The Music:

Wonder what's the story behind your favorite songs? According to Kevin:

Deluxe:

"Good"is about being on the receiving end of a relationship when it ends...It's about being able to separate the positive from all the hurt and anger. And in the end recognizing how that person made you grow." (hmmm...Personal experience Kevin? Doubt it with those beautiful lips, and that voice. ;)

Southerngürl "Well, it's kind of strange, the women that I've been involved with during my life, unknown to me when I met them, are all from the south. I don't know why. More to the point, that song was written when we were living in Los Angeles, and we were very poor and very homesick, and that's what it was. Being homesick for something familiar. Southern Girl just popped out of my mouth, and suddenly we became the next Lynrd Skynrd.---It's a lazy summer afternoon. The sun is coming down real low...and even when the wind blows it still feels like everything is still. And then across the board floor as you hear a voice comin' on strong, calling you back to where that fan is blowing, and you hear this voice high...high in the still, humid air...Mmmmm..yeah...**

"Killer Inside", hmm, besides being a nod to Jim Thompson, I'd say it was about trust. The realization that you never know the inner most workings of another's thoughts and actions....It's about not wanting that part in you that's ruined past relationships to rear it's ugly head." (Anyone else think Kevin's been scorned? or done a bit of scorning? )

"Rosealia" is a very good friend in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and everyone goes through some bad times and this person happened to be in a bad situation, bad relationship and got out of it, like a lot of people I know. And it was like, it was more of a mentally-abusive relationship, and you know...it's a song about her. And she's a friend of ours. She lives actually in Chimayo, New Mexico, which is just north of Santa Fe, and a very sweet person. And that's the story. --- Yes there really IS a Rosealia. She is a lady who owns a restaurant, she's like 78. She owns a restaurant in Santa Fe. And she's, uh...now this is NOT official. Word has it that she....is a WITCH. She's a sweet lady, but I hear that she dabbles in...I don't know if she's a good witch or a bad witch, but in the restaurant she's got these kinda creepy paintings hanging up. I worked in the restaurant for a month and I was a HORRIBLE waiter, I was terrible. I got razzed by all the cooks and stuff. But that's, that's a song that uses her name which has definitely a Tex-mex kinda feel to it.**

Cry In The Sun, when the Devil beats his wife. "That's an expression. Apparently, it's only a Southern expression about when it's raining and the sun is out. You know, sometimes in the summer, you know, it's a sunny sky but you know, over the sides. And um, it's a song about one summer I spent working in North Carolina and a girl I dated there and about a particular time we spent with one another. And I've heard the funniest things like, "When the Devil drinks the wine." **

Teenager In 1993, we were living in Los Angeles and I would drive...I was working in a restaurant in Santa Monica [The Border Grill] and I would drive home to Hollywood every night and I would listen to Loveline [106.7 KROQ]. And one night I was driving up Highland in Hollywood, coming up to Highland and La Brea, I believe it was. No, it was Highland and Sunset, and there used to be a club called "Abeza" there, and it was kinda like a Goth-club. And Loveline was on and everybody was kind of dressed in black waiting in line to go into this like Goth-rock Disco, and it kinda made me think back to when I was in high-school and it conjured up a lot of images, which kind of came out in the song Teenager.**

Porcelain: This is a song about being completely and totally infatuated with someone to the point where you follow them home and watch them go back and forth in front of their window. Until you say, 'What the f*ck am I doing? I'm so much better than this...but I just can't help it.**

This Time Of Year: When we first started out we were going to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We used to drive up Interstate-55 north to Oxford, Mississippi, cos that was like our second home away from home. And one day, it was the first cool day of the fall cos the summers in the South are unbearable cos you're below sea-level and the humidity kills you. And there's always the first day when the cool winds from Arkansas and Missouri come rolling down and it kinda changes your mood...in a good way.**

What about that hidden track on the Deluxe album? It was inspired by "passing all the male prostitutes on Santa Monica Blvd. on the way to work."

Kevin says, "You know, explaining song lyrics is like seeing a bad video for a song you really love. It ruins it for you. Leave it for your own interpretations."

Friction, Baby:

What about King of New Orleans? "King of New Orleans" is about these kids in New Orleans who the wealthy landowners and city council have dubbed gutter punks. They've become the scourge of the city because they hang out and panhandle. It made me think about how people in general transfer their anger or unhappiness with their lives to those beneath them. It's about someone maybe giving a damn that the next time they see someone on the street. I've actually gotten to know a lot of these kids just from hanging out in the French Quarter. And in our video for the song, all the people are real homeless kids. "*

Do you identify with those kids in any way? As far as giving a damn, and seeing how these kids have gotten to the place where they are, I certainly identify with that. I was lucky to come from a good family, but I have friends who came from families where no one ever told them that they were loved, so the only family they've ever had is the friends on the street. I think it's all part of a bigger problem: how children these days are social by MTV and supermodels, and not even really by their school. *

r3wind - This is a song about making a mix tape for someone in the hopes that they'll fall in love with you because of your brilliant taste in music.**

normal toWn - This song is about a summer we spent in Boston.**

What are some of the darker areas that you're exploring on the new record [Friction, Baby]? More vulnerable areas would be a better word. Like "Long Lost," [which] is about being a friend to someone who constantly takes advantage of that -- who calls you at three in the morning -- and you're always a pillar of strength for them but you never really get anything returned. But you love that person so much that you do it anyway, because you don't want to lose them or be another person who's just giving them shit in their life. And "Scared Are You" is about being mid-20's and having graduated from college, and you realize tht life is in a complete state of flux and that you never really know what you want to do, and you never have this complete sense of resolve because that's just the way life is. It can be a really frightening realization: "I had such grand ideas for myself, and how did I end up here? Where am I? What do I want to do?" *

Hung the Moon - The story behind that one is about how basically, people can really be fairweather friends and that how you kind of get...in certain circles you can...you become so popular or whatever, or successful or famous and then you kind of get chewed-up and spit out and it's about one person talking to another one and saying how they kind of always stood by them regardless of how fashionable they are. That they've always kind of supported and been behind and, to that person...there's a phrase, you know, you "hung the moon." It's like, a lot of times you can say to someone you think they hung the moon which they think they're, you know, they can be a really arrogant person, but if you say, "that person hung the moon in my mind" you know, they're kind of everything. And that's one person kinda pining away to another.**

"Desperately Wanting" is a song about a couple of different people that Tom and I have met over the past years, and it's about how when you're young how everything is really kind of an equal playing-field and then as you...as two people grow up, how you take divergent paths in your life. And how...it's about one person looking at a friend and wondering how their life kinda fell apart and thinking back about times when you had so many plans and so many goals you wanted to achieve and how one person achieved those and how another person just kind of got a little bit lost.**

Still life with Cooley: It's about a friend of ours who was house-sitting at this AMAZING place on the Upper West Side of Central Park in Manhattan, and we used to have these parties a lot up there last year. And then finally he got kicked out, and before he got kicked out we decided to have one last blow-out and his name was Cooley.**

"WWOZ" - We have this house that we live in down in the Garden District of New Orleans, and it's about a few blocks from the levy. And on certain nights you can hear these barges going by and they sound their horns, and on one particular night it was just one of those rare, cool New Orleans evenings and the radio was tuned to this radio station called WWOZ which only plays old blues, it's a publicly-supported station, and I could hear the barges out on the river, and I wrote this song.**

... it's about a radio station, a publicly funded station, that just plays blues and jazz in New Orleans. It's about one particular night, just sitting in a room by yourself listening to this great station and these old deejays. It's raining outside, and we wanted to write a song that kind of conveyed what New Orleans means to us, and that's what we did. *

"At Charles Degaulle, Etc." We took a red-eye flight this past year from Amsterdam to Paris. We were on a European tour which was so much fun for us. We were a bit out of sorts when we landed at the airport, and it was just about the experience of a five hour layover at the airport.* (I've been there, it was grey and dirty... didn't seem like it could've inspired a song as smooth and bluesy as that. However, that's just my opinion.)

If you've found the "hidden track" on Friction, Baby, and was wondering about the story behind it, keep reading. If you haven't found it, take BTE's advice, and "R3wind," that's all I'm tellin' ya. According to Therese McKeon, the story goes something like this:

Better than Ezra calls themselves the "ministers of misinformation". They believe that speading around false information makes life much more interesting! When I [Therese] originally asked Tom about the hidden track in September, he told me that they recorded it in Portugal. NOT! Ends up that the song was Kevin goofing around and he's speaking "Griffin-ese". It's actually a mix of French and Spanish although Kevin doesn't speak either language. The band talks about it at length on several radio interviews. The background crowd is a loop of an Ozzie Osbourn concert. If you listen close enough you can hear the same guy whistling over and over again...pretty clever!

hidden track "Well, suffice to say, we hid it on the cd where we did, well now we're giving it away, but....[we hid it] in a place that had never been done before on CD's and we had to get the manufacturer, WEA which is Warner Bros. manufacturers (Warner, Elektra, Atlantic), all Warner Bros. manufacturers out of Pennsylvania had big problems doing it and finally it worked. We knew it would work [placing the track at the beginning of the cd] just by the principle of the way cd's are made. And as far as the languages on it, I am singing this like, uh, bastardized version of French and Spanish and I hope I haven't offended any Spanish or French-speaking people 'cause I don't speak either language and I was just saying phrases, I think, I don't know. The scary thing is that a French-speaking person said, 'What are you saying in French?' and I was like, 'Uh-oh! Uhhh....'**

** Courtesy of Ferlen's Page.

* From "Just Passing Through" on WHFS 99.1 fm

* quoted verbatim from an interview for TV Guide.

* the information was taken from an article (Better than Ezra: friction, baby by Mark Miester) August's OffBeat issue.