Kevin Griffin: It does seem that way…[Laughing]…it does seem that way. We do tour a lot. For most bands, including us, you make most of your money, you survive, by touring. But in the past few years, we’ve been able to take off for several months at a time, and not tour. But for the rest of the year, nine months out of the year, we’re on tour, pretty much.

VOX: Any favorite places to go and play?

Travis Aaron McNabb: I think favorite places to play are really just cities we like to be in. Crowds are different everywhere, but generally were fortunate enough to mostly play our own shows and so we generally get good crowd responses, even thought they might be different, so it’s really more about cities we like travelling to. New Orleans is always great, I really love San Francisco…New York…

Tom Drummond: The West coast has been really nice because the weather has just been awesome. It is so hot in New Orleans right now. You know, touring is just an excuse for us to just get out of town.

Travis: Yeah…

Tom: [Doing his best Cartman impression] That’s what I said.

Kevin: That’s all, from the House of Blues…

VOX: How did you guys all end up together…in the current lineup?

Kevin: Originally, Tom…Tom and I, met at Louisiana State University…

Tom: Studying Dairy Science…

Kevin: We actually were taking a class at the university…Dairy Science was one, Mythology was another one, uh, we were studying Dairy Science together and there was a lab report on Holsteins or something like that and Tom played bass... he was a freshman and I was a sophomore, and we just started playing, with our old drummer, and in ’95 we parted ways with him and we hooked up with Travis McNabb, who was in a band called Vigilantes of Love at the time. ’95 was when Deluxe came out, um, our first single hit the airwaves, hmmm, the "whah-ah" song, and we never knew that song would do what it did, but, well, you know, such is life. [Laughter]

VOX: It’s a great song.

Kevin: It’s…well…you know, we still enjoy playing the song. Some bands tend to distance themselves from whatever hit they had, and I always…I never liked it when I would go see R.E.M. in the beginning of their career and they would never play "Don’t Go Back to Rockville," remember that, because they just felt that too many people liked it.

Travis: The other downfall is when people start doing the reggae version or something…you know that’s not what people want to hear…

Kevin: [In mock-stage voice] This is a hit of ours, done a little differently…

[Laughter all around]

Kevin: That’s lame. So you know, we do "Good" and whatever hits early in the set, cuz, you know people, including me, I want to hear the songs I know.

VOX: [To Kevin] We heard you were a big Ace Freahly fan.

Kevin: Oh yeah, but I mean, who wasn’t?

VOX: My first concert was Kiss.

Kevin: Kiss wasn’t my first concert, actually Elvis was. I was six years old…this is ’74…it was at the Atlanta Omni. It was in the round and we were behind the band, I got to see, at least I think I remember I got see Elvis’s back, his ass a lot.

Travis: His tushie.

Tom: That explains a lot. [Laughter]

Kevin: I knew I was setting myself up for that, that embedded memory…

Travis: If you’ve seen our show, you know, it’s back there somewhere…

VOX: Well, having such die-hard fans like the Ezralites, how does it feel to have so many people who are so devoted?

Tom: It’s really funny…I have a part, a hand in maintaining the web site and answering some of the e-mails and they are so ravenous when somebody says something bad about us. They are just like, all over that person. It’s really great. They have truly achieved like a cult status. They are their own little group, and we’re lucky to have them. Lots of bands never achieve that sort of following.

VOX: So, you guys lived in LA for a while?

Kevin: We lived out here…I moved out here in ’91, July 15^th of ’91, with my old girlfriend and two dogs, in to this God-awful apartment on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood, and man, it was hard…it was bad. The managers were recovering heroin addicts, and it was hard.

Tom: And Guns and Roses…

Kevin: Yeah, the drummer from Guns and Roses, Addler’s girlfriend lived next door to us, and they were always getting into fights. It was like a slap in the face – welcome to LA, if you can’t stand it, get out.

Travis: It’s a nice place to be, though. It’s also nice that we don’t live here, that we have our own homes in New Orleans, kind of separate from the business, so we aren’t overly influenced by the whole music-business-thing all the time. But we like being here for a while. It’s always nice to come…

Kevin: A lot of people say, a lot of songwriters say that if you live in LA, your songwriting goes to crap. I mean a lot of people say that. Now, I don’t know if it’s because you’re so into the business…it’s very easy out here to become a bit cynical, you know, because it’s the industry, and it is so incestuous up here, and everybody’s always talking about the business side and people become…everyone becomes an expert, on a song, or a band or someone’s career, and it kind of takes away from what you started music for, which was something you loved and enjoyed.

Travis: It leads to a lot of second-guessing. Too many worries about how this record will do, whereas our last record we made at home at our own little studio totally isolated from that kind of thing…

VOX: Fudge! [Their studio’s name]

Travis: Yeah! Fudge, yes. …and uh, we made the record we wanted to make, and it’s such a different thing than being in LA. We came here and did mixes for just a couple of songs on the record, and in that short little period of time, we had so much more outside pressure and weirdness, that we felt just being here as compared to making the entire album at home.

Kevin: And it cost more, just doing those two mixes, than it did doing the entire album!

VOX: Being so far away does give you some insulation from the business…

Kevin: Bottom line is, we do like LA, and it’s not popular to say that, you know…people really like to dis on LA. But you know there’s a lot of really great things about it. Being here too long…it’s amazing, the scene here. Everyone is checking one another out, and your whole status is constantly thrown up in your face.