Since the last few years have been regularly touring in America (spending, ironically, more time at its truck stops than its concert venues), I've become aware of some of the excellent shows produced by and affiliated with NPR (National Public Radio). I would love to go off on a tangent here saying how this another great example of what a great thing public media can be, and how a country should take responsibility for these things lest it will slowly drown in hotdog adverts. But I'm off to Leon's house to do an acoustic practice with the other Fanfarlos, so I will have to save that for...

When you're getting a record together for release there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle. We're about to do a lot of touring and in our case so much happened in the studio that it meant learning how to play the songs live again. We've made videos, and we've thought a lot about artwork: what images best convey something about the music. We've had Allison Diaz contribute various pieces (single artwork for Deconstruction and Shiny Things, and band portraits that come with the album) as her cut up found photos seemed to convey something about the...