Yea, it's April 29th.  Definitely, it's been a few years since the last one came out - we're definitely stoked to be playing some new songs - and get stuff that we've been playing live out for people to hear.

 

 

The new CD kind of came about pretty much the last day of recording the last record.  We started writing new songs for this album then, and we've been playing different forms of the songs live over the past few years.  Then they finally made their full shape in the studio.  It was really fun, we worked with a guy named Mike Flynn... he's been a friend of ours for a while... it was cool to actually have him work with us on the music.  He was a great producer to work with, really helped us take the songs to the place they needed to be.  We spent probably four weeks or so doing pre-production then four weeks recording it.  We're definitely really proud of it, I feel that it's a good evolution of the band... it's definitely still Augustana, but there's also a few more influences of stuff that we've been listening to a lot more... that we were able to incorporate into this. 

 

 

Honestly, it was a really easy album to make ... it was very fun.  It was a change from the last one.  I mean, the last one was fun to make too, but this one was just easy.  We didn't play live a lot before the last album, but with this one we were out touring for three years.  I feel that when we went in, it came across really natural.  It was a very welcomed change from the last one.

 

 

The first single is a song called "Sweet and Low".  It's kind of an older song, but we definitely changed it a little bit... added a full band version of it, then kind of re-wrote the verse while we were on the Dashboard Confessional tour.  It's a real straight-forward song, it's kind of a letter from his wife's prospective to him... when he's on the road... but there's a good amount of vagueness so it can apply to other things.

 

 

(laughs)  I don't know.  That was definitely a stepping stone for us, and it's really good to have that foundation when we're touring.  It was really cool to have that teeny bit of success that the song had, that gives us a nice fan base to work off of.  It's cool because I feel that the fans that we have - have been supportive of everything we do, so we're able to move pretty strongly off of that.  So hopefully the people that are supporters of ours from that song will remain supporters ... and maybe we can gain some fans of people who didn't like that song.  You just move along the best you can, just keep writing songs that you love.

 

 

I think the biggest changes were... being on the road for three years, that was a big change... we came from being a small band and playing a few shows.  After the CD we toured about 300 shows.  Within the band, we have a couple new members... that's been a very welcomed change, we've been able to grow.

 

 

Yea, we're going on a headlining tour right after the album comes out.  I think the second week in May through mid June. 

 

 

Yea, them and Maroon 5.  Late August through the beginning of October.

 

 

We just did a video for "Sweet and Low" that should be airing within the next couple of weeks.  Hopefully that will give us a little bit of exposure.  Our roots are definitely in touring, any band needs to grow their fan base... so we definitely strive to be the best live band that we can be.  We're nowhere near perfect, or even close... we love playing live music.  It's cool making records, but there's no other rewarding experience than playing a show with a couple thousand people and having them sing a long with every word, it's amazing.

 

 

Back in high school.  (laughs) 

 

 

Augustana was actually something that Dan and our old guitar player started, we were just really good friends... I played in a little band with Dan for a second when we were in college for a couple months.  Then he started doing Augustana stuff, they asked me if I could do keyboards.  So I started off on keyboards, but on this record there's a lot more harmonies, so everybody has been singing a lot... so it's been really cool to have that whole group aspect.  So it ended up working out really well.

 

 

(laughs)  It's such a broad word these days, I feel that it doesn't have the original meaning that it did.  But whatever, if it gets people to listen to us... then cool.  It's just a word, and genre's are meaningless these days. 

 

 

The best way to keep in touch with people is MySpace, we keep in touch with people that way.  It's kind of cool to get to talk to people that way, and at shows we're able to hang out with people afterwards.  It's probably one of my favorite things, just go out to the merch table and just meet people.  The "rock star" life gets so old... we're just people, we're no different than anyone else. 

 

 

We were definitely very young, we were nineteen and twenty... and we're still young and learning a lot.  We were very fortunate in the way everything came about, I think we learned a lot from the experiences we had.  It's been a good experience so far, we're happy to be where we are.