Behind the scenes:
Have Another
Released June 2008
 
The Making Of:
 
         1. How did the recording process begin for "Have Another"?
         2. What brought about naming the album "Have Another"?
         3. What was the mission going into the recording of "Have Another"?
         4. Can you give us some insight into the lyrics?
 
Q-How did the recording process begin for “Have Another”?
 
Levi:
We had a couple songs in the hopper that were left over from Not Fighters. Undercover World and She's a Chimney. They obviously didn't fit in with the other songs on Fighters but they were perfect for what HA ended up being. Actually, they're some of my favorite songs. \

John had some really cool songs in the works so like past records, we got a start without having enough songs to make a full record. John did scratch tracks by himself this time around which proved to be a lot more efficient because it freed me up to do other things instead of spending an entire week just to do scratch tracks.  I only rely on them as a place keeper when I’m recording drums because I always have the finished production of the song in my head.  So having perfect scratch tracks isn’t that big of a deal. 

Drums were done during the last week of January and then we just plugged away at tracking bass, guitars, vocals and then percussion. It was definitely the most efficient record to date.

John:
I was living in Portland, Oregon at the time we decided to do HA, so Levi wasn’t around to help me record the scratch tracks. Levi would e-mail me a drum loop track, then I would sit in my living room in my pajamas (all day long) in Portland and record just my voice and my guitar to that drum loop track.  Then I’d e-mail the vox and guitar tracks back to Levi and we’d discuss the changes we should make, etc.  It was a long and drawn out process over several days. 

Levi again did his drum tracking down in Phoenix with Ken Mary.  We did the rest of the tracking (guitars, vox, percussion) in Levi’s home studio. Halfway through making the album, Levi, AJ and I got together in Josh’s basement and wrote “Livin’ Large.” We agreed that both musically and lyrically we wanted to add that song to the record, but we didn’t have the time to fly Levi back down to AZ to track drums for it.  As a result, Levi recorded those drum tracks in the Zebra Cocktail Lounge (a basement bar) in Bozeman with our friend Chuck Goodwin. 

Q-What brought about naming the album “Have Another”?

Levi:
Josh stumbled on the name while brainstorming in the RV with A.J. and I.  That was also the trip that Josh came up with the idea for the back design of the album art.  At that point the three of us knew visually how the record should turn out and we wanted the sound of the CD to vibe with that.  It was also an excuse for Josh to finally get the beer Koozies he’d been asking for over the last few years.

John:
We’d gone through lots of title ideas, but nothing stuck until Josh suggested “Have Another.”  It fit our lifestyle as well as the fact that we were recording another record so quickly after we’d released Not Fighters.

Q-What was the mission going into the recording of “Have Another”?

Levi:
It seems like we always want to do the opposite of the last record.  In this case we felt like we spent way too much time over thinking Not Fighters.  Everything from the sound of it to the songs.  So this time around we all really liked the idea of just writing stuff and then putting it on a record.  Dub T Bootay with This is Perfect and She’s a Chimney with Dance Slow.  In the past we’d think“man, these songs just don’t go together”.  But for Have Another we took pride in mashin’ ‘em up (if I may borrow the lyric from Danny Donutz).

John:
We got a chance to work with some really, really talented musicians on Not Fighters, but we agreed that we’d make an album with just the four of us for our next one. That excitement got us jacked, and even though it’d only been a few months since the release of NF, we decided to just pull the trigger and get after another album.

John:
COME HOME ERIC
I met Eric Kolar my freshman year of college and ended up living three doors away from him in the dorms my sophomore year.  Over the years we have gone on many epic road trips, had more crazy nights than either of us care to admit and even had one run in with the cops together. (We got out of it, so all is well that ends well.)

Eric enlisted for the army and promptly got sent to Iraq.  He’d call every three or four months from a satellite phone and fill me in on life.  It made the war in Iraq very real to me.  It’s what inspired me to write this song.

THREE DAY BENDER
Originally I got the idea to write a song called Three Day Bender while on a beer soaked tour in Minnesota. I had been messing around with the riff for a few weeks and when that song idea popped into my head, it all came together very quickly.  We always dedicate the song to the three day long rock festival “Rockin’ The Rivers” outside of Three Forks.  

SHE’S A CHIMNEY
Keehr Dawg pointed out a woman chugging on a heater in the parking lot of an In & Out Burger down in Phoenix back in 2002.  He started saying, “She’s a chimney, she’s a chimney” over and over.  He was doing it to get me laughing. I’ve always thought that’d be a good song idea, but every early incarnation of the song was always weak. When the current song started coming together, I played that first draft for the guys and we invented a useless story that got us all laughing.  The story goes like this.  (Remember this story is total bullshit.)
 
Josh and I were at the Lucky Lanes bowling alley in Reinlander, Wisconsin.  Our cocktail waitress was named Florence, or Flo for short. She was in her 60’s with nicotine stained yellow teeth, leathery skin, and she had a smokers hack that sounded like a lumberjack trying to hack through wood with a dull axe. Flo always had a cancer stick in her mouth for the entire two hours we were there. We fell in love with her and wrote her this song.
 
SENIOR KEGGER
Levi and I discovered that we really have a good writing chemistry together when we wrote “I Make My Own Money” on NF, so we were both fairly jacked to write together for this record.

This song started out with an idea that Crazy Jim and I had years ago.  The lyrics would be based around an old guy who’s always raising hell at the old folks home.  He steals the van, gets all the senior citizens loaded up and heads for the hills to have a kegger.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the stinking song to work for us, no matter what lyrical ideas or melody ideas we’d throw out.
 
It all changed when we decided to make this song about Keehr.  That guy is a party machine now, and I have no doubt that when he’s older his grandkids will all say things like, “Grandpa’s insane!”  He’s gotta have kids first, then they gotta have kids, but you get the picture.
 
REAL MAN
Dan Violett and I wrote this song back in 2001.  I came over to his bachelor pad that had pizza boxes and beer cans everywhere and basically said, “I want to write the most useless song to a woman that she’ll ever hear, but I want it to be fun and make her want to dance.”  Dan just laughed and went with it.
 
We laughed and laughed at the idea of telling a woman that her man was “weak sauce.”  We also laughed at the idea that a woman might (but of course wouldn’t) find it attractive that a man would claim himself to be a “real man.”  We set out to write a super fun useless song.  Mission accomplished.
 
DANCE SLOW
My wife and I got married in Manzanita, Oregon on the beach.  The only day in August it rained that year was our wedding day. Unreal. Our initial plan was to have our reception dinner at a local community center, then head back to the beach for a bonfire. We’d hoped to have our first dance bare foot in the sand by firelight, but the rain shut that plan down. 

As a result of the rain we completely forgot about our first dance until we got back to our apartment in Portland.  It was late in the evening when we realized we hadn’t yet danced as a married couple!  So we killed the lights, lit a candle and danced barefoo t in our tiny little living room by candlelight.  It was great.
 
UNDERCOVER WORLD
This song had been around for a few years and we thought a lot about putting it on Not Fighters. In fact, we had originally discussed calling that record Undercover World, but when the final song collection came together, this song didn’t fit.  When it came time to make this album, we re-recorded the tune and it fit very nicely.

I can’t remember if I read an article or heard this from a friend, but the story in my head goes like this. There were two undercover cops, one male and one female.  They were in different precincts in New York City (one was Queens, the other Long Island or something).  The male cop propositioned the female cop, and then as soon as money changed hands their respective cop teams came out with guns drawn ready to arrest each other.  

It got me to thinking that I’ve written lots of songs about women, to women, for women, etc, but I’ve never written a song about THAT woman, the one who’s an undercover cop posing as a hooker. 

THIS IS PERFECT
Sometimes in life I can get really impatient.  I get to thinking that there’s a bigger, better buzz that I’m somehow missing.  Time and experience have made me realize that it’s the simple things in life that make it awesome.  Love, as crazy and messed up as it can be, is the simple ingredient that makes life perfect.
 
DUB-T-BOOTAY
AJ, Levi and I were jamming on this progression in Josh’s basement when I made the comment, “this song is dirty.  It’s really dirty. It’s like, white trash dirty.” The lyrics came rolling out after that. 

LIVIN’ LARGE
Levi wrote this riff while he was driving our old RV back from a gig one night.  We were talking about writing a song that had a rocking riff, and he started humming the riff out of thin air.  He repeated it a few times, I picked it up, then we called my cell phone to leave a message on my voice mail singing the riff. Weeks later when we got together to write with AJ, we listened to that voice mail, learned to play it on guitar, and off we went.
 
Lyrically it sums up how we feel about living in Montana.  The best times in our lives are when we get to spend it with friends and family.
 
JESUS, IF YOU GET ME OUT OF THIS ONE
Having lived in Bozeman for a decade, both Levi and I know the frat party scene inside and out. We didn’t write this song about a specific party, but those types of parties in general.  Verse one is all about the moment, verse two is all about the hangover, and the rest is just a moment of ass kicking goodness.