The mood must have been rough for the band. [Guitarist Brent Hinds' brother died in a hunting accident during the making of _The Hunter._** ]** It was tough. It was just hard to concentrate with that record, to be honest with you. It was right when we started really getting into writing for that record, Bill told us he was going to leave and go to rehab. And Brent's brother had just died. And so the state of things, it wasn't really that great, personally. Brent was not in a great spot, mentally.

So the mood was heavy to begin with. To get through that whole time period, we had to keep things, I guess, as light as possible in the practice space. So with a lot of the songs we decided to forgo the concept album. It was almost a backlash against ourselves. We just had done about two years of touring, Crack the Skye and very involved, proggy song structures and really dense writing. And so we just didn't dig a lot deeper past certain songs. With a song like "Blasteroid," we kind of put it all together and it was fun to write and it was fun to play, and we said, "That's it. We're not going to go any further with that song. That one's done. Next song… OK, that one's done." So we tried to not go down any crazy wormholes and get frustrated in the practice space because mentally it just wasn't possible, especially for Brent. We needed it to be a happier place. I still love that record and I could put it at number one if it needed to be.