GUADALCANAL DIARY

So that was so much fun, I wondered if Rhett [Crowe] and Jeff [Walls] wanted to get in on this, so I called them and they said sure. They came up to Reflection Studio in Charlotte, and we spent a couple of days and did about four cuts with the whole band. It was really great, because none of us had played together as that band in six years. It was so much fun, and it was so easy, and it sounded so much like Guadalcanal Diary always sounded, that it ended up being some of the coolest stuff we recorded during the whole project.

When we were all together doing the cuts for the record, Dixon and I just had these big smiles on our faces, because we're sitting listening to playback saying, 'This is Guadalcanal Diary in 1995, and this is so strange."

There was a moment in the studio when Jeff was doing a guitar overdub on this song called "Ten Minutes," and he essentially said, "What do you want on this?" and we said, "Just go nuts," and he did, and it was great. There's nobody that plays like him; there's no one that plays like Rhett; there's no one that plays like John. There's lots of people that play like me (laughs).

(The whole experience) felt odd, but good. I think everybody had been thinking about the possibility of getting back together and doing something as Guadalcanal, though. To make a long story short, by November we had all been talking on the phone about doing it. The timing seemed pretty good, because I'd finished my album, and it was kind of in stasis at that point. Hillbilly Frankenstein was taking an extended break, and both Rhett and John were free to do it, so we had a meeting at Compadre's and decided we were going to do this. We've been rehearsing once a week since late November.

FP: Did it feel strange at first? I'd gotten the feeling from talking to John about this a couple of years ago that there was a little tension between all of you.

MA: Yeah, but the key word in that sentence is "a little." There wasn't much. When we quit, when we broke up, it was more of a situation where everybody wanted to go in separate directions and do what they were going to do with their lives, rather than us not being able to stand each other. We all still got along, and we wanted to keep it that way. We didn't want to go ahead and do another national tour and another record because we thought we had to. If we had done that, we wouldn't have been friends anymore. The last tour was really long and, at that point, we'd been a band for 8 years, and had done four albums and all that stuff ...We'd been around the bend with Elektra, and Rhett and Jeff had just had their first kid. It was a strange time. I had Geffen saying, "If something happens, call us." I had always known that, but at that point I got the impression we were all thinking about doing separate projects. Instead of collapsing in on ourselves, we figured we'd stop while we were ahead, which was the smartest thing we could've done. In retrospect, it would have been smarter to get back together two years later, but you never know that kind of stuff.