Tatone: Do you feel hopeful then? When you think about something like how it's sad the way our government reacted, do you feel hopeful?

Tucker: I do feel hopeful. It's one of the many things that I feel, and that we've written about on this record. But there is a sense of hope on this record. You can't just give up hope; you can't just let the conservative agenda take over.

Tatone: You've been known, over the six albums you've made, for keeping it consistently fresh and original without getting repetitive, while progressing as individual musicians. What sort of things have helped and motivated you to progress and grow, with both your playing and songwriting? And do you think there are ways you've changed for this album?

Brownstein: I think it's natural to want to progress from one album to the next. Certainly, when we started writing this album, we felt like "This is our sixth album; there's no reason to do anything similar to what we've already done." We felt like we had no expectations, nothing hanging over us after our hiatus. So, with each specific song we challenged ourselves and spent a lot of time working on them, editing and sculpting the songs. And there's no major motivation except just the internal sense of wanting to grow.

In what ways do we think we've changed for this album? Well, just taking more time with each song is the main thing. We used to rely heavily on the intuitive process, and I think that works and it continues to work, but we realized our first idea wasn't always the best idea. So, we did a lot of rethinking on each song and going back and changing our parts if they didn't work the first time. So that's the biggest difference.

Tatone: It came out really well. Could you talk about the new album? Why did you name it One Beat? Did it turn out how you'd hoped or expected it to? Did it surprise you in any ways after hearing the recording?

Tucker: All those things I was talking about before, when I was talking about ["One Beat"], they came out really clear when we recorded the song. The sense of hope that comes throughout that song — troubled hope maybe — makes sense with the rest of the songs. And the idea of One Beat is the idea of holding onto that one thing we might have in common, which is hoping that things will get better and that we can do our part to try and make it better.

Tatone: As far as the way it turned out in the end, was it what you expected or were there things that were a surprise?

Weiss: You can never foresee how a record is gonna turn out completely. We demoed all the songs this time, had a rough version recorded that people could listen to. There's this certain magic that happens in the studio. Out of all the mundane-ness of recording, if you have the right people around you something really incredible can happen. This time there were a lot of magic moments that just clicked.

We were on a roll pretty much a month before we went into the studio, though being in the studio we really had a creative outpouring. You feel the most scared and the most rewarded at the same time when you're done recording, because we tried to do some different things and push ourselves creatively. It sounded really different, but it also sounded really exciting to us.

Tatone: Were you really pleased with it? Happy with it?

Weiss: I think so, yeah.