THE LUCKY ONES

A short, sharp jolt, recorded in a weekend with Arm concentrating only on vocals ARM: In 2005 I spent four months touring with the remaining members of the MC5. We played in Seattle and of course my dudes [laughs] went to the show. After that Dan was like, “Man, we should do more shows where you don’t play guitar and just hop around…” In Green River I would do a fake Iggy thing and jump into the crowd, and in the early days of Mudhoney I’d still do that but with a guitar on. PETERS: I always thought, ‘Mark’s awesome without the guitar on, he’s got a lot of energy… we need more of that in Mudhoney.’ The songwriting process was kind of slow, but I thought if we hunker down with just one guitar going, Mark could just let loose. MADDISON: Previously we all worked on the music together and then Mark sits with that and comes up with words, but when we were doing that in the practice room for this one, Mark had nothing really to do, so he was ad libbing vocals while we were working on these tracks. I can distinctly remember him coming up with the refrain of “I’m Now”. There’s really nothing similar to it after either.

PETERS: This record was made really fast, I think it shocked us all! We tracked in a weekend and then mixed it another weekend. ARM: We were back at Litho with

[producer] Tucker Martine. It was great. I think the plan was to go in over a couple of weekends, like usual, but we whipped them out and completed most of them in that first weekend. Steve declared it was a sign from God that this was our record! So that was it.

“Hopefully it won’t be five years next time. Do we havc five more years left? I’m 56, for Christ’s sake!” MARK ARM