Clint Conley: I think that's probably true. The creation of the songs on the second one reflects a band that's been together for longer. There's more input from the other guys on what works and what doesn't. There's also a heavier guitar tone. But you know, we're just attacking the material harder, and the guys are much more comfortable in their roles.

Splendid: You have some pretty incredible people in your band. Why don't we talk about who they are and how you all got together.

Clint Conley: Yeah, I feel very fortunate from that point of view. Chris Brokaw is an old friend of mine, who's also living in Cambridge. I think that Burma was probably defunct by the time he moved to Cambridge, but I was a fan of (his former band) Come. So he was the first person invited to join this new thing when things started happening again. Well, actually, first I started working with Holly Anderson, whose poetry is the foundation for the lyrics. But after that, I called Chris and told him exactly what was going on, that I had a batch of new songs and was he interested in kicking them around. He brought in Matt and Winston. He knew Matt from The New Year and Winston had played in an iteration of Come and other bands.

Splendid: And Matt was in Bedhead, too?

Clint Conley: Yeah, he was the chief songwriter and singer for Bedhead, which morphed into The New Year, but of course, he plays guitar in that band and plays drums in mine.

Splendid: So did he always play drums? He's a really good drummer.

Clint Conley: Yeah, he is. I don't know. He just does a lot of stuff. You know he also plays keyboards in Silkworm.

Splendid: Oh, really? I love Silkworm, I was just listening to, um, their latest album a couple of weeks ago.

Clint Conley: Is that the one that has the covers?

Splendid: No, this is the white one.

Clint Conley: Yeah, Italian Platinum. I think there was something after that, an EP of covers.

Splendid: It's really hard to keep up. Even writing for Splendid and doing three reviews a week, I always feel like I'm buried in records, but I'm always missing things, too.

Clint Conley: Yeah. That volume of music now, versus 20 years ago, is just phenomenal. There's so much stuff out there. It's a challenge to get yourself heard, to draw attention to what you're doing.

Splendid: But it also seems like, maybe, the stupid people are losing their stranglehold on music, that there's a lot of reallly good stuff that's coming out around the edges.

Clint Conley: There is. At the same time, I'm occasionally sort of demoralized by the faddishness.

Splendid: What do you mean by that?

Clint Conley: There seems to be such a heavy emphasis on retro, the early 1980s thing, skinny tie bands trying to do karaoke versions of older bands. I say that totally aware that Mission of Burma, especially this year, has benefited from this. But it's sort of dispiriting.

Splendid: It's the 20-year cycle.

Clint Conley: I guess. I don't know. But the primary theme is to look backward, which ... I don't know, it's unsettling. At the same time, as Mission of Burma, we've been very well-treated by it.

Splendid: I wanted to ask you about that, because you've revived Mission of Burma, too. How's that going?

Clint Conley: It's going very, very well. There's no way we could have prepared for the reception that we've gotten when we play out. It's really been mind-boggling.

Splendid: It's interesting, though. You're kind of like the Stooges in a way -- a massively influential band, but only around for a very short time.

Clint Conley: I hear people say that. I'm happy when they say it. But I have a hard time seeing where our influence has been. I don't hear people that sound like Mission of Burma, but believe me, I'm thrilled that people hold us up or admire the work we did. I'm proud as hell of it. I'll take what they give me.

Splendid: So, is it the same people in the current Mission of Burma as in the old one?

Clint Conley: The same people on stage -- me and Roger Miller and Peter Prescott. We had a fourth person, Martin Swope, who did tape manipulation, who now lives in Hawaii and just couldn't participate, so Bob Weston filled in.

Splendid: Oh, yeah, and he also produced the two Consonant albums?

Clint Conley: Yeah.

Splendid: So what's that like, 20 years later, to be back with the same people, playing the same songs?

Clint Conley: It's a very powerful experience. It really is. I had a lot of trepidation going into it -- you know, the idea of playing songs from so long ago, whether it would feel true and whether or not it would stand up. It's been really a very remarkable experience going back to this music, and tapping the power and feeling it again and, you know, I think that it holds up. It sounds contemporary. It's still very challenging, and there's not a whole lot out there that sounds like it. And that would have been my goal -- to make something distinctive, something very personal. I think we achieved that.

Splendid: Whose idea was it to get back together?

Clint Conley: We'd been approached several times over the years and I always said no, but it was proposed about two years ago, and I was writing music at the time and feeling very...you know, that that part of me was back. So I said I was interested and the other guys took it from there. It was just an idea that floated across ... an idea that has been around since we broke up, but we had always resisted. It just started to make sense two years ago.

Splendid: Now wasn't there a problem that Roger Miller couldn't play because of his tintinitis?

Clint Conley: Yeah, his ears are bad. They continue to hamper him. He couldn't play and be in a brutally loud environment as a regular thing, but he's willing to absorb that punishment in measured doses. I think that this year, we've done six shows. He says that that's acceptable. He can't do a whole lot more than that. We also just went into the studio and recorded some new songs because as we had gone along doing these gigs, everybody has been writing new music to keep it fresh.

Splendid: How do the new songs compare with the old Mission of Burma songs? Are they similar?

Clint Conley: Some of them are. I'd say that Peter's stuff tends to sound like Volcano Suns. Roger's sound probably the most like old Mission of Burma. A couple of songs I wrote for Mission of Burma might sound more like Consonant. But, you know, it's hard to separate them sometimes.

Splendid: So were you really not doing anything musical for 20 years?

Clint Conley: Not a thing.

Splendid: Did you miss it?

Clint Conley: I didn't miss it...I mean, well, I'd generally say no. Every once in a while I'd be out and get really excited about the music I was seeing when it was good. And so every once in a while I might miss that part of it...but in general, I wasn't missing being on stage or recording or anything like that.

Splendid: So you didn't even pull a guitar out and play, just for yourself?

Clint Conley: I really didn't. A few times over those 15 or 20 years, whatever the period was, I would play guitar or bass if somebody asked me. I'd pull it out and it would be fine, and then I'd end up putting the stuff back in the closet. So, yeah, I was never a casual strummer. For the most part, I just put it down, and other stuff was going on, and I was happy with that. It's kind of weird. I don't know quite...

Splendid: ...what happened?

Clint Conley: I don't know. I do know the sequence of events. Peter Prescott asked me to play bass in The Peer Group down in New York, and I did that gig with them. I had done that a couple of times. And it was always fine, but nothing had ever told me to continue. But this time, I came back from that gig and I got home and started strumming and I just started going through old ideas that I had had shortly after Burma had broken up, and I thought they sounded pretty good. I kept going and the music kept coming out and I was quite astonished. New ideas started pouring out, and I was out-of-my-mind productive. It was like a dam broke or something.

Splendid: And you didn't have any catching up to do? I know that when I don't play piano for a couple of months, sometimes it's hard to play. Did you have any learning curve?

Clint Conley: Not really, my skills were always limited. (laughs) So getting up to speed wasn't too difficult.

Splendid: Let's talk about Consonant. I understand the name of the band is not, you know, the opposite of a vowel, but it's more about "not dissonant".

Clint Conley: Yeah, that's the idea.

Splendid: Why was that kind of music appealing to you at this stage?

Clint Conley: Well, it just felt like the music that I was writing was less agitated, more balanced, more centered, more tuneful than the Burma stuff. In some ways, it's a reactive naming, but it did feel like the right name for this music. Consonant's music is less overtly challenging than Burma's, not as provocative. In Burma, we were always kind of seeking new images in a restless way. This is more... I don't know if you can use the word mature, but centered or something, with less tension.

Splendid: It's interesting, because I think on both the Consonant records, you hear the sweetness of the music first and the muscular, kind of heaviness later. And some songs, like "Who Touches You Now", sound very much like a natural extension of Mission of Burma to me.

Clint Conley: Yeah, I would hope so. I think that the two are connected. "Who Touches You Now" and maybe "Bucket of Flowers" could have been Mission of Burma songs. I've always been a melodic junkie, and I don't mean melody like the ditties you hear, but ambitious chordal melodies. Predominantly, the Consonant songs are still in that palette.

Splendid: There's also something that I was noticing Saturday that I had not really heard on the records, or if I did I wasn't really paying attention. There are a lot of sort of droney, psychedelic elements to what you're doing now.

Clint Conley: Yeah, you know, it certainly wouldn't be deliberate, but that's very much a part of my nutritional intake.

Splendid: What kinds of bands are you talking about?

Clint Conley: I'm not exactly sure. I grew up in the early 1970s and late 1960s and there was a lot of psychedelic music around then. You're not the first person to say that. I personally don't hear it, but people always say that.

Splendid: I think Chris Brokaw was doing it.

Clint Conley: Yeah, maybe. Chris brings a lot of interesting coloration and texture to the band.

Splendid: I'd like to talk specifically about a couple of the songs on Love and Affliction. "Lost Together" is one of my favorites. It's kind of a love song, but very specific and not sentimental. How do you keep a love song from being sappy and stupid and retracing the sound we've heard 100 times.

Clint Conley: (laughs) I'm not sure that I know. But that song was... I took those lyrics from a couple of Holly's poems.

Splendid: Can you talk a little about how you work together?

Clint Conley: Yeah, it varies, but in general, I write a melody and chords, and I have these notebooks filled with her poems and I just kind of forage around until I catch a line.

Splendid: Oh, so she's not there with you...

Clint Conley: Not typically. We have worked that way at the 11th hour trying to come up with lyrics in the studio. In general, though, I take her poems and sort of twist them and chop them to make them fit the template of the melody. I remember that one, when I first had set the chorus, I was looking at the notebook and found those words, and it just sounded like the chorus. I got very excited, because it felt absolutely right for what up to that point was my song ... (he sings the melody of the chorus of "Lost Together"). I mean, it kind of reads out perfectly. I could just drop in the thought without any alteration.

Splendid: So what if it doesn't? She doesn't mind if you switch her stuff around?

Clint Conley: So far, she hasn't. I go over it with her. I send her along a tape with the lyrics on it, and she might send back a recommendation, like those words kind of clunk there, try this. Or I will send her something and say, I need an ending for this line, and she will send me the words. It's mostly by email, back and forth.

Splendid: She lives in New York?

Clint Conley: Yeah. And she's an ex-Bostonian and a friend from way back. I used one of her poems for a Burma song called "Micah" which is on Versus. She's also done some Burma album covers. She's a visual artist as well. So, yeah, it's been a really interesting way to work. I didn't really collaborate much before. In Mission of Burma, we really wrote our songs separately, and I love it.

Splendid: The lyrics are really good, really evocative and spare.

Clint Conley: I think it's really worked.

Splendid: Another song I really like is "Mysteries of the Holiday Camp", which is one of yours. That's got some stuff in it that sounds like it might be autobiographical.

Clint Conley: Absolutely.

Splendid: Like that "Ripped right out of the car pool and put up on the big stage." That's you?

Clint Conley: Yeah, that's me in Burma. It was just a freak thing. We were playing this big festival -- it was the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in the UK. It was about a month after Burma had done its first gig in New York. We went over to the Festival and, wow, it was great. It still was extremely fresh -- still is, really -- but at that stage, it was extraordinary... phantasmogorical. Being on stage and playing in front of so many people... Again, Burma had never done anything in the UK. when we were together. We never played there. Nobody ever paid the least bit of attention to us.

Splendid: Really?...I guess they had their own punk thing going on at the time.

Clint Conley: Yeah, I guess. They were not interested. It wasn't for lack of trying. We had people over there trying to get us shows. They just couldn't have cared less. But when we went over there, again, to the Festival, they thought we were hot shit...

Splendid: Who was curating that one?

Clint Conley: Shellac. But, you know, we had a tremendous success. It was terrific being out in front of the huge crowds. It's still hard to integrate the Burma thing and the Consonant thing with work and the rest of my life. Particularly the Burma thing because it's on such a big scale.

Splendid: So will you be on, say, a business call, and somebody will say, oh, are you that Clint Conley?

Clint Conley: Every once in a while. I don't know. So it's mostly carpools, but every once in a while...In the song, I was talking about the DI box.

Splendid: The rubik cube.

Clint Conley: Yeah, it's the device on top that you plug in, but I didn't understand what it was. I remember the stage guys kind of looking at each other, thinking how can you not know this thing? The thing was, Burma had never played places big enough to have DI boxes. You could see the stagehands thinking, this guy is playing the main stage and he doesn't know what a DI box is? This is going to be interesting. I could see them kind of rolling their eyes at each other. And I'm kind of like, hey dude, this isn't my life. I don't know what I'm doing.

Splendid: It's such a weird subculture, those people who have nothing in their lives but rock music. So one of the things that I really like about Love and Affliction is the marriage of hard and soft. The fact that you have this really rock-oriented stuff going on and then there are also these really high, sweet, almost folky vocals. I'm talking about stuff like "Dumb Joy", "Cauldron"...Is it ever hard to get that stuff to mesh?

Clint Conley: No, because it's not like it started out in two separate places and then clashed together. It's more that the song comes from the same place. I wouldn't say it's hard to make them mesh. It all comes from the same place.

Splendid: A lot of times they're the same notes, but have a different tone to them.

Clint Conley: I like that tension. There's a lot of that on the album. When we're playing out live, there's probably a little bit too much soft/loud.

Splendid: You think?

Clint Conley: I have very few conscious thoughts about the music I write, but that's one that I did have. I thought that I would try not to fall into that repetition next time.

Splendid: I like it.

Clint Conley: Well, I do, too, in general.

Splendid: But you don't want to be too predictable.

Clint Conley: Right. Sometimes when I'm doing the set list, I'll think, well, this one starts quiet and pretty and then explodes, the next one starts quiet and pretty then explodes... You know, you don't want to have too much of a pattern.

Splendid: You already talked about this a little bit, but I was wondering if you wanted to share your thoughts on how the music business has changed since the last time you were in it -- stuff like downloading and the disappearance of radio. How has that changed the way that you market what you do?

Clint Conley: Well, when it comes to marketing, I'm really uneducated.

Splendid: Maybe that's the wrong way to put it. How does it affect the way you reach your audience?

Clint Conley: As for reaching an audience, I'm the last one to know that, too. I'd say that 80 percent of my focus is on writing the songs and recording. Even performing live isn't exactly an afterthought, but it's of secondary importance to me. The actual environment into which these things are being released, with the media consolidation and digital technology, I just don't think about it much. And I certainly don't think about it in terms of compensation or anything on that level. When I think about Napster and Kazaa and all these things, I never made any money on music and I never expected to. Other than dribs and drabs. It's not like that's a big concern of mine. And certainly, anything that hurts the record companies makes me happy. Even if it's hurting me at the same time.

Splendid: Do you download stuff?

Clint Conley: You know, I don't. I did. I started to do it when it first came out, and I did it and I felt dirty.

Splendid: Really?

Clint Conley: Yeah, and I'm not a stickler. I wouldn't mind if people downloaded mine, but I downloaded music from bands that I might have bought the CD for. I was sort of sampling stuff. And I felt sort of dirty. I really did. I woke up the next day and I felt like I had looted a record store the night before. I felt kind of sick. So I don't do it. Every once in a while, I'll go in and sample something. But I'm not a huge consumer. I listen to the radio quite a bit.

Splendid: Do you have decent radio in Boston?

Clint Conley: Oh yeah, we've got great radio.

Splendid: We don't have anything.

Clint Conley: I have to imagine that we have some of the best radio in the country. There's new music on all day.

Splendid: I miss that. I listen on my computer quite a bit, but it would be nice to just be able to turn it on and listen.

Clint Conley: Yeah, WMBR at MIT is a stalwart in the morning. CBC is on all day. That's AM. There are so many other college radio stations. But those are the two pillars, where you know you're going to listen to them and hear good stuff.

Splendid: That's the thing. You want to hear new stuff that maybe you'll like. It's easy to find stuff you like, because you can listen to old stuff, and it's easy to find new stuff, because it's all over the web, but it's good to have somebody you can trust who can go through it for you. So what are you working on now, musically?

Clint Conley: I'm getting ready to...Burma is playing at the All Tomorrow's Parties in LA, which is taking place on the Queen Mary ship.

Splendid: Cool.

Clint Conley: Yeah, it should be out of control. The Stooges are playing there, Cat Power, a bunch of cool people. Elliott Smith was supposed to play there...but won't be coming for the sound check, as they say. So that's going to be a really wild time out there.

Splendid: That sounds great. Are you going to be doing another Consonant album?

Clint Conley: There's nothing planned right now. I'm working on some new material. It's going to be a busy Burma schedule for the next month or so.

Splendid: So how do you manage that? How do you get time off to do all this stuff?

Clint Conley: That's the challenge. You try to keep it to weekends and night. And then early next year, the New Year is releasing a record and going out on tour, so Matt and Chris will be out of the picture. So I don't know. Consonant may...we have some gigs set up for January and December, but they're weekend things, going to New York and DC in one weekend, going to Chicago, Milwaukee and Minneapolis on another. So it's just quick hits. But probably next year, things will slow down for Consonant a little bit. It's likely to be a little more Burma.

Splendid: Well, great and good luck, and hopefully it won't be another 20 years.