What's On TV?

By Alex Wendt

This was transcribed by Monica Beethe from the CNN World Beat that aired on September 5th and 6th, 1998.

Seg: Don't Drink the Water video

There's no plan. It's completely luck. I mean not, not in that how hard we've worked or what time we spent, but that there was no thought before we got together sayin we wanna be heavy metal or we wanna be rock or we wanna, we didn't know. Well we knew what we were gonna do, I was gonna play guitar and sing and Carter would play drums.

Seg: Jimi Thing live

I think it's a combination of all of us. We don't, it's nothing we're aiming at so it's hard to know what it is. If there was a place that we're all focused on then we could say 'that's what we do' but if we're doing anything we're sort of trying to run away from from any any label that we might start to look or sound like you know then we're 'ok, let's do something completely different'.

Seg: Stay Video

To be fair to the audience, we try to just challenge ourselves a little bit you know well to change scales and try and make..try and make things, we try and play things clearly, but to play something and end up in a less common time signature than 4/4 but then play it in a way that sounds like no one will say 'wow that's weird, why's that weird, you know that it sounds really clear'. So I think that focus on clarity is so that people can get what we're doing.

Seg: Seek Up live

You know we just enjoy ourselves and I think the tightness comes from just knowing each other really well. And so we know 2 takes in the studio never sound the same either so when we're in there it's sort of the same thing. No 2 nights repeat themselves too much you know there's obviously things you fall into habits with. But it's been fun on this album because we really hadn't ever played any of it live unlike the other albums before we recorded it.

Seg: Jimi Thing live

The fun of it is sort of to be adventurous with not ever being sorta safe. Hopefully every songis a little bit of a challenge to us in it's own way. The way that we approach music i think is very similar to the way that some musicians in South Africa approach music.. a real love for doing it. It's that not so much for performing it although we love that too, but doing it is just such an inspiration.

Seg: Stay video

Our job is really to focus on real simple things, treasuring our friendships and treasuring the music and treasuring our time doing what we love to do. 'Cause it will pass and then what happens after that I don't know I'll have to wait till I get there.

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