We thought about just doing a series of songs on Lincoln's life, but that might be kind of boring and there's almost too much ground to cover. With this, we can keep it at April 1865.

I'm a sensitive guy. If you are a woman and you're in any kind of emotional duress and you write a song about it, I'll buy you album.

I thought that everything was lost. It only takes one mistake for you to mess up your life. I thought I would go out of jail and go home (to Texas) and get a 9-to-5 job working construction or something.

I was lucky that way. I always held on to it and appreciated it, ... The songs on this album were more personal and I really wanted to sing them.

We've got a bunch of new songs: 'Ashes and Cinders,' 'Queer Pressure,' 'Cut Your Tongue Out,' those were just ones I've written in the past few days. All we need now is some days off to get into a studio, ... We had four days off like a month ago, and normally you'd want to just sit around in a bed and do nothing, 'cause you've been on tour for months, but by the second day we were getting bored, and we went back into the studio and started working on a real Motown-sounding album. We always just sort of go into the studio and press 'record' and see what happens.

Almost all our set is new songs,