. As the sun is setting down and the sky is orange, for some reason, that turns a switch on in me somewhere. That's my favourite time of day so my mood is pleasant, and that's when I seem to sit down and start writing music or lyrics or whatever. During the day, if it's a nice day, I'd rather be outside. But as the sun starts to set, for some reason, and it gets dark, that's when I feel most creative. For recreation, I have a dirt bike track on my property so every once awhile I go tear it up there for a minute. I like to do relaxing things, because my life is pretty f**kin' crazy most of the time. So for me, a lot of the times... I love to swim. I've been a water baby all my life and I love to just float around in the pool or be anywhere near the water, the beach. I find that most of the time when I have some free time, I really try take advantage of it and just relax, because there's not enough of that in my life (laughs)."