I found these interviews on the web & decided to put them up here for your reading pleasure. ENJOY! I will soon be adding many articles about the band..past & present so be sure to check back often for new articles.~~9/21/99~~

Interview with Blas Elias from Modern Drummer magazine 1992

There are some songs on our records -- especially the new one -- that have complex rhythms, even percussion parts, that are a little out of the ordinary. If you look at it from the outside, it seems really simple, but it's not. I just always loved rhythm, and no matter what, I've always been banging on something - ever since I was a kid. I learned the solo to Moby Dick in my high school algebra class. I failed my final exam because I was playing drums on my desk after I finished my test. The teacher didn't grade it; she just came up to me and said,--That was a very good solo--and she wrote a big "F" on my paper, and I failed the whole course. But I lived rhythm, no matter where I was. You don't have to have a drum set, as long as you have your feet and hands.

RF:How was the first album recorded?
BE:We lived in this little apartment, and we worked with a drum machine and a four-track on the living room floor or the dining room table. Then we went into the Record Planet to do the demos, which was a great place for me to work my first time in a real studio.

RF:What did it feel like the first time?
BE:It's scarier before you go in somewhere. We were so busy before we went in that we didn't have time to feel that kind of anticipation. It was just another progression of that we were doing. It was really natural. Dana is really good in the studio. He knows how to bring out the best in people.

RF:How does he bring out the best in you?
BE:That's hard to answer. He makes you feel very at ease, he jokes with you. Everything is very lighthearted. It's not like,"Okay, you're on the grill." There was never any pressure. We did the demos in the studio as preparation for the record so that we wouldn't have that problem. Being self-produced, there wasn't anyone there intimidating us.

RF:How was it cut?
BE:Everybody at first doing scratch tracks together. Everything was pieced together after the fact.

RF:What were some of the more challenging,hard-to-get, or fun trackson the first album for you?
BE:I can't name one favorite, because they're all so different. Fly to the Angels has always been one of my favorites as a song, not necessarily drumming-wise. It's very laid back and influenced by John Bonham, in one of his slower feels. It's really simple, but the parts were very well thought out. Doing that record, I learned a lot about playing for the song and laying back where the vocals should be. I can't say there's anything on the first album that was technically really great, but it was pretty much playing for the songs and playing for radio and the concert arena. We had definite goals in mind of what we wanted to achieve, and you can't over play when you're trying to get airplay and MTV. But we're glad that on the new record we decided to take more liberties.

RF:Aside from playing for the song, what was your role on the first album
BE:I had to keep the parts interestingenoughtomake a difference and to
make the song interesting and
different from anything else you'd
hear. My drum hooks didn't have
to be hard to play - just good,
well-written parts that a
listener is going to remember.
When you see someone
listening to your song on their
car stereo and they're
air-drumming along, you know
you accomplished something.

There are a lot of classic songs
that have these great drum parts
that aren't the hardest things in the
world to play. Most arrogant
drummers would say,That's just
full-of-sh*t, AC/DC 2/4,
but they're still good parts. I think
it's harder to come up with parts
like that than to just throw in a lot
of notes and bs your way
through something.

RF:Any other songs on the first
album that you want to
talk about?

BE:Like I said, there are a
lot of different feels. There is a
song that was never on the radio
called She Wants More that
had a really
good shuffle feel to it. It was
something you wouldn't expect
a rock band to play. The intro
to So Mad About You is done
in 6/8 and has a lot of
polyrhytms, which nobody would
expect, but it really doesn't come
across because you can barely
hear it. I do a lot of things with
the hi-hat that add a different
feel to it, like on the song
Up All Night. Even though
it's a very straight-forward 2/4 groove,
I interpreted that a different way
than maybe a lot of people would have.
I put in some 16th notes
combined with the 8th note
feel on
the hi-hat, and that gave it a bit
more of an upbeat, dance-type
feel to it. It gives me a little bit
of my own style, I hope. I do
that in quite a few of our songs.
I expanded the whole style of
my hi-hat work on the new record.
I get a lot of that from my drum
corps days.

RF:Dana and Mark gave you free
reign to do what you wanted?

BE:It's free reign for ideas,
but then everybody has their input
on what's cool and what's not.
It's not like any one person says,
Absolutely not, you can't even
try that. In fact, Dana will ask me
to take more liberties and come
up with more ideas, because the
more ideas you throw out, the more
chances there are of hitting
something good. That's a really
good attitude to have, because we'll
come up with some cool stuff
by accident sometimes.
Also on the first album was the
song Eye To Eye, which is really
cool as far as the parts go. It's inI think it was probably two different songs
that got fused together. A lot
of times we'll do that. There's
also some really good hi-hat
work in there that combines somewith a shuffle feel in the bass drum.
It all works in a weird way with
the cowbell rhythm, which is more
of a straight-forward, almost Latin
type of thing.

RF:What did you learn from making
the first album?

BE:As far as the instruments are
concerned, I found that smaller
drums tuned lower and played not
as hard work best. We went
through all these snare drums to
find which had the biggest sound,
and the one that ended up sounding
the biggest was a piccolo that
was tuned lower and hit softer!
I even used a 20" kick drum.
The microphone doesn't hear the
volume, it just hears the sound.
The bigger the drum, the harder you have
to hit it to get the same sound
out of it. With cymbals it's the
same thing. I do play hard, especially
live, but in the studio I had to
lighten up a little.
One of the biggest things
I learned was to relax.
Even faster and harder parts came
a lot easier when I was relaxed.
I remember the last night we were at
Pasha, I had two more songs to do,
and I had been up for twenty hours
recording, with no breaks.
We thought we had to be
finished in the morning, and
it was already 6:00 in the
morning - we had been recording
since 7:00 the morning before.
We were working on the end
of Reach For The Sky. It's not
that hard of a part, but I was trying
so hard to get the end down
that for two hours, I couldn't get it.
When I was doing the demos
and there was no pressure, I breezes
through it in one take.
That performance blew away
anything that I tried when
we were doing the record.
We decided we'd just quit and
beg for more time. We came back in,
and I nailed it right away.