MPP: So until Matt left, Mudhoney was you four. Isn't it pretty unusual to last twelve years with such a stable line-up?

MA: There's really one reason why we stayed stable for so long: because we split songwriting, publishing, everything financially four ways, even steven. We did that at the beginning, and I'm not even sure exactly why, but I think it's the smartest thing we've ever done. It wipes out petty jealousies: there's none of that, "well, I wrote the main riff for that song, so I should get more money." And it works out better for the album. I remember Screaming Trees, when they figured out, "oh, you can make money off publishing," every guy was writing songs and trying to push the songs onto the records. That will splinter the group. And a group of four, that's a pretty fragile thing; it's hard enough to keep together a marriage with two people, and four ways is exponentially harder - it's not four times more difficult, but four hundred times.

But it was tough when Matt left, because Mudhoney isn't a band that's driven by one guy's vision - it's truly a democratic band. Everybody participates as much as they want, and they're all encouraged to participate to the fullest extent. But in the last days with Matt, his enthusiasm had waned. In fact, I don't think he even wanted to be there. (laughs) He felt really bad about quitting...he didn't want to let anybody down. And I mean, early on we'd said that if one member quits, it wouldn't be Mudhoney. So I came over to see him, and one thing he said was that if we wanted to keep playing as Mudhoney, he was okay with that.

MPP: You guys came back to Sub Pop after ten years away. How come?

MA: Basically, once we got dropped from our major label, we had to figure out where to put out the next album. We'd worked with Sub Pop on our singles comp, March to Fuzz, while we were still on reprieve, so it was a pretty easy transition. It was kind of like going back home, only with a whole bunch of different people working there.

(Ready for the big time? - photographer unknown)

MPP: When you started out, Sub Pop was at the cusp of something really huge. Did you expect Nirvana to be the first big band out of Seattle?

MA: Well, we kind of were the first band out of Seattle, and way more out of the independent or the underground. I mean we thought things had gotten out of control in like 1989! (laughs) We had no idea what insanity was going to come when Nirvana broke out.

MPP: Did it ever bother you that Nirvana were the ones to break out like that?