I’m not generally one for astrology, but I know people who are, and some of them live with me. One of them, actually, and today she showed me this. It piqued my interest for two reasons:

1. I am a Gemini.
2. I have had all ten of these careers.

Tonight, I’m going to put on seven of these hats and respond to a message board post by avid fan Dan Pollitt. Why? The reasons are, again, twofold.

1. We have been really, really bad at fostering a sense of community around here since the fall tour ended, and there’s just no excuse for that. Until such time as we can once again stand before you with instruments, it is our responsibility to keep you at least kind of entertained here on the website, and I am leading that charge tonight because that’s what a co-frontman does.
2. This is Dan in the middle here:

So.

On to the questions:

(1) We need new album information!! Progress?? Song titles? Style?? HELP!

Dan, are you familiar with Joel Salatin’s method of seven-stage sustainable farming? Long story short, the man not only alternates his crops but brings cows out onto the corn fields after the harvest, then shuffles his cows off so that a mobile chicken coop can roll in and release the chickens, who will eat the grubs that have been hatching in the cow shit and transform them into chicken shit, which apparently has a whole different set of oxidants than the cow shit, and together they re-fertilize the soil for the next wave of intermediate vegetable crops, and the world actually winds up being a substantially better place because of his additive, rather than subtractive, agricultural methodology.

This is essentially what we of the LLC are doing, even as I type this: we are rolling out the chickens and inviting them to shit on our corn. In the short term, this means that no cows are present and nobody knows where they are. But in the long term, it means that said cows are coming back with a vengeance, just as soon as the intermediate crops have undergone one complete lifecycle and we’re able to relocate the, uh, cows.

Which is to say, we ran out of money and will be back in the studio as soon as we have some again.

(2) Next tour?? We already assume nothing this summer is going to happen...Cross country tours have to be brutal; assumingly fall is the next one...

The summer is, unfortunately, going to be mostly Speechless. (See above farming analogy.) But we are actively scheduling our fall, so we’ll let you know as that comes together, and will definitely be representing most (if not all) American time zones, in one way or another.

(3) If you could pick a Street Fighter II Turbo edition character, who would it be and why??

I think the screenshot speaks for itself.

Cheers,
Dave