I think whenever you are trying to establish something new, you have to draw a line and put everything that came before that behind you,

I’m just happy to be part of a ‘sophomore effort,’

Yeah, I’ve always thought it had sort of a jazz improvisation aspect to it,

You can’t be a politician with a guitar.

I think the Knitters were a little more straight-up country than some of those bands, but we were all bringing roots-type sounds to a new audience.

When you set up to play, you made sure to give the performance of your life, … Our first two records were done in [a total of] six weeks.

Well, ‘help’ is the important word there because there were a lot of other bands back in those days doing similar stuff,

It was a sense of mystery. X was scary in a different way [than other punk bands],

We play music that doesn’t suck. And the minute we start sucking, we’ll quit.

Prior to that, it was probably more often thought of as that old fuddy-duddy music, that corny old stuff. What we do is corny, too, but it’s fun to do. And just because something is...

The only way you could screw it up is to try to manicure it, … If you pull it apart, it makes it bad. If you leave it together in its little mess, then it’s...

The interesting thing now is the Knitters have a context to exist in,

a source of pride.

We would tour the West Coast every four or five years. And every time we would finish we’d say, that was fun, we should do this more often. But [until this year] we never did...

With the Knitters, nobody’s the boss,

We started believing our own press,

I don’t know of any other band that has two vocalists that can sing together without competition,

That was probably their catering budget for three or four days.

Restraint can be tough. I’ve made a point to learn how to make a slow song have as much impact as a fast song. That’s a challenge I’ve given myself, because it’s easy to just...

I think we were among the first positive examples of country music for the punk rock audience,

No. It was like father and son … He is my father.

We had no preconceived notions of what we were going to be,

To have someone like Ray — like rock ‘n’ roll royalty — embrace what we do, it was great for our confidence, … In the studio, he knew what to try to do. He went...

We did it in the most hillbilly way we could think of, and there we were,