Remember Pond? Sure you do -- they were that band out of Portland on Sub Pop back in the day that sounded nothing like any of the other bands on Sub Pop. They were sorta weird, sorta trippy, very rockin', not very grungy, and almost staggeringly good. They released two records on Sub Pop (1993's Pond and 1995's criminally overlooked The Practice of Joy Before Death) before moving to the "big leagues" in 1997. Sony Records released the brilliant Rock Collection that year, and proceeded to ignore it to death. Pond eventually succumbed to the pressure of being on a label that didn't feel the need to support their efforts in any way; they broke up the following year. Bassist Chris Brady, who, with guitarist Charlie Campbell, was half of Pond's winning songwriting team, took a few years off, recorded the same record two or three times, and eventually found a home for his new project on über-indie (er...micro-major?) Vagrant Records, which just happens to be run by Pond's old manager, Rich Egan. While the resulting record, Audio Learning Center's Friendships Often Fade Away, is miles away from the emo-pop, eminently palatable-to-mainstream-taste sound of Vagrant stalwarts Get Up Kids and Saves the Day, it's really not too far off from the abstract, experimental, yet sinfully catchy material that Brady penned during his tenure with Pond.

I caught up with Chris before ALC's Seattle show opening up for the above-mentioned Get Up Kids. He proved to be as amiable and chatty as can be, and we discussed all kinds of neat stuff, from his past in Pond to his experience with the various labels with which he's been affiliated, to his present and future on Vagrant.

Splendid: So, how's the tour going? You guys have been out for...

Chris Brady: A couple months, on and off.

Splendid: How's it been?

Chris Brady: Pretty good. We had some really good shows and some really truly awful shows. It's the same with anything -- if you're out for long enough, you have really good times and really bad ones. We went to one rest stop and had some guy try to pick up on us in the bathroom, and a week and a half, two weeks ago we were in New York, and we played our show and as we were driving through Ohio, we saw like thirty dead dear on the road. At two in the morning, there was a pack of four deer on the highway, and we like barely missed hitting one. Steve like threaded the needle! And then on the way back, we stopped at the Badlands, and bought some Corona and went in there, and then a huge lightning storm came in while we were there, so that was great

Splendid: Yeah, some friends of mine are on tour in California right now and they hit a Lexus yesterday with their tour van!

Chris Brady: A Lexus? Oh my god, that's not good!

Splendid: Yeah, and they're not insured, so they basically had to fork over all of the money they'd made on tour. There it goes!

Chris Brady: Oh man!

Splendid: Is there any soundtrack for the tour so far? What have you guys been listening to?

Chris Brady: Oh, in the van? A lot of OK Computer, Queens of the Stone Age's R... What else have we listened to? We all have huge collections, so we all listen to a ton of stuff.

Splendid: Anything new in particular that you've been digging on?

Chris Brady: Ummm, not really, no. Nothing that totally... Oh, the White Stripes record I like.

Splendid: Yeah, I was surprised at how much I liked it when I finally heard it

Chris Brady: I love it, but I think the drums sound awful. If you can get over the drumming, it's fucking great. But I don't know if I really want to "out" the White Stripes here! But I think that guy (Jack White) is an amazing songwriter. It's kind of like Zeppelin, like Zeppelin IV or something.

Splendid: So you guys have been out with the Get Up Kids for like a week now?

Chris Brady: No, we've just done one show so far.

Splendid: Oh, okay.

Chris Brady: We're doing four shows. This is the second show, we have two days off after this, so we'll probably go home tonight, then drive to Salt Lake for the next one.

Splendid: Even though it's only been one show, how have their fans been treating you?

Chris Brady: Oh, it was great, it was really good. They're really nice guys, and Hot Rod (Circuit) are super nice guys.

Splendid: It seems like you've been doing a lot of tours with bigger bands, like Sloan and the Get Up Kids.

Chris Brady: Yeah, well right now we're just trying to get in with as many bands as we can.

Splendid: I mean, it's great, it's great exposure.

Chris Brady: The thing is, when we left Sloan, we jumped on with Cancer Conspiracy, who I totally dig, they're a really great band. But we played a few just horrible (shows) -- we played in Philly at this place called The Fire, which, I talked to people from Philly, and they're like "Where is it?" We played to like three people or something.

Splendid: That's what happened when Sloan came here (Seattle), like two or three years ago, oddly enough. The show was on a Thursday, and The Stranger (the Seattle alternative weekly) comes out on Thursday, and the only advertising for the show was in that Thursday's issue, and I was reading the paper on Friday morning and found out that Sloan had played the night before, and I was like "FUCK! NO!" And I guess there were like twenty people there, and they were totally pissed.

Chris Brady: They're amazing.

Splendid: Oh yeah, I love them.

Chris Brady: In Canada, they're ginormous, and they're huge around Detroit and the Great Lakes. The Chicago show sold out. But definitely as you go south, the crowds start getting smaller and smaller, until we got down to Atlanta. The show was still like three-quarters full, but it was a smaller place.

Splendid: Well, I think if there had been any publicity at all for the show here that people would have shown up. I think they have a pretty good fanbase.

Chris Brady: But man, if they were based in America, they'd be huge! They'd be ginormous!

Splendid: Well, there's so many bands you could say that about. Do you know You Am I?

Chris Brady: (shakes head)

Splendid: They're a band from Australia, and they're kind of in a similar situation, where they're huge in Australia, and they're playing the stadiums and everything, but here, they play the Crocodile when they come, which is like every five years. I mean, they don't even have an American record deal, but they're seriously like one of the best bands out there. If you dig Sloan, you should totally check out You Am I.

Chris Brady: Sloan just did a distribution deal with BMG, I think. But those guys, man, they are just one of the best rock bands, and they just have a huge catalog to draw from.

Splendid: Do you find a lot of old Pond fans showing up to the shows these days?

Chris Brady: A few, a few.

Splendid: Or is it mainly new converts?

Chris Brady: It's a little of both, you know, I'll run into people...like we played in Atlanta, and ran into this guy who we stayed with when we played there in '93.

Splendid: What have you been doing with yourself in the years since Pond broke up? It's been like four years, hasn't it?

Chris Brady: Yeah, I was writing songs, I was working on this record for a long time, for about two years. I recorded almost three times, with the guys, you know. It started on a VS-880 digital 8-track, and then Charlie, the guitar player from Pond, sold his, 'cause he got a computerized system, like an MO-2 or something, so I bought his for like 500 bucks, so I started over, doing 16-track, and you know, and made a little four-song demo. We played with the Get Up Kids here, actually, and...

Splendid: Was that Mandarin?

Chris Brady: Yeah, Mandarin, home recordings, there were four songs that are on the (Audio Learning Center) album. I did "Prescription", "The Shell", "Broken" and "I Heart Robot", and gave the Get Up Kids a copy. We played with them at the RKCNDY (a now defunct all-ages club...say "Rock Candy"), one of the last RKCNDY shows, and they gave it to my friend Rich, who owns Vagrant, and also used to manage Pond.

Splendid: Oh, okay! Well, that's the connection, then. I was going to ask you how you guys got hooked up with Vagrant.

Chris Brady: Yeah. So then, just a couple of years went by, and I sent one to Adam Kaspar, a friend of mine who's a producer. He did the new Queens album, he's working on the new Pearl Jam record, he did all the Foo Fighters records. He's in Seattle, and just an amazing producer, and he said "hey, I'd love to work on this." So we started all over again, did the drums and bass up here at Studio X, and then I took the two-inch home and dropped it to Pro-Tools. But in between that time, I had a baby, and I got into a house. In three weeks, I moved into a house, had the baby at home, got a job. Then I worked for seven months and didn't do any music, I was just burned out and working like 45 hours a week. Finally, I was so miserable that my wife said, "Look, why don't you just quit and we'll figure it out, just finish your record." So I quit, ran out of money, called Rich and said, "Hey, do you want to put my record out?", and he said "Yeah, sure!"

And I said, "Well, we can either do a part-time band thing or a full-time band thing," and I gave him the two scenarios, and he said "let's do the full-time band thing," and that's what I've been doing ever since!

Splendid: Yeah, cause I heard about Mandarin a few years ago, and thought "Oh, Chris Brady from Pond, cool!" And then I didn't hear anything for a long time, and now all of a sudden I see this band "Audio Learning Center", and I'm like "Who the hell are they?" "Oh, it's Chris from Pond! What the fuck!"

Chris Brady: Well, there were like three other Mandarins, and one of them played South by Southwest. They're on some...I don't know what the label is, but you know, their description was like "They sound like Polvo" and something else, so it was similar to what we were doing. I didn't really like the ethnic overtones of it anyway.

Splendid: So, where did the name Audio Learning Center come from?

Chris Brady: Um, well, actually we took the idea from this place in LA called the Belmont Learning Center. It was like a multimillion dollar learning facility kind of thing. They ended up building it on toxic grounds or something. They threw like millions and millions of dollars into it and once it was almost done, they ended up having to pull out because there was this noxious gas coming up from the ground. So, it was like "Wow, that's really cool." But then we were talking about it and I didn't like that "BLC" is a little too close to "BLT." (laughter) And at this point, we had gone through like every band name we could think of. When I was with Pond, it was like "How about 'Pond'?" "Oh, I like that!" "Okay, we'll take it!". You never thought like the internet. I mean, the internet was out there, but nobody really had it.

Splendid: There are so many more considerations now.

Chris Brady: Everything's so immediate. Like, there could have been a Pond somewhere, but you never thought like "Somebody will have it somewhere, and then we'll have a problem." Now, UBL's been out for awhile, and you type in anything, I don't care what it is...we looked under Latin names, like "Minim", which means "minimum" in Latin. Well, there's a "Minim" in Iceland! So we went for the multi-worded thing. And we like the "ALC" as an acronym also.

Splendid: That's cool. Coming back to Vagrant, I think a lot of people who haven't heard your stuff before and get the record to review or whatever and say "Oh, another Vagrant band, whatever", and then pop it in and are pretty surprised. I've seen a lot of stuff like "this is not your typical Vagrant band."

Chris Brady: I don't think we are.

Splendid: Well, you're not, at all. But I was just wondering, does it feel kind of weird to be on a label where 85 or 90 percent of their bands are, you know, Get Up Kids, Saves The Day, Hey Mercedes -- they all have a pretty similar kind of sound.

Chris Brady: Yeah, it's different.

Splendid: But then there's Paul Westerberg.

Chris Brady: Yeah, you know, I think Vagrant's trying to change, too. They know they can only take that thing so far. And those bands, you know, like the new Get Up Kids album sounds a lot different than their previous stuff. Those bands change. It comes down to good music or bad music. And the whole "emo" tag is such a lazy journalism thing...like when I was on Sub Pop, it was like "Oh, grunge! You're a grunge band!"

Splendid: Like, uh...no.

Chris Brady: Yeah, "Oh, Pond, you're a grunge band 'cause you're on Sub Pop!" You know, we used to tour in Europe, and it was like...the people who made the Sub Pop stuff over there, the T-shirts, had like "grungewear" on the sleeves of our shirts! It was ridiculous! (much laughter) And it's the same thing. People trying to encapsulate in their palette this thing where they can go, "Oh, this is what it is..."

Splendid: Yeah, it's easy to put your finger on. But the thing is that one person saying "emo" could mean something totally different than the next person saying "emo".

Chris Brady: If you listen to the new Get Up Kids and then Saves the Day, they sound pretty different.

Splendid: Yeah, but they both started out pretty similar, you know -- punky, poppy, smooth vocals, there are a lot of similarities.

Chris Brady: Yeah, I'll give you that. And that was a big consideration in going with Vagrant. I mean, we were going to go with them 'cause Rich is a good friend of mine, and I didn't think about it too much, but then the label wanted to push "Favorite" for a single, and, well, it's probably the most palatable and most two-dimensional song on the record. You know what I mean?

Splendid: Sure. It's not a particularly "easy" record.

Chris Brady: Well, yeah, and I'd rather be pushing "Prescription", which I think is much more reflective of what we're into and what we're about, or "Broken", or "Shell". I'm not interested in "easy" music. I'm into like Wilco and Grandaddy, and...you know, like that new Wilco record is not an easy record.

Splendid: Not at all.

Chris Brady: But it's huge! You know?

Splendid: Well, it's not as hard as you might think it would be, what with all the label bullshit they went through trying to put it out. It's pretty straightforward, all things considered. It's definitely multi-layered, though.

Chris Brady: It's definitely like a Kid A, or something like that, for Wilco. You know what I mean? So there's definitely different reservations that I have -- differences that I have with Vagrant. And sitting with Rich, you know, we're supposed to make a video, and I'm sure they want us to do one for "Favorite", and really, I'd rather do one for "Prescription"! You know what I mean? And for videos, like, I don't want to make a traditional video, and I'm going to fight it tooth and nail! What I'd rather do is get a really amazing Flash person and do a Flash video. You know, or something like that. Videos are just played out, I think.

Splendid: Well, MTV is just a bunch of bullshit anyway, so why should you even try to pander to that audience?

Chris Brady: And once you deal with film, it's like, if you have ten grand to spend on a video, or five, or whatever. For film, that's not much money! But in the Flash realm, if you hand $10,000 to a Flash guy, boom! He can fuckin' create a whole universe with that, you know what I mean?

Splendid: Have you seen the big feature on Vagrant in the latest Punk Planet?

Chris Brady: Yeah, yeah, it was really interesting. Really well-written, I think.

Splendid: What do you think about their whole "we're an indie label, but we're going to use all these major label business practices"? Do you have any feeling for that? Has that impacted you guys at all?

Chris Brady: Well, they're doing really well, and I think that the music industry is a really hard place to make money, especially now, so why not? As long as it doesn't come down to "fuck the consumer"...

Splendid: Or "fuck the bands".

Chris Brady: Yeah, or "fuck the bands". Like Alkaline Trio, they showed up in the top 200 in sales on Billboard. I think that did wonderful things for them.

Splendid: But then you think about is that something that you should really be that concerned about? As long as you're making a living, that's great, right? As far as I'm concerned, for someone who's tried to make a band work for like eight years and pretty much failed the whole time, it's like, if you can make your living doing that, that's all I would want.

Chris Brady: Yeah!

Splendid: And it seems to me that once you've reached that point...

Chris Brady: But it's part of making a living, you know what I mean?

Splendid: Yeah, but then again, if you try to sort of exceed that, "we're doing pretty well, well enough to get by", and then you want to take it to that next level... I don't know. It's hard to say.

Chris Brady: Well, if you're not changing what you're doing, then why not? You know what I mean?

Splendid: Yeah, that's fair.

Chris Brady: I mean, I have no fucking problem with making millions of dollars playing music, if I'm playing the same music I'd be playing anyway. I haven't changed the music I've been playing since I signed with Vagrant. The album was done before they ever heard it! They didn't even come to the studio. I sent it to them, I said "hey, whaddya think, my album's done!" And they said "Oh, shit! Sounds great!" So I have no problem with somebody making shitloads of money if they're doing what they want to do. Like the Foo Fighters, I think they're a great fuckin' band! And the guy's huge, I have no problem with that. Nirvana was fuckin' ginormous.

Splendid: Radiohead.

Chris Brady: Yeah, Radiohead...you know. But if you're changing what you're doing, you know, "these kinds of bands are big, so I'm gonna start this kind of band", well I think there is a problem with that, because you're just becoming a shallow-ism, and you're not doing your own thing, you know what I mean?

Splendid: Sure. How would you compare your experience with Vagrant versus Sub Pop or Sony?

Chris Brady: Well, this has been the most supportive label I've ever been on. I think they're a great label! Shit, you know, the van we're using is Vagrant's van, I've never had a van that the label owned. They gave it to us for the next six months! They've been paying my rent for a year. They're great! So in a lot of ways it's great. But there's a lot of similarities. All labels have certain things...they're steering a big ship, you know? And you're just this little lifeboat attached to this whole thing, and your thing is like "hey, it's me here!" Like I'm trying to succeed here, but on the other hand, they have Westerberg and Saves the Day and Get Up Kids and Face to Face, and they've got all these other things, so it's your job to kind of try to get them to...

Splendid: Pay attention to you?

Chris Brady: Yeah, like get you press, or get you radio, or whatever. But it's the same as any label, and it's the same pains like with any label. I think it's very similar, like how Vagrant is now part of Interscope, or whatever, and ten years ago when I was on Sub Pop, Warner bought into it. So Vagrant's growing, and they're hiring all these people from different companies, and it's suddenly like "Oh, we just added this new guy, and that new guy" and whatever, and Sub Pop did the same thing, so it's almost exactly the same.

Splendid: The past repeats itself.

Chris Brady: Instead of grunge, it's emo. I was on the biggest indie then, and I'm on the biggest indie now! I just do what I do, and hopefully outlive the trends.

Splendid: So, let's talk about the record a little bit. You've always kind of written about pretty personal topics, although in Pond, it seemed like you tended to write more about other people, like in "Golden" or "Spokes", which are sort of stories, but are still very fraught with emotion and pain, and that sort of thing. The ALC stuff is a lot more "I", "me", "you", more personal stuff.

Chris Brady: I think that's true -- I don't think it's a very "easy" album.

Splendid: Well, like Pond was easy.

Chris Brady: Yeah, yeah, well, Pond wasn't so easy either, but I spent a lot more time writing this album, probably, than I did with any of the Pond stuff, and I always shared songwriting duties with Charlie in Pond, so I'd do half, and he wrote the other half. With this, the other guys helped me arrange stuff, but I bring all of the melodies and the lyrics, so it's a lot more me, you know what I mean? And I think Charlie always wanted things to be lighter than they were, at least in my songs. He had more songs like "Laika" ("My Dog is an Astronaut"), that had more of a dark twinge to them.

Splendid: Yeah, really weird stuff, but really cool.

Chris Brady: But his stuff was always a little more jovial in a way, whereas my stuff has always been more of a downer. But our second record, though, he wrote a lot of downer music, totally. He had some hard times, and wrote a bunch of that stuff. But I spent two years making this. I spent a long time writing all the lyrics, I recorded all the vocals at home. In Pond I always went in to the studio, I never thought "This is how I'm going to sing it", I'd just sing it, then say "I hit the note -- okay, that's cool". And this one, it was more like I could listen to it, digest it and go "You know what? I'm hitting all the notes, but I don't really like the way my voice sounds," so I could spend the time to get it exactly the way I wanted it...which is probably almost unhealthy, you know what I mean? But I'm a lot happier with the record -- it's a lot closer to me than a lot of the Pond stuff was. I'm very proud of Pond, and super happy with what we did, and I took a long time decompressing after we broke up, trying to figure out what to do with myself.

Splendid: I think Rock Collection was one of the top ten or 20 best records of the '90s.

Chris Brady: Hey, well thanks!

Splendid: I mean, I fuckin' love that record. I put it on like a week ago, and I was just blown away all over again.

Chris Brady: Well cool, thanks! I can listen to it like twice a year, maybe. I think Charlie's the same way.

Splendid: What's he up to these days?

Chris Brady: He's making a record -- it's his solo stuff, it's a lot like "Laika". It's a lot of his slide stuff. I think Quasi is playing backup on a few songs. A lot of keyboard, slide guitars, orchestral stuff. He was talking about going down to record with Jason Lytle from Grandaddy in their studio. He's going to put it out on Off Records -- which is Chris Lutarenko, who used to be in Sprinkler, his record label -- and it's going to be called Gold Card, and there's a couple songs that he wrote in the end Pond days, so I'm on like two of the songs -- he took those, and I took "I Heart Robot". So those will probably make it to the record

Splendid: What precipitated Pond's breakup? Had it just run its course?

Chris Brady: I think so. We'd been doing it for like eight years. Charlie didn't like to tour, and he didn't like to play live. He's pretty much told me that he's never going to play live again. It really just made him uneasy and made him stressed out. The last tour we were on, he was really unhappy. Then when the whole label thing fell apart, we hired some managers. Rich was our day-to-day guy, but there were these two big manager guys who were kind of like his bosses, and they basically hooked us up with Sony. It was between Work or Dreamworks, and I kind of liken it to the two hot girls at school -- one of them is really good looking, like Dreamworks is the one that everybody wants to go to the prom with, but you probably won't get laid. (much laughter) They were like "Yeah, you guys are okay," and they were just starting. They had signed the guy from Wham! -- George Michael and Rollins, I think, were the only two signings that they had made. Work was like a little less pretty, maybe a little more common, but she's definitely gonna...you know?

Splendid: Put out.

Chris Brady: Yeah...so they all showed up and they were super into it, so we signed to them, and they just never did anything. Every time I went over there to try to talk business, they would be like "Let's get out some chicken strips and fuckin' peanut sauce," and I wanted to talk about ads, and what we were doing. And so we went on a tour, we toured with Grandaddy, which was great, we did the No Knife tour, which was great, but probably the worst Pond tours we ever did were around then. The routing was really fucked up, like we'd play Kentucky, then Atlanta, then Chapel Hill -- that's like a 14-hour drive. I don't know, it was just a really fucked up tour. So we called them and said "Hey, what's going on? You promised us all this juice you guys had, and you'd make all these moves, and you could do all these things with this label." They said "Well, it's kind of like stocks...you've gotta get a certain amount of radio play, and radio just didn't like it, so there's not much we can do at this point." And basically they were just sitting on their hands, waiting for something to happen. It happened to everybody -- they were basically just "buying stock" in bands like us. You know, Girls vs. Boys and Pond, and every band who did, like, indie-guitar shit, got signed to a major, and then the day came when the trend changed. So the management just said "Well, you can take your publishing money back and go your own way" -- which was a ton of money to us, but probably not much to them -- "or you can make another record." And the record just came out, it had only been out for a couple of months. So I was like "Well, give us our money back!" So once they were out of it, then suddenly it's like "The label just kind of dropped us," 'cause they were friends, and without the management, it was like "It's not gonna happen." Then our publishing company went left, and we all walked away from Sony with a big check, 'cause they owed us two more records, and Charlie and Dave kind of went their own way. Charlie went to South America for awhile, and came back, and I was just like "Well, you know, I'm just going to start up something else."

Splendid: Dave played in Mandarin for a while, right?

Chris Brady: Yeah, for a short period of time. He was kind of done with music at that point, though.

Splendid: Really?

Chris Brady: He's really into computers. He's a computer guy now. He lives in San Francisco

Splendid: That's a shame, he was an amazing drummer!

Chris Brady: Yeah, he's a good drummer. I think he just wanted to do it for fun, and I was really looking to make it full time, because that's what I'm into, and that's what I want to do. So he was doing computer stuff all the time. Steve and I would sit with him, and he'd say "Can you guys practice and I'll just come in?" He didn't want to play songs more than once, so it was just like "Okay, Dave, I love ya, but..." So then we got Paul, and Paul's a fucking phenomenal drummer.

Splendid: Cool. There are a lot of long songs on the record! Like five to six minutes.

Chris Brady: Yeah, I'm gonna try to do them a little shorter next time.

Splendid: So was that intentional, or just kind of the way things turned out?

Chris Brady: No, no, just the way it came out. What I want to write into a song meaning-wise, they always end up being long songs.

Splendid: In "Broken", about halfway through, there's that total Who ripoff.

Chris Brady: Oh yeah! I think that's a hats-off.

Splendid: So was that intentional?

Chris Brady: Yeah, sure.

Splendid: Cause the first time I heard it I thought, "Okay, what CD is this again?"

Chris Brady: When we wrote it, we thought "Man, this sounds like the Who..." But we love the Who!

Splendid: Sure, sure, there's nothing wrong with that!

Chris Brady: We've had a lot of people say "That's a Who ripoff," but if you're going to rip somebody off, they might as well be great, you know what I mean? And if people say it sounds like the Who, then we must be doing something right! I don't think that whole song sounds like the Who.

Splendid: No, just that one part.

Chris Brady: But that part does. But fuck, you know, they're one of the best bands ever.

Splendid: So...it seems like this is pretty much like your solo record with the band added later?

Chris Brady: Oh no, no, not at all.

Splendid: So it was written as a group?

Chris Brady: Yeah, yeah. We're a band.

Splendid: Well, I'm not saying that you aren't now, but it seems like you're saying that you spent a lot of time doing this record by yourself.

Chris Brady: No, Steve was with me the whole time.

Splendid: Oh, okay.

Chris Brady: We wrote all these songs together. Paul was in it from the beginning. We sit and write as a band. I think that's a misconception that people have, that it's Chris Brady's new thing, but it's not at all. I told the label that, too, like when you talk to the press, this is not my solo thing. We're a band. These guys come up with ideas all the time. I may be the singer and write the lyrics or whatever, but it's a democracy, and we're a band. If I was interested in being a solo artist, I'd call it Chris Brady, and I'd go out and hire people. It's not what I'm into.

Splendid: No, no, I totally understand.

Chris Brady: That's something that I'm very clear about -- we're a rock band. It's hard for these guys, though, 'cause Pond was doing stuff for a long time, and people want to talk about Pond and stuff, but that's only one root of this band, and there's a lot more to it than that. That's just my history with it.