When original drummer, Cary Bonnecaze, left the band in January, the party line was that it was a personal thing more that musical. Could the title "Friction, Baby" possibly refer to the politics of Ezra -- the creative tension between strong personalities?

"That's exactly what that's about, "laughs Drummond.

Is Ezra a democracy?

"Yes," Drummond says diplomatically, "but every democracy has it's leader."

Griffin (said leader) has both an explicit and implicit explanation of the title. The band was in Germany when they saw an old David Frost interview of Keith Richard. How, Frost asked, had Keith and Mick Jagger managed to stay together as partners for so long? "He took this drag off a cigarette and said, 'friction, baby' "Griffin laughs. "We were like 'That's the name of our album.' "

"And then everyone said 'Oh, there's too much friction between you. That's why Cary left hte band' ", Griffin continues. "Friction is like the connective tissue between everything. Everything requires friction in order to work. It's a positive force, but too much of anything good, I guess, is a bad thing. So the lyrics have a lot to do with relationships and how people interact with each other -- the friction, the movement between people and classes and relationships. "

So was there any point last year when Griffin realized that Better than Ezra had made it, really made it?

"I had never kept a journal, and I started keeping a journal February 1 when we were going to sign our record deal", Griffin recalls. "I had been writing different things that had happened, and I was writing in it one day when we were flying back from this thing we did in Europe. And I was like, 'Day after tomorrow, play Leno/ Last week, played to 72,000 people at RFK Stadium.' I was like, 'Oh my God! There are all these things I had dreamed about doing. ' You don't realize it's happening at the time. That was really cool. "

"Hopefully, " he adds, in a not-quite-facetious drawl, "we'll do it all again."

* the information was taken from an article (Better than Ezra: Friction, Baby by Mark Miester) in August's Offbeat Issue.