STARPOLISH: And on the back of the CD, does that say Surfing Nurse?

SHELLEY: Yes. When you get the real booklet, it's a series of paintings by this artist, Richard Prince. He took these pulp novels from the 60s that all had nurse in the title and he made paintings based on these book covers, which are beautiful; his paintings are amazing. I don't know, there's like five or six of these paintings in our CD booklet and each one of them is a different title, whether it's New England Nurse or Surfing Nurse, so we've changed one of them to be called Sonic Nurse.

STARPOLISH: That's pretty cool. I was thinking that I'm old enough to remember buying record albums, and they'd have great album art and my bedroom walls were decorated with posters. I was the kind of kid who read all the credits to see which guest musicians played on the album, so I wonder if people seemingly satisfied to download music on a computer lose the connection that I had as a kid.

RANALDO: Well you lose one connection, but there are other connections going on, you know? When we were kids that was one of the few games in town. Now kids are distracted by computers and the Internet and video games and whatever; there's a zillion other things going on so, the impact of a record is not the same as it was in our lives when we were kids. That's just a given at this point. So kids today are making different connections, I suppose.

Embracing the Internet

STARPOLISH: I think maybe community is one of the things that makes up for that. You don't have the booklets, but now you are able to connect with people. With kids in my neighborhood, if you got along with them and listened to the same music, that was your community. Now with the Internet, that community has became vastly larger. I guess that leads to something I think you alluded to earlier, when you were talking about the business and putting a new album out. And that is that you have pretty well-defined fans, and to me it seems that the people who can leverage the Internet perhaps the most effectively are bands like yours, that just have a fiercely loyal community who are going to support you financially by buying things. So I'm wondering if you, as you move forward, have thought about having a direct approach to your fans via the Internet as opposed to going through a record label and trying to handle that on your own.

SHELLEY: I think we've always felt we could do more with the Internet. I mean we've got a pretty intense website, but there are certainly tons more things we could do with that. We have a lot of free mp3's on our site and videos and things like that, but there are definitely artists who've embraced it and are leading the way into that next chapter and what's going to happen to music and the Internet. It's all pretty interesting, but I don't know — in some ways it's strange to say, but we're a pretty traditional band. I mean, we're pretty physical about playing guitars and drums and we carry this junk with us and play these shows and it's a really big part of what we do. So I'm not sure what will happen next between the Internet and us, but I know all of us feel, in different ways, that there's more.