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ON THE INSPIRATION TO DO COVERS
It actually comes from a place that's different from the 60s baby boomer strident assertion of individuality. What it comes from more is the country aesthetic, which is an "everyone is welcome to the party, everybody come on down" kind of thing. Country artists, without any sort of shame or tarnishing of their song-writing prowess, can do entire albums full of cover songs because they know they are not the first person in the history of the planet to have written a song. I'm sort of exaggerating, but I think there is a slight arrogance to the other aesthetic. There are thousands of songs in the world, millions maybe. If your prime directive is the album, to make that the best it can be, then you should sacrifice all other imperatives.

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF SONGWRITING
That's been forced onto songwriters and bands by the cult of the singer-songwriter in the 60s, where there's this sort of singer-songwriter/poet/philosopher-king kind of aesthetic, which is total crap. There is still a lot of that in rock culture, but there's never been that in country culture. For instance, Willy Nelson, a really accomplished songwriter, has done I don't know how many cover songs in his career. And that's just because he thought it would be interesting to play them or he wanted to hear what it sounded like with his voice. On a more pure level, he just thought he might enjoy singing one of those songs. And that's not allowed in rock. There are a lot more clinching, self-conscious, calculating considerations, I think.

ON THE TYPICAL ROCK STAR
The culture of rebellion—gratuitous rebellion—gave us 90s grunge rockers acting like they were so sad to be up there on the stage. But if you are really so sad why don't you turn your amp down from 11 to, like, seven, to reflect your doubts and your self-hatred a little bit better? I believe there's a lot of phoniness to it. But I shouldn't point the finger too closely at anyone; we are all just entertainers, just a few steps from jugglers and clowns.

ON COVERING DISCO'S BEST-KNOWN SONG
Generally, it's really simple. It's just, "Wow, I really love this song." The sad thing, for me at least, about covering I will Survive, is everyone thought "Oh, this is a joke band and they are making fun of disco." And maybe we're a joke, but we really enjoyed playing that song. We thought it was a well-written melody and it told a story as well as any song. I thought it told a really good story and had a lot of nice visceral details, about leaving one's key and outer space. I love it when the words "outer space" are in a song. I just always loved that song, ever since I was a kid.

ON BARRY WHITE
There's something unarguable about Barry White's baselines and arrangements in general. He was a true musician; he just loved music itself. He probably wasn't stylish for much of his career, but he made really great music. I always thought it would be healthy for the band to have to get inside the geometry of one of his arrangements. Playing a song is always sort of mind expanding—it forces you to imagine yourself writing it and how it was probably written.

ON IRONY
There's something so badass about White's rhythm section and we just thought we had things to learn from that music. We weren't making fun of it. It wasn't ironic. One of the weird things is no one believes this band is not being ironic. We're being really sincere most of the time. Some of the time we're not and I think it gets extrapolated that everything we're doing is a joke, but it's really pretty earnest. In terms of these covers, I think it's important to say there's not some underlying joke about the songs or the artists that originally played them. It's not smirk-smirk. It's a genuine admiration for music that comes from different genres. We know the juxtaposition of culture is interesting and sometimes funny, but we're musicians, and we love music.

ON WHEN TO LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE
With the Black Sabbath song War Pigs, there were certain elements we didn't want to change because they were 50-60 percent of what we liked about the song in the first place. The words are really spooky and scary and exciting and angry, but they wouldn't be half that mysterious sounding without the guitar aggression.

ON MAKING MONEY WITH COVERS
You know, anyone can cover any song that has already been recorded without permission, but one has to pay royalties to the songwriter. So if you release an album of all covers, the band isn't going to get any money. But who cares anymore, 'cause music is free, so it doesn't really matter.

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