Why is this your favorite? I think this was a redefinition of what we were. It’s got a lot of great songs on it. We were firing on all cylinders at the time, but also challenging what people thought we were. We changed directions a little here, adding Farfisa and going a little more garage-y. Plus it was more song-oriented than Fuzzbox oriented. We all really liked this record. I have really good memories of that particular era. We were on a roll back then. A short-lived roll, apparently.

I didn’t realize there were so many mnemonics for EGBDF. Yeah, like Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, which I think was a Moody Blues album. But we didn’t know that at the time! We never looked anything up. Growing up I knew it as Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge though. This is how dumb we were about music though—we were trying to remember what the strings were tuned to, and one of us wrote it out. I think Mark was the only one of us who had piano lessons as a kid.

How concerned was the band that Sub Pop wouldn’t be able to release the album because of finances? At that point you were basically bankrolling the label.

Yeah, that was the problem. We were frustrated with them because we had lined up a tour and we needed the record out in order to tour. So there was a lot of handwringing. They got it sorted out but it was definitely problematic. It eventually sold really well, like 75,000 copies, which was a lot for something like that. I think we got lucky that they held on. Whatever lies they had to tell the pressing plant worked. But I think it was the right record at the right time. I think we were writing good songs, and obviously recording it at Egg with Conrad Uno made it sound different. We recorded it with an 8-track, so we had to really think about what would be on the track because we didn’t have any extra tracks to use. So we were really focused, but it was fun too.