Splendid: Some artists -- like you, and maybe Neil Young -- are constantly reinventing themselves, and there are some who kind of find a corner and keep doing what they're doing over and over again. There must be some critical juncture where you decide which way you're going to go.

Steve Wynn: I don't know why people would want to do the same thing over and over. People do that. I would never want to do that. I make a lot of left turns, changes in direction and being contrary. It's like Neil Young and like Bob Dylan. You risk losing a lot of fans, but I think at the end of the day you have more fans than ever, because they know that each time it will be something different, some new take on what you're doing. I think that's kind of exciting. Those are my favorite performers. I thought the last two Dylan albums were amazing. It was like after all those years, he found a new way of getting to the way he's feeling, to the heart of what he wants to show. It's exciting. The guy is 60 years old. This guy has influenced everybody in rock music and written songs that will live forever. And so, he feels the need to come out there and blow away everything he's done before. That's exciting.

Splendid: Yeah, what do you see as some of the biggest risks you've taken?

Steve Wynn: Almost every record. Each record, almost willfully, almost in a self-sabotaging sense, I try to completely confound the expectations of anybody who liked what I did before, to make a very different type of record. In fact, the first two records, the first one I wrote was a record that was loved by lots of people, and rather than duplicate that, I wanted to almost... Really, when we made that first record, that was almost a way of testing not only people who didn't know us but people who liked us -- to say, if you think you liked us, I'm going to make sure by completely pushing you in some direction you may not be willing to go and see if you're still along for the ride. It's kind of this brattiness that we had. And with the second one, we did even more of that. We built almost a secret society among people who liked the first record, and then the second record was a very different record. It was the same in attitude but very different in sound, and a lot of people got it, and that was exciting. Things like that. Changing styles, revisiting songs on stage each night. Stretching things out. These are all things that are important, I think, because they challenge you and they challenge your audience. It keeps you from getting bored and stale and thinking you've heard it all before.

A lot of musicians will put out a new record and people who liked them in the past will think, "I don't need to get that because I already know all about him." That's a bad place to be. I would hope people wouldn't do that with me, so I try to avoid it. That's a really bad place to be as a music fan or to be as a musician, where people think, "Okay, I know that once I pull the shrink-wrap off the CD, I know what's going to be inside." That's bad.

Splendid: I also think that what you do -- which is very much in a traditional rock-and-roll vein -- it must be really hard to do well. We get a ton of CDs from bands that say, you know, this is just straight-up rock and roll, and it's really boring and awful. And yet your stuff, you hear it and it feels like something you've heard all your life. It's really familiar and really great, but it has that extra something to it.

Steve Wynn: I hope so. Definitely, working in the two guitar, bass and drums field, you think, "Man, what in the world can you do that hasn't been done before?" I think that's a reasonable question. I think most things I hear like that tend to be pushing some buttons that have been pushed before. I think with any music, whether it's indie rock or heavy metal or soul or jazz or classical, any kind of music, you use whatever style you're in as a tool to get to deeper emotions. I love jazz because you've got alto and tenor sax and a trumpet player and bass and drums, and you've heard it all the time, but you can take the most standard of standards with the most normal jazz quartet and throw in all of the pain or excitement or lust or love or fascination or beauty in their life, and use the instruments and the style as a way of getting that out. I think that's where the excitement is. That's where, as you say, the extra something comes in. Why, when we hear a band, which should be the most conventional...For example, Nirvana, when they first came out, why did they connect? Not because they were playing grunge. Not because they were using a nice fuzz pedal. Not because the drummer was playing great stuff. It was because there was something in the music and in Kurt Cobain's voice that expressed what made him special -- his personality, his life, his past...That's what makes music that transcends all the other music you hear. Not because you play guitar very fast, not because you program samples better than the guy next to you. It's because you have some way of getting whatever's interesting about you out through your music.

Splendid: I wanted to ask you...your email address is "cultartist".

Steve Wynn: (laughs) Yeah.

Splendid: And I assume that's sort of a joke. But did you make a decision that you wanted to be where you are now, respected certainly and a good fan base, but not huge? Is that a decision you made?

Steve Wynn: I never made the decision, but when I started, all my heroes were in that same kind of ballpark -- Jonathan Richman or Lou Reed or Iggy, or even most of my favorite jazz artists. My heroes were in the underground, somewhere between middle to lower underground, who had fans who were devout and loved what they did, but never quite were known by most of the mainstream. So it makes sense that I would want to do the same thing. I like it, you know, it's a good combination, because I live for my music. I tour all the time. I have a lot of people who connect to my music and it means a lot to them, and yet, I have complete freedom to do whatever I want. I didn't design it that way, but it doesn't surprise me that I would end up there.

Splendid: Does it ever bother you that people who are doing much less interesting and creative stuff are better known and making more money?

Steve Wynn: No. The last thing I would want to do is make music that's less interesting. No. I think that's part of the deal. Of course, there's lots of good music in the mainstream as well. I don't say that everything in the mainstream is bad. But the fact of the matter is that you generally have to compromise, sell your soul, whatever, to get to that point where you're accepted on a mass level. Unless you're kind of a fluke situation. I don't know. My view of the whole thing is that I am very fortunate. I have what I want. I've lived for music. I travel a lot. Eat crazy foods. Meet interesting people. Make records every year or year and a half. Make the music that I want when I want to make it. That's a great situation. It's a fair question, but when I get a question like that, I'm always surprised. If I walked into any local rock club or bar and talked to a couple of the bands playing there, and said, "I'm your fairy godmother, and I grant you the wish to get a recording contract and go on tour and give up your day job," they would say, "You're kidding me." It's a great life. I just never saw it that way. It's the same way for a lot of people that I'm into. You kind of roll with it, and if you have a year or two where you're maybe a little less in fashion, that's cool, because maybe next year you'll be back in fashion.

Splendid: Let's talk about the people in your band.

Steve Wynn: Well, the record is by myself and the Miracle 3. That's the band I've been touring with live for the last couple of years. That's Jason Victor on guitar. He's from New York. I've known him for a long time because he worked at my favorite record store.

Splendid: Which one?

Steve Wynn: Well, it's gone now. It's called Venus Records. Where are you located?

Splendid: New Hampshire, but I lived in New York for about eight years.

Steve Wynn: Venus Records on St. Mark's. I used to go there all the time. He was, at the time, probably 21 or 22 years old, and knew all my records inside out. It was kind of cool. I knew he was a musician, so we got together to play guitar just for fun one time, and I was going on tour, and just before the tour, my guitarist quit the band. So, I said, look -- at this point, he didn't have a job -- he knew my songs, so I said, "Do you want to come on the road and be my guitarist?" He was thrilled. And he's great -- really, really cool to play with. It's still very new to him, so he's very excited about it, and that's a definite spark.

The bass player is Dave DeCastro. I've played with him for about four years.

Splendid: Yeah, he does some solo stuff, too, doesn't he?

Steve Wynn: He does. You know about that?

Splendid: I've heard the name, but I don't think I've heard any of his work.

Steve Wynn: He's on a very low level, and I wish more people knew about him. He does completely self-press, completely DIY, but he makes really good records, all homemade, and he played on the Health and Happiness Show. He's played with a lot of good people -- Butch Hancock and Amy Rigby and Marty Wilson-Piper. So he's been playing with the Miracles.

Then Linda Pitmon, my drummer, has been with me for seven years now, my last four or five albums. She was in a very good Minneapolis band called Zu Zu's Petals in the early 1990s, and she's played with a lot of people -- Amy Rigby, Freedy Johnston, people like that.

And then on the record, also, is Chris Cacavas, who has been my friend and I've worked with him for 20 years now, and he has been the sideman or the bonus guy for the last couple of records.

Splendid: And he does all the keyboards, right?

Steve Wynn: Right. He's great. His records are fantastic. He was in a band called Green on Red in the 1980s. His records are mostly available in Germany. He doesn't get a lot of attention here, but he's great.

Splendid: You seem to have more of a following in Europe than here, too.

Steve Wynn: Definitely. All along, from the start, I've had more of a following. A lot of my following is in Europe, for whatever reason. I think initially, the Dream Syndicate toured there a lot. People seemed to pick up on the early records. And just naturally, as we toured there a lot more, it started perpetuating itself. You tour more in one place and you get more fans. And throughout most of the 1990s, until about five or six years ago, I didn't tour America at all. I played maybe 10 times in the States over five years. Just because I was touring Europe all the time. You go where people want to hear you. Now, to some extent, we're rebuilding an audience over here, and it's fun. It's exciting. It's almost like a crusade.

What's great is that a lot of people who are just getting into my stuff over here have kind of started with Here Come the Miracles and gone backwards from there. Not that I'm embarrassed about my past, not that I don't want to talk about it. I'm really proud of it. But you always hope that people are keeping up with new things you're doing as well.

Splendid: So I was hoping we could talk specifically about some of the songs on the album. The one that I like the best is "Amphetamine", which has that great, really long intro. Was that how the song started?

Steve Wynn: Yes, there were a lot of things that went into that. That was kind of by design from the start. There was a great version by the Byrds of "Eight Miles High" on the record Untitled, and I had thought of that at that time. It's got a version of their classic "Eight Miles High" but the intro is like ten minutes, and there's this long, long jam going into it, and finally when it breaks into the song, you feel this kind of relief and exhilaration, like "Here it is. It's finally here." And I really liked that. I did that on the last couple of records with different songs -- "Smashed Myself to Bits" on the previous record. I like that. It comes out of jazz. In jazz, you will often have a long build up into the theme, a lot of improvisation. I want to do a lot more of that in the future.

What I love about "Amphetamine" -- the first riff is one chord and it's a repetition of three chords through the whole song. It's very minimal, but a very strong groove. But you feel so much out of that groove. I like that it's very hypnotic.

Splendid: But there's a lot going on within that.

Steve Wynn: There's a lot of changes. There's a lot of development within those chords. Which is a very typical way of working in -- more the traditional way of songwriting is to change chords and melodies a lot to dictate what's going to happen in the song, what will happen in the development of the melody and all that. You'll have a lot of chord changing. When I started the Dream Syndicate, I started getting back into more what happens in jazz and psychedelic music, which is to take a very minimal, repetitious thing and just repeat it until it creates its own pattern. It sounds very dizzy and cosmic, but it works really well.

Splendid: There's a lot of that stuff coming out now. I don't know if you've heard the new Dead Meadow album, or Kinski? There's a lot of drony, hypnotic stuff.

Steve Wynn: Yeah, there are a lot of things -- well, they're not new, but Spiritualized or Primal Scream, that I like quite a bit, Death in Vegas. There are a lot of really cool bands doing this neo-psychedelic thing that's great to hear. I think a lot of people think, even going back to the early days, that psychedelic means wearing paisley shirts and sunglasses and using a wah-wah pedal. But, no, psychedelic music really is music of extremes. It's music that can take you out of your head to someplace, and by the time you've finished experiencing the song, you're someplace different from where you began. That's a great thing. That's a real potential of music that people don't look at. I think people forget that music can be a transforming thing. My favorite music is like that and I always try to do a lot of that. "Amphetamine" is definitely the strongest case for that on the new record. And "Keep It Clean" is another one.

Splendid: "Keep It Clean" is a lot sparer than "Amphetamine". There's more space in the song. In "Amphetamine" there's always something going.

Steve Wynn: "Keep It Clean" is a lot more minimal.

Splendid: What about "Candy Machine"? I love that one, and it's more of a character song, whereas some of your others seem very personal.

Steve Wynn: Yeah. The funny thing about that one... I've been asked about that a lot, and it's hard for me to talk about because I didn't write the lyrics. Linda wrote the lyrics to that one. It's the second time ever that I've sung lyrics that somebody else wrote. But I was stuck. I worked on "Candy Machine". I had the title, I had the melody, I had the riff, and I had some really bad lyrics. I couldn't...it happens a lot where you write something and you've gotten attached to it because you know it and have sung it a few times, and it's hard to hear anything different, but you don't like it. It was driving me crazy. I knew I wanted to record this, and I couldn't figure out what to put there. Linda had insomnia one night and the next morning had written these lyrics. They were great and really fun to sing and a great story song and fit the melody. I think she had channelled a lot of my writing style. It was kind of funny, too. She was pretty right on.

Splendid: Yeah, it reminds me of "Southern California Line".

Steve Wynn: It's so dense and everything, and the distortion and the whole thing pulsating, kind of heavy, thick thing, exactly. All the distortion pedals going at once. But it's a little happier than "Southern California Line".

It is a good story. I've asked her about it, because if I'm going to sing it, I probably should know what it's about. It was inspired by her grandmother, who came from South Dakota and settled in Minneapolis.

We were in Tucson recording the record and living in this great hotel called the Congress Hotel. It's a real old hotel, going back to the 1900s, in very old style -- no TVs, ceiling fans -- but it's also the main club and hip bar and dance scene for the city as well. So you're in the hotel until one in the morning and it's just complete thump, thump, thump and everybody's all decked out and hanging out at the bar until one in the morning. So we're kind of seeing this whole scene, this whole circus of the Tucson nightlife going in and out of our hotel the whole time, and I think that song reminded me of that as well.

Splendid: The other one that's kind of interesting is "The Ambassador of Soul", which has that great '70s soul keyboard ...

Steve Wynn: Fender Rhodes.

Splendid: Do you like soul?

Steve Wynn: Quite a bit. Probably it's my favorite music. For all the fact that, it's very nice that my music has been embraced and taken up by the alt-country crowd, which is very cool, I really come from much more of a soul background than a country background. I've always loved it. Especially '70s soul. I love '50s R&B and soul, but early '70s soul is really my favorite. I kind of wanted to get a bit of that kind of feeling, that sort of slinky thing. And as much as I love it, I don't do it often, because it's something that doesn't come that naturally to me, and I know the difference between loving a music and being able to do it. But I've done it a few times. A few records ago, I did a song called "Cats and Dogs" where I did this also, and I liked that one as well, so maybe I'll get a bit more into it in the future.

I wrote that song on keyboard, and that dictates what you can do with it as well.

Splendid: It reminds me of a song called "How Long Has this Been Going On", by, I think, The Amazing Rhythm Aces.

Steve Wynn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great song.

Splendid: Just the keyboard, not the song, the song is completely different, but it just gives me a little bit of a flashback.

Steve Wynn: Yeah, it reminds me of a Steely Dan song, too, at the same time. It definitely has an early '70s -- in fact right now I'm in Santa Monica, looking down at the beach, and it sounds like what I'm seeing. It feels like waves crashing and the top down. I grew up with the early '70s music, not just soul but pop and rock, so it's always the language I know best of all. You don't want to be too nostalgic, but also, it's happened a lot in the last ten years, too. When I was starting, 20 years ago, it wasn't as cool to be retro or nostalgic. Now people do it all the time. I think it's kind of fun -- rather than getting a sample of a Fender Rhodes, get the Fender Rhodes. It sounds great. And you don't even know why, but it takes you back to a time in your life.

Splendid: Yeah, but a lot of your fans, you couldn't take them back to that part of their lives because they weren't alive yet, or they were in diapers.

Steve Wynn: I'm glad about that. For a long time, until about five years ago, I'd say most of my fans were my peers. People who were as old as I was, people who started when I started, they'd been through the music and followed all along. That's very nice, but there are two problems with that. One is that those kind of people want you to stay where you were and get threatened almost as you try to move on when they're not ready to do that. Not always, but sometimes. And also, it's just nice that young people are picking up on what you're doing. I see that all the time now, and I love that. It started with Here Come the Miracles and that record really gave a nice second wind to my career. I'm really glad.

It is funny, though, because a lot of things I refer to -- even Jason, my guitarist, who was born in 1973, so there's elements in my music that came before he was alive, but that's cool. But he's got quite a record collection anyway, so he knows what I'm talking about.

Splendid: It's weird when you talk to kids who are that age about stuff that you remember hearing on the radio, and they're treating it like pop history. It's a little strange sometimes. They're all expert about it, and you're like, oh, yeah, I remember that song.

Steve Wynn: It is pretty funny. It is pretty wild when people talk to you who are experts on the things that were around before they were born. But I was like that, too, when I was starting out, playing in bands, 18 or 19, in the late 1970s, I was completely into Bo Diddley and Little Richard and all this stuff from before I was born. I was like, "Howlin' Wolf, that's the greatest stuff." And he was making records before I was born. I was into all the 1960s garage, and my god, I was, like you say, in diapers, when that stuff was going on. So I was into the same things. It makes sense to me. I think if you love music you would want to do that. It's always good to be up on what's going on right now, and get hopped to the coolest things and why you like it, but you also should know your history. It's inspiring.

Splendid: That's what's great, it's always there. I learn a lot of things backwards. I'll get a record, and someone will say, oh, that's influenced by "X" and then I have to go out and get "X".

Steve Wynn: That's cool. That's fun.

Splendid: I understand there's a bonus disc that went out with Static Transmission that had a Springsteen cover on it.

Steve Wynn: Yeah, it's eight songs, all outtakes from the record, including a Springsteen cover that we did for a Springsteen tribute record in Spain.

Splendid: Are you a fan?

Steve Wynn: I am, actually. Uncut magazine in England did a Springsteen special, and I ended up writing a lot of the issue. I wrote the introduction to the piece. I'm a very big fan. People tend to be so surprised that I'm a fan of Springsteen. To me, it's funny, because it reminds me of the difference between what he meant when I was a teenager and what he means now. Now he's sort of this very big, very bombastic, pompous, good-time, nostalgic party band kind of thing. Which is cool. I think he's still great. But when I was younger, I saw him play when I was 18 on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour, and I went to that with Kendra Smith, who was the bass player in the Dream Syndicate. We'd never seen anything like it. It transcended -- sure, he was combining Phil Spector and 1960s R&B and Dylan all together -- but it was more than that. It was him. His tenacity and need to create something that was the biggest, greatest, grandest, most ambitious thing ever. It was really exciting to see him really bite off more than he could chew and really pull it off. This was the way it started. And at the time, everything else that was around was boring prog bands. You see that and say, "Man, that's great. I want to do that, too." He was a huge influence on me. Not so much anymore. I know he's playing LA on Sunday and I have no desire to see it. But, you know, that's great. I still admire what he did and how he really turned passive, boring music of the 1970s upside down, just as punk rock did.

Splendid: You write a lot of California songs.

Steve Wynn: God, yeah, that was the plan.

Splendid: Is that where you grew up?

Steve Wynn: Yes, I was born about a mile from where I'm sitting right now in Santa Monica and I've lived here for most of my life. Yeah, as much as I love New York, I will never know any city as well as I know Los Angeles. I just started writing about it lately. It wasn't even by design. It wasn't even a case of, "Okay, I'm going to write California songs and tell the story of my home town." I just started writing them all the time. I think it's because I've been gone from the city for nine years, and I think I've been gone long enough that I have the perspective of the city, and all that's left in my memory are the romantic elements of the city. None of the insane things. Maybe this happened to you in New York, as well, that all the things that were dull and commonplace are gone and all that's left are things that seem interesting and essential.

Splendid: Right, although I do remember being stuck in the subway with the air conditioning off, and I try to hold that image whenever I get bored up here. So how'd you get started? When did you get your first guitar?

Steve Wynn: I got my first guitar when I was eight years old and wrote my first song when I was nine. By the time I was four or five, I was obsessed with music, and just, you know, I don't know why. I had an older sister. But for some reason, it was available to me. I would listen to the radio, I would walk miles to go to the local record store and look at the records and see what they were playing at the store. All that stuff. I was always obsessed. I started with an acoustic guitar and got my first electric when I was 11 and started playing in bands back then. I would love to have film or videos of when I was 12 years old and playing songs by The Who and The Rolling Stones and Neil Young and Creedence and all that stuff. I was having a ball.

Splendid: Your mom must have been very worried about you.

Steve Wynn: She wasn't. She may have been later on, but at the time, she wasn't. She was probably glad I was into something, that kind of thing.

Splendid: My son has been asking for a guitar.

Steve Wynn: Really. How old is he?

Splendid: Eight.

Steve Wynn: Well, there you go, that's the right age. Does he want an electric one, or acoustic?

Splendid: He wants electric. He wants to make all the noise he can.

Steve Wynn: Well, you should get him a really small amp, so he can't make too much noise.

Splendid: Well, we live out in the country, so I don't think it's going to bother anyone.

Steve Wynn: But you'll hear it. I played in bands for most of my teenaged years, and kind of laid off because the music scene was so boring in the 1970s. I was jaded. I had had enough. But then when punk rock came along, I was leaping back into it. It's amazing. Unless you were there, you can't appreciate how inspiring that was. It was the first time ever that anybody could do it, for better or for worse. For better because all of the sudden people got inspired, people who never would have thought it was possible to be in a band. And also there were people who had no business being in a band and had nothing to say were doing it as well.

Splendid: Were you really into the punk scene in the late 1970s?

Steve Wynn: Extremely into it. I was out there every week, buying every new single, every new band coming along. I was obsessed with it. Not so much as a fashion statement but more of a reawakening of all the things that I loved about music. There are certain times in history -- and I think now is another time like that -- where there's that kind of immediacy, where every week the rules change. I think it's happening, too, now with so many new bands coming up through the Internet, where you can be turned on to bands that are just making music to be downloaded, and all kinds of different stuff is happening all the time. But again, it's a secret society. It's there if you want to find it. If you look at the mainstream, if you look at what's selling, if you listen to your alternative rock stations, you're going to think that everything's boring, it's all been done, it's just kind of bland and corporate. But if you dig around, there's some amazing stuff out there. People who are playing in ways that no one every thought of before, and that's great. And you've got to listen to 1,000 records to be inspired by one, but it's like drugs, just complete exhilaration when you find that one.

Splendid: It's kind of overwhelming. There's so much music out there.

Steve Wynn: It is overwhelming. One of the nice things about my life, touring as much as I do, is that every night I run into hardcore music fans. It's a nice thing. I have people all the time, saying, "Steve, I think you would love this." And they give me a CD and I hear it, and I say, "Yeah, I like that. It's great." Only five people will know, and I get to hear it. Most people who know me know I'm a music fan and will take the opportunity to try to turn me on to something. And I love that. I'll go to a record store for an in-store performance or whatever, and I'll always go to the clerk and I'll say, "What do you like?" And he'll say something and I'll pick it up and listen to it. And maybe it will be the one. But it is overwhelming, completely overwhelming, and unless you're in my position or working in a record store or a music journalist, you're not going to be able to find stuff that easily.

Splendid: So how do you feel about the whole downloading thing? It sounds like you're not entirely against it?

Steve Wynn: I've done 180 degrees. I used to be really against it because at first I thought it was one more way of ripping off musicians. I thought it was taking money and food away from people who could least afford it. I've kind of changed my mind. Radio is so bad and record stores can't carry a lot of stuff and there's so many bands clamoring for attention, any way you can get your music out there is good. Downloading music isn't the new retail. Downloading is the new radio. It's another way of getting music out there. I'm not going to get played on the station that's playing Creed or Nickelback. I have a better chance with somebody going online and saying, hey, this sounds pretty cool. And all of the sudden I've got a new fan who's going to come to my show the next time I'm in town. How can I compete with that? Maybe if you're a huge superstar and somebody's pirating copies of your stuff, it's a problem. But, hey, that's a problem you can deal with. If you're Metallica, you've got better things to complain about than somebody taking one percent of your money away from you.

Splendid: Yeah, I think so, it seems like every time I download something, I end up buying records, usually more than I had intended to or could afford anyway.

Steve Wynn: I think so. Especially on this level, it seems like you're a real music fan. It's more a way of getting turned on to things that you will eventually buy and support. If you're a mainstream artist, maybe it's a whole different story.

Splendid: But I do feel bad for these young bands that can barely afford gas for their tour vans. It seems so unfair to take money away from people who are hardly making a living and are doing something that's really valuable to people like me.

Steve Wynn: Yeah, but what they really need is to reach their fans. You could, just as easily 20 years ago, have gone with your tape recorder and taped off the radio and said, "Okay, I have all the music now." People did that all the time. It's really no different than it was. It's just that you can't hear it on the radio. So, it is a drag that a lot of young bands are going to have sales taken away by downloading, but in the long run, it's going to turn more people on to your music. It's kind of a godsend in that way. It's a way to communicate to people that you wouldn't have otherwise. That's one of the reasons why touring is more important than ever. It's a way -- like troubadours from the 15th century, you're travelling into town. That's how you're connecting with people. That's how you're telling your story. That's how you're getting it all across. Even people who are just below the mainstream, you'll hear them say things like this is great. I'm in communication with my fans all day long.

Splendid: What are you doing next?

Steve Wynn: We're probably touring until the end of the year, the States and then Europe all through October and then back over here. I want to do another record right away. I've been writing a lot lately and I like the way things are going. I'm trying to get to the studio in March to have another record out this time next year. I like to do a new record every year, year and a half; people say it's prolific, and I go, "Man, a year and a half, that's being a slacker, that's being lazy." Because I'm comparing to Neil Young and Creedence, the Beatles, they would do three a year.