Can’t really say the same for Ohio.
What part of Ohio?

Columbus.
Do you know where Portsmouth is?

Yea, about 2 hours straight south.
I have a girlfriend right now from Portsmouth, OH. She’s always telling me about it. I haven’t been there though.

Cool, ask her about the paper mill smell there. Terrible! She go to school there?
She was born and raised and there I think, well, she wasn’t born there but she was pretty much raised there I think from nine years but I don’t think she went to school there though.

Small town.
She seems like a small town girl. Maybe that’s why we like each other.

I just got the preview release of the record, So Long.
You got it? Cool.

I have been playing it in my car pretty much non-stop since I got it.
That’s a good thing. It’s a little better if you can take it away like that.

What I like about it is the sound is really New York. You can almost feel yourself walking down the streets of Chelsea or ...
Like Soho or something? Really, no shit. Damn, I never heard that.

I was talking with Walt, the singer for Silvertide, and we were joking that everyone should have a soundtrack playing as they went about their daily routine. This is a great, strolling on a Saturday New York soundtrack.
Wow, because that’s pretty much what I did when writing the record. I love to walk around town and maybe that was the soundtrack in my head. Damn, that’s cool man.. I never thought about it that way.

Coming from Louisiana, how much influence did the Big Apple have on you?
I mean it definitely influenced me everyday. At the time I really couldn’t go out that much. I was like living a pretty distant life and so I was in the apartment creating with the computer and the piano or walking around, like I would walk around Soho. I would take a train to Soho, get coffee and just like try to feel something, you know, try to feel the city. Cobblestone and cafe’s and whatever it was that I would get into, so maybe I did capture something. I never really thought about it that way.

When you starting writing and recording and with all the technology, were you ever afraid of going overboard?
What do you mean by going overboard?

Meaning, sometimes with what is at your fingertips it is easy to lose the essence of the song. Sometimes you can just create and create and completing becomes the hard part when in reality, you could of had the song hours before.
Yeah the struggle is completion, like completing things. I don’t know man, I never really thought about how I put it all together. I mean, I wrote this record over the course of 2 ½-3 years because I was taking computer classes and I had so much to learn. I was trying to develop my own thing out of all the ideas that we had, so, I don’t know. What was your original question?

Experimenting and creating versus essence. And when working on a computer, can you experiment too much.
Well, I think I was more attracted to the idea or experimenting since we had gotten a computer and we were finally at a place where we can try new ideas for free. We didn’t have to waste tape. We could just click a mouse to get rid of bad ideas. It was just so nice. That was the thing about creativity that we liked the most was trying to come up with our own sound with all of these elements that we wanted to try. Like the songs were just kind of born from that, from trying new things. Like taking this sample and this beat and go and get this guy of the subway to come play a horn. Just putting all of these things together and meanwhile you’re living life and things keep happening. Life keeps happening around you, and it just kind of happened and I tried to document everything ,including all of the things I would discover and learning about. Like inspiration of the first time being in New York and having a wonderful opportunity of being creative here and having the free time to create. I don’t really know if there was a definite formula to doing it, it was just a matter of discipline every day, because there was no boss around getting you out of bed and making you work. So that was like the hardest part I think.

I remember Custom, another guy who created on his computer in his apartment, said that was his toughest struggle. Getting the personal discipline to get shit done.
You know it’s like in school and you gotta study and you want to do anything but that. You want to do like all the stuff that you never want to do, like clean the bathroom. It’s pretty much the same thing, because even though you love music, there’s always a point where it becomes work. Like the beginning part of song, you create it, you make the beat and come up with all these cool things, but when you gotta complete something, it’s a whole different thing. So that little area was tough.

At the end of the day, is So Long how you envisioned it when starting it almost 3 years ago?
Some stuff is like I wanted, some stuff maybe not. Just moving on in life and I also worked with two different studios on the record because I did all the pre-production in my studio in my apartment and then I took it to a studio to mix and work with other producers. That helped me to realize what I was trying to do and certain things went in the directions I wanted and certain things, like songs just come out, the stuff I like the most on So Long are the songs we did the beats for, like songs like "Perique" and just like all the stuff that was beat oriented, that’s got it’s own rhythm. That’s the stuff that I really attach myself to on the record. The whole thing was a learning experience, the whole making of the record. Being able to give an idea and saying, "No," to this one. It’s still like that. Like now, dealing with a major label, like making calls and saying, "No," this is gonna be this way, don’t do it this way. Every day is making decisions and defining your product and your music.

How frustrating is it to be compared to Jack Johnson all the time?
Yeah man, definitely, definitely frustrating. Yeah, I don’t...I understand why people feel the need to do it. But it’s definitely frustrating. Some people try to say like I don’t know..Jack Johnson when it’s not that. It’s not..(laughing) ...you hear different stuff. Like Coldplay, my music is not Coldplay, but it’s not that...how can you say that?

We have to find a place for ya as critics, I guess.
Yeah, put me in somewhere.

I think I got lucky in that I put the CD in without reading one word about you, so I had the true experience of the music before reading or looking for comparisons.
Right, right, yeah. Ultimately that’s what I want. It would be great if the music just speaks for itself and then you didn’t have to worry about the hype thing. Because it’s like we see it every day with new bands coming out and their hype and they’re winning Grammys or they’re supposed to be the next rock God or whatever you want to call them. They’re dying. The music industry is dying. They’re trying to push it down the listener’s throat and trying to like tell you how to look at them, how to perceive them and everything. Everything is packaged for you, it’s like, I guess I would much rather people to just go to the music. It would be nice, but unfortunately, sometimes you have to read stuff.

You kinda have the best of two worlds. Independent and major melted together, so to speak, with Lava.
Fortunately, in our case, we are the creators of our own product. It’s not, even though we’re with a major independent, they recognize us and what we did and bought our product as it was and they’re going to continue to buy our product as we create it. So that’s like a beautiful situation for us. We were selling our own record and getting away with that. We needed somebody to get it, to understand the value in the record and the simplicity of it; all the little nuances in the character and all the imperfections. We needed somebody to understand it and just jump on it and you know, it’s the new way. Homemade music. Free from mix studios.