We pulled our '99 Ford E-Series up in front of our practice space in Brooklyn. It was a Tuesday afternoon. It had been 4 months. We'd been across the US 3 times, hitting 46 of the lower 48. One of us rode with severe food poisoning across the Great Plains and Pacific Northwest for 3 days, throwing up out of the back door, refusing to stop for treatment and miss shows. Because we couldn't afford to. We'd been back to Australia, where one of us, in a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to pad the coffers at the dog track, lost every penny he had. And we'd been in Europe for 6 weeks, 17 countries, from UK to Russia. In Moscow, a man wearing a watch that cost more than the building the show was held in offered to sell one of us a woman. To take home. For life. So yeah, we were tired. So we cancelled the remaining 2 months and got back to writing songs. But the money was gone. Re-enter one J Robbins, who made Get Saved with us. He needed a studio built. So over the course of months, we put in the floors, soundproofed it, renovated the front office, and we made Scott replace the toilets. Every couple of weeks we'd go down to the Magpie Cage in Baltimore (deep in "Wire" country) and make an improvement in the studio and record whatever we'd recently put together.