STARPOLISH: Has the experience that some artists have like Prince or George Michael, who've had public conflicts with their labels and then decided to try to do it on their own and not really been particularly successful, become cautionary tales in any way?

SHELLEY: Well, those are such strange stories to me because those are people who, business-wise, live in a totally different world then we do. They're people who get advances for millions of dollars and who are still not happy with what's happening after the advance. So our story is pretty far away from that, and we live much more modestly as musicians; we relate more to blues or jazz musicians than to George Michael and Prince, who by the way I love and we were actually talking about him yesterday.

STARPOLISH: Have you heard the new album?

SHELLEY: Yeah, it's great. He's going to do really well this year, getting inducted into the Hall of Fame. It's awesome that he's back. But it's sort of weird for me that he probably made a lot of money from Warner Brothers, but at a certain point he was so unhappy with the deal that he would write the word "slave" on his cheek. And I think that he signed the contract (laughing). You know, he agreed to get into the situation just like George Michael did, and they knew that these people who don't care anything about your music have all this power over you. So it's sort of like they chose their path and they're dealing with it. When we were talking about a major label, Lee was saying that Geffen seemed to want to give us control. They didn't give us all the money; they gave us all the control. I don't have a lot of sympathy for those stories, and they don't seem really related to what I do. That's like a different world, the George Michaels and the Princes of the world. But I hope that they do what they want and they make good records and they have fun. I don't know if that answered the question...

STARPOLISH: No, you definitely did. I just remember back to 1999, when I left journalism full time to help launch an Internet music company, and the word of the hour was "disintermediation," meaning that you no longer needed a record label. And boy were they wrong, at least for the time being. The Internet is a tool. So I'm just wondering if some of these examples, if not particularly relevant to your situation, underscore that that utopian idea of the Internet being the be-all-end-all really is not instrumental?

SHELLEY: Well we've definitely thought about it but for those guys, I think they really lost something when they didn't have structure, you know? Like for Prince, when he's putting out his record he thinks, "Well, I can do anything." And he did, and he has a hardcore group of fans, but it didn't reach everybody; he sort of lost touch.