VOX: I think I’ve heard three different versions of the record. At least three…
Jon Bunch: Maybe more than that.

VOX: Were you ever at a point where you thought, "This record is never going to come out"?
Jon: It actually…the first two versions never did. I mean, it did get to the point where…I’ll be honest with you, I was the only person who still believed, all the way up to the bitter end. I kinda have that personality, you know? Where I thought for sure it was gonna come out. When we found out is wasn’t, I couldn’t believe it. Even though it got pushed back a bunch of times and it got changed, I still thought, "It’s gonna come out, it’s gonna come out." Then it didn’t. But, the interesting thing is, with Nettwerk, they’ve gotten so many things done in four months, more than we had accomplished in four years. We now have the record licensed in numerous territories that we never had before. It’s licensed to the UK, Germany, Spain, France, Greece, Portugal…and, uh, Australia, Southeast Asia. And we didn’t have that before, so in a way, it’s a much more positive thing that the record didn’t come out before. Although, it was painful and long and excruciating, it turns out to be a good thing that it didn’t come out under those circumstances. Now it’s out on Nettwerk and things are moving forward.

VOX: What’s the story behind how things went down?
Jon: Basically, when we signed in…96-97, um, the label that we were on went through so many different changes, and restructuring, personnel changes, that by the time we finished our record, most of the people that brought us over and most of our main support that believed in us had either been fired or had moved on to Internet companies or whatever. And it was like a revolving door of new people, and we would try to re-introduce ourselves to these people and show them who we were, but it just became impossible toward the end because there were so many new people. We were looked at as like the old regime even though we hadn’t gotten a record out. So, it’s happened to a lot of bands, to our peers as well.

[Sense Field drummer Rob Pfeiffer enters and grabs the mic]

Rob: [In his best newscaster voice] Film at eleven! [Now in his best sportscaster voice] Jordan from downtown. Good!

[Laughter]

VOX: How's the first single doing?
Jon: Well, they’ve already gone to college radio with "Fun Never Ends."

VOX: What’s the song about?

>>Jon really wasn't this serious the whole time.>>

Jon: The song is about my friends and me, when we were much younger…and we used to just go out and wreak havoc and get in all sorts of trouble…anything we thought was fun. It got to the point where a couple of people got hurt, and the song lyrics say, The fun never ends/Until you bury a friend, and that’s basically what happened. Like we were just going crazy to the point where somebody actually got killed. I was hoping that the song would somehow make kids not do that kind of thing, to that extent. Does that make sense?

VOX: Sure, trying to do something positive.
Jon: Yeah.

VOX: "Weight of the World" is a powerful song. I know I’ve seen it on at least one other version of the record.
Jon: [laughs] Yeah, I know...
VOX: Tell me about that song.
Jon: That song is basically about us trying to find our way after we had been let go by our first record company. We were uncertain about whether we were going to be able to continue and things were looking about as dark as they could look. We kinda went through a little bit of uncertainty and I felt a little depressed, and I had never really been in that sort of depression before. And so, basically, what I started feeling was that I was beginning to understand and realize what all the other songs I had been listening to for so long were about because I had never understood it to the degree that they were always singing about. That song’s just about the darkness and finding your way out of the darkness and finding some hope when there is no hope.

VOX: Where did the album title come from?
Jon: Our guitar player, Chris Evenson, came up with idea..

Rob: I think we just threw around a lot of really bad ideas.

Jon: Yeah, we had a lot of bad ideas, but to tell you the truth, I think it might have been the theme to my girlfriend’s prom or something like that. I don’t know.

Rob: It kinda sounds like it, huh?

Jon: Yeah, it does. But we liked it because it fits in with the artwork and with the music…it kinda gives it…this life of it’s own.

VOX: Where does the band name come from?
Jon: Our bass player, John [Stockberger] came up with it. It comes from this Buddhist term. He explains it and even for us it kinda goes in one ear and out the other - we can’t even understand it.

Rob: He’s told us a few times that he was reading this book and those were the two words that didn’t actually slip off the page while he was reading it.

Jon: We’re not exactly sure. We would have to have him answer that…