Exclusive Interview: Lumbar’s Aaron Edge

There are times when you get off the phone from an interview or finish writing an article and you close your thoughts, move onto the next project, and go about your life. Easy come, easy go. There are other times, such as this particular interview, when a story is so enthralling that you find yourself wrapped up in it, along for the ride of the crazy, painful truth behind the art. You’re left reeling when it’s finished, unable to hit the reset button in your brain. After spending two hours on the phone with Aaron Edge, creative force behind one of 2013’s most unexpected and celebrated heavy bands, Lumbar, I stared at the wall for a good ten minutes, almost trying to decipher whether or not the conversation had actually happened. 

When Lumbar was initially announced as a project, the lineup alone sent the metal world into a message-board frenzy: The band would consist of Aaron Edge (Iamthethorn, Roareth, Rote Hex), Mike Scheidt (of Yob and Vhol) and Tad Doyle (of Brothers of the Sonic Cloth and, of course, TAD!) for a one-off Southern Lord release entitled The First And Last Days Of Unwelcome. The kicker: Aaron Edge, who wrote the entire record and enlisted the help of Mike and Tad for vocal duties, had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. All of the profits from the record (meaning AFTER the label gets paid back and production costs are covered, which, in 2013, takes a LOT of work) would be put toward his medical bills. Something magical happened when 1,500 people bought the record without even hearing it in its entirety, and the preorder through the label sold out completely. Though Aaron is quick to remind everyone that the success of the release so far has by no means put him atop a pile of cash or made him able to take his wife on a trip around the world, it has — for a bit, anyway — put a small dent in his daunting medical expenses.

But the money isn’t the point. The point is that the result of this “sonic endeavor,” to quote the words emblazoned on the cover of the beautifully-packaged record, is a 24-minute crushingly heavy musical and emotional experience in which you are trapped, temporarily, in the mind of a man dealing with excruciating physical and existential pain. The album, though finally put together with vocals at Witch Ape Studio in Seattle over one weekend in May, was stitched together by Aaron as he went through various stages of his illness and diagnosis. After the album was officially released, he took to the band’s Facebook page and announced that no amps were used in its creation, but rather a pre-amp run through GarageBand. (Aaron also urges everyone to take this to heart: If a hardcore/sludge/doom project this intense can be created using GarageBand with the right tools and patience, you too can make a record.)

Before I sat down to transcribe the interview with Aaron, I decided to call up Mike Scheidt for some extra insight on the story. Any Yob or Vhol fan can attest to the fact that his penchant for creativity and empathy seem to operate on a more elevated plane than the rest of us, making him an excellent source of otherworldy perspective. (Or, as Lumbar’s publicist put it, “Mike sort of has that shaman thing going on.”) Here’s a snippet of what Mike had to say about Aaron:

He was in a lot of pain. Aaron was having trouble getting out of chairs, and I think he was feeling really bad and he knew that we knew he was feeling really bad. And so he felt bad. [laughs] We were just like, “Look, man. We’re all here doing this together. There’s no expectation on you to keep up any appearances. It’s okay.” With “Day One,” in particular, when we got done he was more or less in the fetal position. The drugs weren’t touching it. When we finished there were sniffs and sobs and crying—it was really, really heavy. And it turned out exactly like I kind of thought it might: infinitely heavy and emotional and totally honest and on point, in the moment just… so good.

What follows will most likely be the last interview Aaron Edge does regarding Lumbar. Grab a pair of headphones, go for a long walk alone listening to the album, and then settle in and enjoy.

To start off, for the average person who doesn’t know anything about Multiple Sclerosis, why don’t you tell me a bit about it?

MS is your white blood cells attacking the sheath that is around your nerves. So, for an analogy: A guitar cable has the inside wiring that carries the actual audio signal, and the outside is that rubber that, after a show, is soaked in beer or whatever. And you wind it up and it’s all over your hands. [laughs] That rubber is the insulation around the nerves called the myelin. If you have MS, your white blood cells attack that insulation for no reason, other than your body thinks it’s fighting off a disease or something. Once that myelin is eaten away in some parts, your nerves are unable to transfer and carry the signal correctly to your brain. So your hand might not actually be on fire, but it feels like it is. Or your hand may physically be on fire and you might not know it is.  So it’s a very difficult thing. It’s very troubling because you know your body is in good shape, but your body thinks differently. It’s attacking itself. Sometimes, if the insulation on the nerves is eaten away enough that pain does not go away.

That started in December of 2012, on and off, and on January 6^th, I woke up and it never went away to this day. The first symptoms I had were numbness in my hands and my feet, and a week later, in my chest. I thought it was just from being cold—it was the same sort of feeling of when you’re out in the cold for too long and you lose a bit of the feeling in your hands and they hurt and you can’t wait to warm them up and put them under warm water. And when you do, they hurt—the pain is terrible for a few seconds. Or when your limb falls asleep and there’s that tingling feeling of, “Oh shit! My hand’s asleep!” and your friend’s like, “Oh, god, I hate that I hate that I hate that!” And then it passes and you all laugh about how weird that is. That pain does not go away for me.

The pain is mostly in my hands now, luckily not in my feet anymore. It’s lessened by drugs; their whole point is to keep your white blood cells at bay so that they don’t attack or grow in numbers to attack your nerves.  I take about 16 pills a day, for pain, and for stress, because if you’re stressed out it brings more pain. Anyway, so that’s the pain that I have had personally. Some people with MS lose control of their legs and can’t walk. I’ve had the experience of, not losing sight, but my eyes have been blurry for weeks at a time because the optic nerves are where the symptoms are. Some folks actually lose control of their bladder, usually later in lives. I’ve certainly had issues with bladder pain and urgency and that kind of thing. My neurologist has said that probably my hand pain will never go away. So all we can do is keep new and other symptoms from happening. Like blindness or further issues with my bladder, or numbness in my feet and things like that. Hopefully those things don’t get worse or new things don’t happen.

Yeah, I hope so, too. As far as being a professional musician goes, which symptoms affect your playing?

The part that’s been so difficult is that I no longer have the coordination to make chords on a guitar, and I don’t have the strength to hold down the strings on a bass. And because there are some tears in the insulation on the nerves that are in my spine, when I physically move my head down—to look at my feet, to tie my shoes, to pet my cat, to pick up something on the ground—or when I play the guitar and look down at the fret board, that causes pain too far down. The pain is as if you are being electrocuted. Until I lift my head up again, I have surges of electric shock, which is super painful and uncomfortable. It’s hard to describe it to anyone around you when you go through it because it’s not something they see.

And the first time I noticed this was when I was recording in December. I was playing the music and looking down at the fret board and I was like, “Man, I feel so uncomfortable.” And I had this weird tingling going on when I looked down. So that’s been very difficult to try and work around. And drumming, I don’t have the strength or dexterity. Even though I have the timing in my mind, I can’t keep the timing correct when playing drums.  The actual feeling of lifting the drumstick and having the timing correct when I actually hit the drum is totally off now. It’s not the same. If I’m just tapping on the drums, my timing is still what I consider good, and I still have the timing right in my body, but transferring it to being recorded is off. There’s that lapse in my brain from holding the sticks to hit the drums that’s off. So now, my only musical ideas are pushing buttons on keyboards and drum machines and samples. And I’ve been trying desperately to make that interesting to myself, and so far it isn’t. Either with the tools I have or the ideas. I’ve pretty much decided that my focus will be just singing for bands, which I’ve done in the past. And try to work with musicians who are writing stuff that I like.

At what point in all of this did you decide to turn your story into music?

Honestly, the music came before the whole experience. I was writing this record and a couple others as soon as my wife and I moved back to the Northwest from LA, where I was the art director for Southern Lord. The records I was writing really just started as riffs, just like any other thing I would write in my spare time. When I was finishing with these records was really when I started to have the pain and then the Lumbar record was written last, so it was written when my pain was at its worst and without diagnosis.  And then I was focusing on the pain and trying to be diagnosed, so months went by when there was nothing done with that record. Then I passed it around to a few vocalists, Tad and Mike included, as well as a few other friends. It was just like, “Hey, I have this record—it’s taken on a new meaning; I’m in bed, I’m sick, I have these songs—do you want to check them out?”

Finally it was Mike who said, “I want to finish it, but I think it should be your story. I don’t think it should just be a band; I think we should focus on your pain and your story and you being in this situation right now, post diagnosis.” Really, it was Mike who told me, “It should be you. It should be your whole poem, and we’ll just present it.” And I thought the idea was incredible and I was honored. I actually originally asked Mike, “Will you write the lyrics for this record, though, and tell my story?” and he and Tad talked and it was decided that I should write the lyrics to really express myself the best and sort of present my story.

So it sounds like Mike sending you in that direction might have been one of the best things that happened to the record.

Yeah, it’s the only way the story would have been told the way it was. Instead of a book, it would have a poem–my book of many poems that not many people have seen or heard, and all of a sudden it’s this short but very intense novel. And it’s crazy, and there’s a publisher who put it out, and stores that are going to carry it and some people are seeking it out, and some people are curious and some people will download it for free and share it with their friends. It’s distributed on such a grand scale instead of me just telling a few friends at coffee what happened to me.

Well the album definitely does a perfect job expressing your story. It seems like most of the reviews have reflected that, right?

Well the only thing I’m hearing is that people are upset that maybe it’s too short of a record. [laughs] Which is so nice to hear, but even though it’s sort of in the realm of sludge—and people are calling it doom as well—I come from the realm of, initially, punk rock and hardcore. Even though my interests lie in slower, heavier music in general, I believe in getting up onstage, performing for 35 minutes and getting offstage. It doesn’t matter if you’re the headliner or opening act. I think that short and sweet is the best way to go, and with records, you can control an audience, or at least their time, for so much longer because people are willing to sit with a record. They can sit down, they can read, they can be driving somewhere, they can be doing whatever they’re doing, and they can invest more time into it, but it doesn’t mean that you should just fill that void with a bunch of extra long songs that sometimes drag on too far and you lose the interest of the listener. So I thought that putting out 25 minutes of music was a better way to do this, but it’s very interesting and nice to know that people are left wanting more. That’s kind of the idea. The issue with this one is that there most likely won’t be more. But that kind of puts this in a different light and I hope that people will always like to put it on, even years from now, and not be like, “Oh, it’s that long record—I need to set aside some time for that record.” You can go make your coffee and go through your emails or sit on your couch and zone out and get totally stoned and just kind of take it for what it is and not feel like you have to set aside a big part of your day.

Definitely. It holds so much more power when it isn’t lost in an interrupted attention span. I know that for me, if I have to flip a record a bunch of times for a double-LP or whatever, it honestly makes me less likely to listen to it. Not that it’s actually that much effort, or that I don’t own a few double-LPs that I love, but it always just seems like, I don’t know, too many steps. I can’t think of a better way to describe it.

Yeah. It’s true. And if the record was too short, then it just would have been a 7”. And how often do we play seven-inches? [laughs] Except when someone comes over to your house and you’re like, “FUCK, have you heard the new _____?” My friend plays in this band ACxDC—AC with an “X” and then DC—they’re a killer band, and it’s one of the few seven-inches where every now and then someone comes over and I’m like, “You need to check this out.” It’s worth listening and having some discussion. It’s worth the seven or 10 minutes. There are bands that make you want to seek out their 7” and put it at the front of your collection because you want to hear it and you don’t mind flipping and getting off the couch or whatever you’re doing with friends. But I think longer EPs are the way to go. That said, you know, Sleep put out a masterpiece with Dopesmoker. You don’t mind settling in and preparing yourself for an hour of music and four sides of a record. You’re ready for it. You want it. It’s a long movie that you’re willing to set aside—it’s The Lord Of The Rings of records.

What we did is weird. And what we did is different. And I think it draws in a whole lot more people to it than some records. I’ve done a lot of sludge and doom bands over the last 10 or 15 years, but before that it was a whole lot of hardcore and punk rock. And though, most people don’t remember me or those bands, and they didn’t get a lot of attention because they were so small, I’m coming from a different background. Mike’s coming from a different background. Tad, of course, is coming from a different background of heavy rock, and though he didn’t write any of the music, his voice is so different than ours and he comes from such a different background that it was so nice to have those guys sort of shape what I started. And back to the point is that I hope that it draws in all kinds of different listeners and different backgrounds as well. Some probably won’t like this—many won’t—because they’re prepared for something else. But some of the reviews so far, in fact, most that I’ve come across, have been favorable of the melting of all three of us.

I think it’s also really interesting that you’re coming at this from the angle of punk and hardcore, whereas other people might come at this from a doom upbringing. It seems like this record meets right in the middle. You still get that doom, sludge idea but you get to enjoy it in a small package.

I actually read a review relating to this yesterday that said there are only three songs that this particular reviewer thought were actual tracks, and the others were just sort of odd things. He wasn’t particularly interested in the music as a whole; he was more interested in Mike’s voice, which makes total sense. I was prepared for a lot more people to listen to the record and things like that. And that still might happen, of course. The record is so young.

I think I read the review you’re referring to. He said something like, “It’s impossible for us to know what Aaron went through and therefore we can’t relate,” or something.

Well, it’s true. That reviewer actually touched on something really important. Most of the people listening to this record have never met me. And, in a way, they have met Tad and Mike. Even if they haven’t met them in person, they’ve met them through their material.  A lot of people don’t know who I am, or they’re trying to find bands I used to do that they might be familiar with, and they’re like, “I’ve never heard of this guy!’”

But people are finding it not only hard to relate to my music because they’ve never heard of me but also it’s very difficult for people to relate to disease or pain because, thankfully, not everyone has it. I think the reason that review was actually good to me was he was able to separate his like or dislike of the music from the actual story, which is heavy. Though the review wasn’t favorable of the music, I think it’s an amazing thing to take in, which is some people will just put the record on and enjoy it because they enjoy dark, heavy music. It was very interesting to me, and constructive, and you can’t fault someone for not liking what you do. Ever.

How has the positive response to this record made you feel about humanity?

That’s an interesting question. I’m not a very positive person, though I try to come across as one and I put up a sort of a wall, and I get into a costume and try to be positive and look at the bright side, but I don’t know a more negative, angry person right now than myself. So I want so badly to trust people and think that things are going to be okay, or that there are so many nice people out there or that things are going to be alright. I’m a pessimist by nature. I mean yeah, all three of us are so thankful to everyone. But just because 1,500 hundred records get sold and maybe a hundred people are really posting about how excited they are doesn’t change my outlook on life in general. It doesn’t change my opinion of people in general.

I do feel loved and respected, as do Tad and Mike, but remember that a lot of that is coming from people that are trying to sympathize and empathize with my situation, and that’s difficult for everybody. Usually, if someone says they like your band, it’s like, “Oh man, that’s so great! Awesome!” And this more like, “Man, your story is insane and heavy. I’m so sorry.” Honestly, it’s a lot for me to take in. It’s very difficult to take all of this in because I’ve been in pain for almost a full year and only now is a lot of this coming to light, so I’m sort of watching my own movie and going back and watching and reliving these early moments and remembering recording the record myself at home and not knowing what the hell was going to happen to it. There was no plan and I was in pain. I’m sort of reliving these moments as people are listening to the record now and learning the story. So it’s just really a heavy experience for me as well as everyone who’s new to it. It’s hard to take it all in. The success of selling all of the copies of the first record, the really amazing response, but the side of this is an awareness and a remembrance of all things painful.

Well, to be honest, you sound exactly like I would expect a person going through a painful experience to sound.

Yeah, it’s not just a band releasing our own CD or CD-Rs and getting in the van as I did for more than 20 years, traveling around in bands that were just fighting to get a show here and there and maybe selling a hundred CDs, maybe selling a thousand records over five years, and having shows cancelled on you and running out of gas, having vans explode, having band members have health issues or pass away, having band breakups—there’s so many terrible things that every small band goes through. To all of a sudden be in a band that is really under a magnifying glass. But to have people really focusing on what I’m doing is a real change for me. To have what I’m doing under scrutiny is a new experience. To have so many reviews, to have so many people interested or loving it or picking it apart. It’s such a new experience for me that a lot of these questions are hard to answer because I’m not even sure how I feel. Whereas when you’re in a smaller band and you write this music and you keep writing music and people are like, “Oh, I didn’t like the last record, I like the new one,” it’s such a different vibe. I can’t liken this to anything I’ve ever done before.

Well, you’ve thrown an extremely personal experience into the limelight, so it’s just not just your art at this point; it’s your life.

Yeah, it really is. That’s exactly it. It’s my life and the story told by two friends—two storytellers—that people are more familiar with. So it’s like that dark room where people are all hanging out and there’s a lull and someone’s like, “Hey, Tad, tell us that story about your friend. What’s going on?” And Tad and Mike grab a candle beneath their bearded faces and they tell everybody this crazy story of this guy. And that’s kind of what happened. I might not even be in that room. This is a group of people who have never heard of me, who are going, “Wow, who is this guy? This is such a terrible story.” That’s kind of what’s happening. Tad and Mike are in the spotlight here, and I’m so happy that they’re the ones telling the story. And now people are sort of retracing my steps and looking into my life. And it’s a weird experience. It’s really heavy.

You chose to tell this story through the sounds of hardcore, sludgy, doomy music—what do you think you get out of that genre as catharsis goes that you wouldn’t necessarily get from another genre?

Well, there are two parts to that. One: it was a sludgy, doomy record by nature because I was in sort of a heavy place with the onset of pain. A couple of the other records that I wrote around the same time which will surface later on are not even in that vein. One is classical guitar and one is, although it’s heavy, it’s more tech and there is a lot more variation and dynamics in the songs themselves. Another one is even more sludgy than Lumbar, a lot slower and even simpler. So at the time, this was just the last of those four records I was working on, and what was coming out at the time. It’s not so much that I chose to play those riffs or make those songs, that’s just the way it came out. I didn’t intend to be like, “Okay, now it’s time to make a sludgy record,” that’s just what came out. The records were all written as they were recorded. So I cut and pasted drum parts in pieces. And I wouldn’t change the riffs, I’d let them be and I’d move on. So it was sort of a beatnik approach to this, where you get up on stage and you just sort of fire away.

I love analogies so imagine that you have a garden and you want to grow a new crop, but you’re not sure what, and you’re not sure what will grow and what will die. And you have many seeds in your hand and you just throw them all out—all varieties of vegetables and fruits. And you throw them out, and you water them, and you walk away, and you’re unsure of what’s going to happen. And you come back and you’re so surprised that you go this particular flower or vegetable. And even if some of them didn’t grow very well, they grew. Some of them were a bad idea and some are invasive and they’re taking over. Like you’re watching your garden grow but you’re not doing anything about it—you’re not weeding it or taking care of it, you’re just letting it do its thing. That’s organic and that’s real and that’s an honest expression of what you’re doing or what you’re capable of.

The other part of that is that while I love to write riffs, I am not a very proficient guitarist or bass player. I never have been. I was a drummer by nature first and at some point, I started having some decent ideas about riffs and playing music, so I ventured out into the world of guitar and bass. So when I play, it’s going to be simple.

I think that’s a great way of putting it.

Basically, I made a child, and I didn’t want the child, I didn’t know what to do with the child, so I gave it to Tad and Mike to raise. I said, “I have faith that you guys can help me raise a good human being.” And that’s what they did. Tad and Mike really helped give a voice to this piece. It would not have been possible without them or without Greg Anderson’s interest and hard work behind it. As well as my friend Danny who is going to put out the CD and the cassette on Holy Mountain Music. These are the people who really had the push behind it. Right behind those musicians and label owners, my wife is so key to me staying focused and interested in the craft that I do. She’s been so supportive of the other recorded-only endeavors I’ve been a part of. She’s pushed me during times when I’ve said, “Fuck this. What’s the point?” and “Why keep doing this?” She has been the greatest influence on me giving a damn about any of it.

Tell me about the weekend when you guys recorded the record. What was it like re-living that pain?

I have never been in a studio environment and been that moved by what we were doing. I’ve done lots of records I was very proud of, and certainly there’s heavy shit that’s happened in the studios when I was recording with other bands, but I can’t recall a time when it was this crazy. The only other time that comes to mind was when I was in a baseball-bat brawl outside of a bar in Philadelphia and my jaw was broken in a huge fight. It was crazy. It was a street fight that got broken up—the cops came and I went to a hospital and my jaw was broken. I had to have it wired shut. I wasn’t fully healed when I went in to record the vocals for a band I was in called Christ, and I recorded with my jaw wired shut with rubber bands all over my mouth. But I did my vocals. I can’t recall another heavy experience that really moved me like Lumbar except for that one.

When I went into the studio to record the Lumbar album, spirits were actually high. I was in bed for 40 days before all that, and finally, after lots of meetings with my neurologist and a few others, I was finally able to get my pain manageable. Because of the drugs I was taking, I was able to open doors, pick up small things and get on my bike. I was able to get back to normal things like holding plates of food, that we don’t normally think are a big deal but once you’re in pain they’re impossible. All of those things were at a level where I could manage it.

Mike picked me up when he was on his way from Eugene to Seattle to meet up with Tad and we had a good two and a half hours to have some fun and reconnect as friends because we hadn’t seen each other in awhile. As friends, we don’t see each other for months at a time, so when we do, it’s always a really blessed time. So we reconnected in the van and we’re like, “So we’re gonna do these vocals! What should we do?” And we listened to the record a few times in a row and had early ideas and though it got serious as far as writing and doing a record, but it wasn’t serious heavy as far as emotional yet. So this was the bridge we were crossing and as soon as we got into the studio, it got real heavy. It was very emotional from the moment I stepped into their house. It got heavy and it didn’t stop being heavy for the next few days while we were there.

This record was done with tears. I remember a specific vocal part—and I wont say where because I am interested to see if anyone picks it up—there was a part where I was doing my own vocals and it was meant to be only a placeholder for Mike and Tad to sing their parts. So basically they said, “What’s your idea on this?” And I would do that for every song. I had the lyrics in front of me and I would lay down a vocal track almost all the way through. So I would go in and do these things and come back and they’d say, “Oh, yeah, we totally get it. We’ll go do that right now in the same kind of vibe.” And then my vocal track would be erased, or be put way in the background. But this particular time I went in and did my part, and it was so heavy that I was literally brought to tears, and it came out in the recording. I was in an isolation booth, and I was separated from the other guys by glass and a sound-proof wall and all this stuff. And I really was crushed. I exerted myself to the point where I couldn’t sing anymore. So I finally went back in after some time and both guys were pretty serious, and there was a big moment of silence.  I sat down and I said, “That was really bad. I apologize for getting out of hand and emotional—I just lost it.” And both guys said, “That was perfect. There’s no reason to sing over it—it really embodies what you wanted to say and there’s no way it could have been said better.” And to me, having my friends tell me that was really heavy, but I first said, “Are you kidding?” When I was doing it, it just seemed so unnecessary. Because you can feel the pain and the aggression and the sadness and sorrow in the lyrics themselves. You don’t need to hear a guy crying on a record. In my mind, I broke down and it shouldn’t have been that way, but my friends convinced me that this was actually a very good take. And considering where it was in the record and the part of the song it was in, it actually fit the vibe perfectly. I was uneasy about it for awhile, but upon listening to it in context with everything—even though it’s very difficult for me to listen to, it’s really, really hard—it deserves its place. It’s a chapter of this little book that had to be there.

Wow. Seriously, that’s just an incredible story.

I don’t think that has been told yet in an interview—I might have said, “There’s a crazy track where I got emotional,” but it hasn’t been discussed in that length ever. But yeah, pretty heavy moment. There’s another one, too—when we actually listened to the whole record, there were some friends in town visiting Tad and Peg’s house and we had sort of a “listening party,” so to speak. And it was like watching explosions go off on your street. We all sat around and watched people dying. It was dead silent, no one spoke in between songs, no one said anything, no shuffling around, and there was no one coming and going from the room. For 25 minutes we all just sat there and soaked in this crazy thing we couldn’t believe we had finished, and people who weren’t a part of it were now hearing all of it at one time. When it was done, there were quite a bit of tears in the room. The record ended and nobody spoke. It was this weird, awkward pause.

Finally, I believe it was Tad who said something like, “This is a really heavy experience.” I remember turning around and seeing him standing. Everybody else was seated in couches or on the floor. I remember very specifically staring at the computer screen on the studio console because I didn’t want to see anyone’s expressions, I didn’t want to hear anything. Usually you give a record to your friends and they talk in between and they’re texting or whatever. Everyone does that—but nobody did that. It was full-on focus. I don’t want to say that this record was changing their lives and it was the best thing they ever heard—please don’t misconstrue my description of awe—it was more just, “What the fuck? This is crazy. What a ride.” I finally turned around and everyone started talking a bit, and like I said, there were some tears in the room, myself included. It was fucking insane.

The rest of the weekend was sort of quiet. There wasn’t a lot of fun and joking around. It was more quiet sort of peaceful coexisting in this house. And we took one photo—there’s only one photo from that weekend of me, Mike and Tad together and it’s the one that’s been passed around a bunch because there is nothing else. We all hugged and said our goodbyes and my wife and I left together, and Mike went on his way and Tad stayed there and mixed the record and sent us those files later. There was just this peaceful calm that happened on that last day. Normally when you finish a record, you’re joyous. You goof around and get silly. Though I don’t drink, a lot of my band members just get fucking tanked and celebrate, but this was not that kind of thing. It was a very quiet space. Very, very different.

[Immediately after recording the Lumbar record, Mike Scheidt headed down to Portland to help Red Fang record the track “Dawn Rising” for their Whales And Leeches album, where he was greeted with choruses of, “Hey! We’ve got some Pabsts!” Talk about two completely different experiences.]

That’s sort of the ultimate thing an artist can ask for in the wake of creating something, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s an experience I don’t want to happen again. [laughs] I don’t have it in me to do that ever again. Therein might be why Lumbar can’t be more than a studio record because it was just too much. It was very stressful.

So the quote at the beginning of the record is a Twilight Zone sound clip, right? Tell me about that.

Indeed it is. The reason that particular one spoke to me was because when I was in bed and couldn’t get out of bed and was too messed up, I watched every X-Files, Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock that ever was—all the awesome classics because I was bored. My mind was totally with it but I was in pain so I couldn’t just function normally. So I was trying to find anything interesting to watch. When I watched that episode, I watched that intro twice because I was like, “That totally speaks to me.” It’s one guy telling another guy to shut the fuck up and yeah, things are bad, but you’re still alive and you still have things to look forward to and things will work themselves out.

There are so many people in this world that are in pain. Far worse pain than I am, far more difficult situations, who don’t have a spouse there to help them, don’t have family or friends or a music community or an outlet for their feelings so I am kind of trying to tell myself to be thankful. Quit bitching and do something productive. That’s probably not what that episode was really about—it’s about ego, and it’s about how you’re still alive and you need to get on with your life because things could always be worse.  I just hope we don’t get sued for using it. [laughs]

Well, if they don’t have anything better to do these days, that’d be pretty ridiculous.

I think we’re far enough off the radar that that won’t happen, but I guess if you get sued by The Twilight Zone, that’s pretty rad.