Are you looking for a new fan base or have your fans grown up with you?

So many of our fans have grown with us. We play 1,500-2,000 seat rooms every time we go out. We have done very, very well the past several years. A lot of people in the crowd are our fans from the beginning, guys or girls. We have always had a large percentage of girls. But that is also changing a lot. We are finding some guys who were fans at very young ages are rediscovering the band. They first saw us as young guys with long hair. Now they can relate to us in a different way. It has been a process. We are surviving in a business that is unrelenting.

What is the goal of the band?

My goal is survival. When I’m 60 years old, I want to be out on stage and have people screaming their guts out because they are having so much fun. When we were 11, 14, and 16, we knew that music was our lives’ passion. People would always look at us when we said that, and thought `How do you know that now, at such a young age?’ But how the hell could we be writing songs at such a young age if we didn’t have the passion?

We don’t take any of that for granted. Every time somebody walks up to us and says - `Hey, I listen to your music and totally love it’ - that is the kind of thing thousands and thousands of bands seek. We don’t take it for granted for a minute. That is what every guy holding a guitar and every girl trying to make something happen in music is hoping for. Don’t act like it’s not big deal, because it is a very big deal.

What should people expect at your shows during this tour?

We have always tried to make our concerts as musical as possible and as untheatrical as possible. Music speaks so much louder than words, why use a lot of words? But people will hear random covers from the `50s through `70s to everything from "MMMBop" to what we recorded over the last 10 years to a couple songs we worked out in sound check and think have potential. We are not, by any means, a jam band but our shows are an evolving experience.