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And you played intermittently in other bands, too?
Yeah. We've both played in countless [bands]. In middle school and high school... that was all we did. That's like pretty much all we've done since, is play in bands with our friends. The scene that we are from is really, really, really small but really intense. There's like 60 or 80 kids or something that just all have bands with each other. But this is the [band] that made it possible for us to do it full time, because we just started making money off of it.
Was your sound a conscious decision or just what came out?
It's just sort of what made sense. Just to get more tight and poppy. We're a lot less psychedelic now than we were a couple years ago. On our album two albums ago, the first song on the first side is this 14-minute, kind of Krautrock-y epic jam called "Ghostride the Whip to Berlin." But now we're really focusing on trying to fuse together early 70s hard rock and 80s pop punk. [It's] a weird sound but people really respond to it well and it's a lot of fun to play and write.
To what extent do you plan things out, musically? Despite your stage silliness, you and Jamin are amazingly in sync. Has that just developed or is it something you work on in rehearsals?
It's just after playing so long. We actually don't rehearse. We're just on tour so much that we play every night anyway so we don't really need to. But I think a lot of it also has to do with sharing the same blood. And when it's just two people it's a lot easier to be really tight. You can just look at each other and know what's going on.
How long have you been on tour?
Since March of last year. We quit our jobs and gave up our places. We've been touring for five years, but for the first four years we only did it in the summer. In March we kind of made the decision to do it full time. If you're touring in the summer it's tough to build up a following since you're not coming back to any cities for a year. So we kind of had to start from scratch in March, and we knew we were going to be poor as shit for a while.
What sorts of crazy places have you played?
We were always down to play anywhere because we were always booking our own tours. The only way to do that is to ... find the cool kids in the town and be like, 'book us a show with your band, we'll play anywhere, we don't care.' Because otherwise you're going to play in a bar to nobody. We'd always try to get some kids involved and other kids' bands, even if the only place we could play was like their parents' beauty salon.
How do you write lyrics? They seem very casual -- inspired by whatever is going on in your lives.
For a long time, Jamin wrote all the lyrics and they were mostly poems. I've been writing most of the lyrics recently. We don't really care about the lyrics, we just write whatever is on our minds, I guess. When I listen to music personally I don't really pay attention to the lyrics. Rock 'n' roll music -- it's about the beat. I don't think the lyrics really matter.
Looking at your blog, it looks like you've had a lot of fun checking out different foods on tour. What have been your favorites and what are you looking forward to in San Francisco?
I really like going up to Quebec and getting Poutine. It's french fries with gravy and cheese curds. Our favorite is probably going to Philadelphia and going to Pat's and getting cheese steaks. It's the best thing ever. We look forward to that for months at a time. I don't really know what I want to eat in San Francisco.
Pretty much the universally regarded things are Mexican and Asian. You can't really go wrong with a good Mission burrito.
We don't ever seek out Mexican food on tour because it's so good in Nashville and we're so used to that style. I had a burrito in San Francisco and I was like, 'This is weird.'
