What's there to say about the new Mudhoney album? That it's good? Yeah, well, Mark Arm, Steve Turner, Dan Peters, and the irrepressible Matt Lukin still are Mudhoney, and expressing the self- evident truths that these Shadowy Knights Of The New New Super- Heavy Punk, these Sinister Ministers from the Land of Designer Lattes, Dessert Beers, Memory- Sucking Software, and Whatever, Nevermind-- and O, Lord, give us this day their Indie Cred-- are 110 proof that not all rock bands are creating sequels.

Tomorrow Hit Today-- the not- illogical follow-up to 1995's still- smokin' My Brother The Cow-- is also Mudhoney's first album that wasn't produced by somebody who wasn't a blooded-in member of their hometown Seattle Mafia, but by (drumroll, please...) the Man! the Semi-Legend! Jim Dickinson, hisbeautifulself.

-From the Reprise press kit

Pitchfork: How many days have you been on tour so far?

Steve: Well, we're a little over two weeks into it. Our first date was the first [of October]. It's going fine-- we're a little out of it today because this is the sixth show in a row-- we've been denied our sleep. We've had six-hour and eight-hour drives between cities. And we pulled basically all-nighters in Atlanta.

Mark: Some of that's our own fault. I think all of it is our own fault. [laughs]

Pitchfork: Have you been getting a different response in each city?

Steve: We've just been to the south, and we haven't really done much in the south over the last couple of years, really. So it was sort of a crap shoot. We played some places we've never played before and in some places 150 people came or something. I think it's generally safer to play some of the big cities.

Pitchfork: Safer how?

Steve: In terms of getting a crowd, you know.

Pitchfork: Did you choose the bands that are opening up for you?

Steve: Yes. In California, the Urinals played most of the dates with us. Kent 3 is doing the whole US. Nebula joined us in Texas, and they'll be with us through all of the east coast. Kent 3 are from Seattle, and Nebula... where does Nebula reside?

Mark: Um, I'd like to say the LA area.

Pitchfork: How did you hear Kent 3? [note: he means Nebula, since they were in Fu Manchu]

Steve: All three of them used to be in Fu Man Chu [sic]. And a friend of mine alerted me to the fact that all three of these former members were playing at Tuesday Night in Seattle. I went down, and I was just stunned.

Mark: They're the best freedom rock band ever!

Steve: I didn't really know what to expect. I'd seen Fu Man Chu [sic], like the new lineup, but I'd never seen the old one. And when I saw these guys play as hard as they did in front of 30 people who didn't give a shit, I had the biggest grin on my face. I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't like anyone said, 'You gotta see this band,' and then I went and they were good. It was like, 'These guys might be good, you should check them out.'

Mark: They're southern rock-- I think that's what it's called. You know, back in our day we used to call it grunge [laughs]. They're hostile to the term 'stoner rock' even though they do smoke a lot of pot. And they hate heavy metal, so don't call them a heavy metal band.

Pitchfork: So how would you describe them?

Mark: Grunge. [giggles]

Pitchfork: There seems to be a lot of international press for Mudhoney these days. How do you feel about that?

Mark: I haven't seen any of the press; I've heard [the Melody Maker review of Tomorrow Hits Today] which was none too favorable. Italian reviews would be favorable, we've seen those.

Steve: We've done some interviews for Europe, and they're not really negative this time around. We went over to London and did one show about a month ago, or a couple of months ago. And it was a really great show, and...

Mark: ...the problem was we had brought our 'antique instruments' with us.

Steve: There was one great review, like, in the London Times which called our guitar, bass and drums 'antiques!' [laughs] So, you kind of get an idea of where they're coming from. We went over there to kind of sniff around and see what it was like over there because things change so quickly in England. And it was what we'd expected.

Mark: And the funny thing was, the first time we were there in 1989, we were considered 'cutting edge.'

Pitchfork: Was that when you played the Reading Festival, with the now famous 'mudball incident?'

Mark: No, I think that was in '91 or something.

Pitchfork: How did you guys like doing the festival circuit?

Steve: It kinda depends on what the other bands are. You know, some festivals are kind of fun. We've had some real un-fun ones and fun ones. We did the Big Day Out in Australia and that was great. It was an amazing lineup: Sonic Youth, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Iggy Pop... It was excellent, that was great.

Pitchfork: How does it feel to have come from such a huge, famous, incestuous scene in Seattle?

Steve: Well, a lot of the bands that we were lumped in with don't even exist anymore. You know, we're friends with plenty of those people still. But it's not really the same scene as it was ten years ago.

Mark: Ten years ago, on the outside, a good show was 150 people. That would be amazing in Seattle. Sonic Youth might get like 400. And then the whole alterna-rock explosion happened, and all of a sudden people were asking, 'Well, what did you do before this?' But not that I could care what they were doing before this, I was just curious. I need sleep!!

Steve: You know, I don't mind being lumped in with the Seattle grunge Sub Pop scene because it's just a fact that we were there. So, I don't feel shackled by it. You know, George Michael said, 'I wish they'd listen with open ears.'

Mark: Open flies, I think he said. [laughs]

Pitchfork: Are there still really good up- and- coming bands in Seattle that you'd like to plug?

Mark: There's small bands-- who knows if they're up and coming. It seems like the best bands are the ones that aren't really all that popular necessarily.

Steve: Like the Kent 3-- we really like them a lot. I actually think that in the past few years, there are more good bands in Seattle than during the whole grunge period. I guess some people just retreated from it and did their own things with other themes. Like a little garage or a garage kind of scene. You know, there are bands that only have a single or two out like the Moogs Starring as Viva La Revolution-- I think that's their full title. And the Pissed Off Zombies are really great. The Fall-Outs, if they manage to ever do anything again. The Wire Taps. The Cripples are really cool. There's a lot of really cool bands that I go and see.

Mark: There's plenty of un-cool little bands, too.

Steve: Sure, like what me and Mark disagreed on-- Cold Way Walking. [both laugh]

Mark: I think we'd both agree on the Primate Five.

Steve: Yeah. They're no good.

Mark: Oh-- Murder City Devils, too.

Steve: Yeah, they're pretty good.

Pitchfork: Won't they be upset to hear that you don't like them?

Mark: Who Primate Five? They can't read, they're apes. They're damn dirty apes!

Steve: The Murder City Devils are really good, too. They just had a new record out on Sub Pop. I like them a lot.

Mark: They're like the best new band that Sub Pop has worked with in over a decade that's, like, unknown.

Pitchfork: I hear you guys had a song featured on a Microsoft ad. Has Bill Gates ever come to one of your shows?

Mark: We did whore our songs to the other guy, Paul Allen.

Steve: Bill Gates' ex-partner. The other reigning billionaire in the Seattle area. He's building a music museum over there.

Mark: It started off as sort of an homage to Hendrix. It was going to be the Hendrix thing.

Steve: We played at the groundbreaking of it. So we've played on both sides of the Microsoft billionaire thing.

Mark: We're playing them off each other. Trying to make them jealous and fight for our attention. But it hasn't worked.

Steve: [laughing] 'Who?? What is this gnat making noise down by my ankle?'

Pitchfork: What did you think you'd become if you didn't grow up to be a rock star?

Steve: Oh, I knew I was going to be a rock star from the moment I was three years old.

Mark: When I saw "Donny & Marie" on the television when I was three years old, I said to myself, "I'm gonna be that!" I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I was 18 when I started playing in the band.

Steve: He's a couple of years older than me, so I was a little younger than that.

Pitchfork: What do your parents think of your success?

Steve: They're pretty into it.

Mark: My parents will come on a night when we play an outdoor free show in Seattle. [laughing] My parents think we're as popular as Pearl Jam!

Steve: My parents are really proud of me. They love me.

Pitchfork: On one trip to D.C. you guys got invited to the White House-- has the president called this time?

Mark: No, we aren't with Pearl Jam this time.

Steve: We didn't actually get the call last time, Pearl Jam got the call.

Mark: And they let us tag along. They actually had an audience with Bill.

Steve: Which I was actually concerned about at the time. Like, 'Why is our president wasting time talking with fucking Stone Gossard and Eddie Vedder?' Like, what the hell is this-- he doesn't have better things to do?

Mark: He did have better things to do. [laughs] He should have been meeting with more rock bands-- it might have kept him out of trouble.

Pitchfork: What was your relationship with Sub Pop after you left? After you had basically kept them solvent for a number of years?

Steve: Well, that was only at their worst point.

Mark: When Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge came out, they owed money to everyone. And they were avoiding paying us. And they were using money from that record to keep themselves afloat.

Steve: They'd done that before, on the Mudhoney record.

Mark: But it wasn't quite as extreme as during that era.

Steve: They owed us a lot of money at one point.

Mark: They even offered us a piece of the company. You know, instead of money, we'd take stock. And we were like 'Fuck no!' [laughs] But we should have.

Steve: You know, I didn't think they were going to be around much longer.

Mark: First of all, I don't think at that point I even knew that they had a piece of Nirvana. You know what I'm saying?

Steve: There wasn't much of Nirvana to have a piece of, then.

Mark: There was always those three guys, until the end.

Steve: No, I mean they hadn't done shit yet.

Mark: Yeah, oh yeah.

Steve: We never had a contract with them, so it was a pretty friendly thing. We just told them that we weren't giving them our next record. We almost didn't give them Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge because they kept delaying it, and it would have fucked up our whole schedule-- we'd already made tour plans and everything. They were trying to delay the record a few more months or something. We thought about leaving then, but we figured it would probably interrupt our plans for the next six months.

Mark: And if it wasn't for Krist Novoselic drunkenly knocking on Jonathan Poneman [the head of Sub Pop]'s window demanding a contract, thinking he was going to save his ass, Sub Pop wouldn't have had points on Nirvana. I guess they scribbled down something on paper which was legally binding. I bet Krist regrets that night.

Pitchfork: How was making this record different?

Steve: We took longer, all around. We took time after the last record. And then we kind of started to write songs slowly without any big idea, really. After a year and a half, we actually had way too many songs, and that was another difference. Usually, we have just enough or just under enough. We had about ten extra songs this time around-- songs that we'd like to have worked out all the way through. We played them live, and had been 4-tracking this stuff and playing it back and all that. And making changes. We also spent more money in the studio this time. We spent about the same amount of time in the studio this time, except it was all spread out over a bunch of different studios and different sessions. We worked harder on it all around, but at a slower pace.

Pitchfork: What happened to the songs that didn't make it onto the record?

Steve: We didn't record all of it. We recorded about five extra songs or something. I don't know what's going to happen with them. One song's going to a compilation. One song ended up as the b-side to a 7-inch single.

Mark: We knew where those songs were going. One song was destined to be the b-side. We thought, 'Let's just do this one to be the b-side to a single Steve put out on SuperElectro, his label.' The other was a Skip Spence cover which was specifically recorded to be on a Skip Spence tribute record. Which is going to feature Bob Plant fronting the Flaming Lips!

Pitchfork: What was it like doing soundtracks?

Steve: A lot of our soundtracks were just instant songs where we've got to put a song together. So we come up with a song in one day, record a song for a few hundred dollars, and-- boom-- it's out of our life.

Mark: And sometimes we can tell where it's supposed to go in a movie, so we can make something happen to annoy the film people.

Pitchfork: Had you seen Singles before doing the soundtrack?

Steve: No, we knew it was happening and we knew it was about Seattle and stuff. We basically wormed our way onto the soundtrack.

Mark: There was this other movie that we did, and they gave us the clip for it. The movie "With Honors"-- they showed us a little piece of film. It was Brendan Fraser. It was the story of him as this Harvard Law student, this yuppie running through the snow.

Steve: He's training, and they wanted a song for over this part of the movie. They wanted a "Rocky" theme, essentially.

Mark: And the music they had under it was EMF's Unbelievable. They said, 'Upbeat kind of pop song-- this is the kind of thing we want.' So we wrote this instrumental called Run Shithead Run...

Steve: Was it called Run Shithead Run already? That was the working title.

Mark: And they said, 'Well, we want lyrics.' So we said, 'Okay, here they are: Run shithead run!' Which is actually one of my favorite pieces of music which we've ever done.

Steve: It works really good. But they didn't end up using it in that scene. It was really hilarious. They used it in another scene, at really low volume. I rented the movie when it came out, so I could see where they put it. Someone told me they had heard the song in the movie. We really thought they would pick the instrumental, because it was a really cool, rocking little number-- but nope, they wanted singing.

Pitchfork: Which is your favorite Mudhoney record?

Steve: I don't have any favorites, really. I'm satisfied with all the records still, which is a good sign. Usually, there are a few songs that I'm not totally down with. But I think we picked the right songs for this one-- at least the songs that turned out the most successfully in the studio.

Mark: It all seems still fun to play. I'm not sick of any of them yet-- either to play or to listen to. I have my theories of which ones I will get sick of first [laughs] but I'll keep them to myself. It'll come out someday in a burst.