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“We picked him up at the nursery”

“That song’s hard for me to talk about and even to listen to in a way,” he says. “It’s probably one of my favorite tracks on the album just for the music alone, regardless of the lyrics…the music itself is the saddest piece of music that we’ve ever written. But at the end it turns kind of optimistic, and we’ve never written anything like that.”

The song was born in sobering conversations between Keuning and Flowers; the lead singer’s own mother has battled with a brain tumor this year with chemotherapy and radiation. The opening lyrics to the tune: 'The unknown distance to the grave beyond stares back at my grieving frame/To cast my shadow by the holy sun my spirit moans with a sacred pain.’

“Originally I wasn’t sure that the whole world was going to know what that song was about,” says Keuning, who prefers to keep his songs shrouded in a bit more mystery. “Brandon writes all the lyrics, and I know that we like to have the lyrics be - we don’t really like to explain the lyrics to any song. Because I think it should be open to people’s interpretation. I think about my mom every day at one time or another. It’s just not really fair, and that’s all I really want to say about it.”

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 "I was quite a porker when I was younger,“ says Flowers. "I never went swimming or anything like that because I didn’t want anyone to see my body. I always assumed that people were looking at me, and if I heard someone laughing while I was in a restaurant it would kill me.”

 “I’m getting better at not being myself,” Flowers says. “Because I’m not the most secure person in the world, on a night when we play a bad gig I’m very conscious if someone walks out of the room or laughs. It’s strange, the bigger the place we play, the more comfortable I feel.”

Dollar Bud Lights fueled the rest of the night, ending in a longitudinal hang-out with the band. Flowers was predictably, maybe intentionally, aloof, but still signed a bunch of stuff for us, including the back of a ticket stub that he inscribed in bibliographic style, “Flowers, Brandon”. I peppered bassist Mark Stoermer with questions about the band, but even this reached a strange conclusion after I complimented him on the bassline on ‘Jenny Was A Friend of Mine’. He replied, “Yeah, actually, Brandon wrote that,” before turning his attention to a modestly attractive 20-something girl who held more promise.