What we learned here is love tastes bitter when it’s gone.

And the people we’ve become, well, they’ve never been the people who we are.

Ever since I can remember, I`ve always wanted to tell stories, but I never had the patience to sit down at a typewriter and write short stories or anything like that. I started writing songs as a way of communicating ideas the best way I could.

It sort of started with this idea of doing a teen noir show. The first-person, hard-boiled narrative is inherent in noir. I wanted her to sound like a 17-year-old female Raymond Chandler.

About midway through (last) year, we started having to think about the big mystery for season two.

I used to do lots of coke. ... You`d be tired and you`d do it just to stay out and go to bars and meet girls and have a good time. ... There`s a two-year period at the beginning of this band that I don`t even remember. I can`t even imagine what the shows were like.

We`re most pleased with it when it`s revelatory character stuff, when we`re getting her attitude and philosophy out of that voice-over. I`ll even have her being deflecting and defensive within first-person narration. She`s a prickly girl.

[Referring to the UPN`s treatment of "Veronica Mars"] "I think they`re really good. The network loves us and treats us so well. They don`t try to fix our show, and so often if you`re not doing numbers, the network tries to fix it for you. And they have told us, `You guys are doing the show we want. It`s our job to get people to watch it.`"

Because we`ve spent so much time promoting the album, doing radio shows where you play one or two songs, and doing interviews, I`m all about wanting to get on the road and just play.

I like something with a classic touch. That way, it`s easy.

We`re gonna do a song off the new record. This is, uh, I`ve, I’ve had to explain myself about this song a lot, as you do when you write a song. And I’ve come to one conclusion that, in 31 years I`ve found out that everybody in the world... everybody in the world is a little bit f****d up. Okay. And its okay, it`s okay. When you`re young, you think it`s just you. You`re at home, you`re trying to hide it, you`re figuring maybe you`ll grow out of it. You know, maybe you`ll get like all the other people. What you don`t know when you`re young is that it`s everybody, man. Everybody is a little bit f****d up. And as you get older you have two kinds of people. You have the fortunate people who realise it early on, man. They let their freak flag fly. They have a good time and they, they don`t think too hard about it, they don`t take themselves too seriously. And then there`s those poor bastards on the other side that are still trying to play it cool, man. Everyday. "I`m not f*****d up". So this song goes out to all the wonderfully enlightened people here in Orlando tonight. That know that it`s okay to be a little bit f****d up every now and then. [sings `Unwell`]

From the Ground Up

I say, if you`re going to bash us, just be clever.