Billy Howerdel

| GUITARIST |

WHEN DID YOU START WRITING FOR EAT THE ELEPHANT?

“I never stop. From the first day I picked up a guitar many years ago until two months ago. I put them in a folder for Maynard to check out, and see if he responds. It’s like when you’re in school and send a note to the girl three rows back, and it says: yes/no/ maybe. I have a yes/no/maybe folder in there. We can avoid the uncomfortable ‘I hate this song’, and I get the message.”

MUSICALLY, WHAT’S BEEN INFLUENCING YOU?

“In the last four or five years, I scored my first feature film, and that weighed heavily on the production of this record, or the orchestration of it. I also got together with a few top-line writers about two years ago, in an experiment of writing a song in a sit-down. Sometimes it was as quick as 90 minutes, sometimes three hours. They were more in the pop realm. It was a great experiment and played into this record. It opened me up and got me out of my muscle memory.”

AS AN OUTSIDE PRODUCER, HOW DID DAVE SARDY PUSH YOU?

“He pushed me to take some of the signature out of me and bring some of the average into the sound. It seemed he was trying to go for classic rather than specific. Timing, notes, the gathering of notes, my clock, my sense of melody. Going outside of that.”

WHY DID YOU DECIDED TO USE MORE PIANO ON THIS RECORD?

“I wrote the whole record on piano. With the other records,

I’d always gone to bass or guitar, a little bit of keys, but I wanted to go from a place of being able to play a song in its entirety.

It’s kind of a more classical approach – classical meaning The Beatles or Dylan.”