You’ve been touring in support of Leviathan for a while now. Are you tired of playing those songs yet?
No. It’s cool, because we got a whole group of new people that are coming to see it for the first time and we feed off the energy of the crowd. Personally, I like everything we’ve ever written. I don’t mind playing “March of the Fire Ants” a million times. It doesn’t get old because I enjoy playing the drums to those songs, they’re fun.

Are you happy with how Leviathan turned out?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ll probably never be 100-percent happy with anything, but every time I pop it in it’s something I’m really proud of. I’m not afraid to play it for people.

You’re on the road so much; do you write on the road?
We wrote Leviathan in like a month and a half, but we collect riffs along the way. We fill our bags full of riffs and then when we get back home we dump ’em out and put ’em together. But sometimes Brent [Hines, guitarist/singer] will write an entire song, “Man, the other night I was on the couch, I was high, and wrote this with an acoustic.” That’s what happened with “Hearts Alive.”

He wrote that whole thing? It’s 13 minutes long!
Yeah. It was two different songs that didn’t sound like full songs by themselves so we put them together in proper prog rock fashion.

Why did you opt for the different production feel on Leviathan?
We didn’t, really; that’s just the way it came out. Remission was recorded in a week, and we never really discussed how we wanted it to sound. Same thing with Leviathan, in the studio it just sounded big and heavy and everything was breathing a lot bigger. Leviathan is the product of us playing so many live shows, wanting to write songs that we’re really going to like to play live for a long time. Not necessarily just to get people going, but I think that plays a part of it, mentally, when writing material. Stuff like “I like this part a lot; I think people are really going to go crazy for this part.”

Was it your idea to base it on Moby Dick? Why?
Yeah. I had it in my head for a while before I said anything about it. But I wanted to re-read the book just to be sure. It’s an extremely dense book; in no way, shape, or form could you actually do it justice—it would take six to 10 CDs to cover it. So it was loosely based like, “Put this in the back of your head while you’re writing because the artwork and the imagery that we could draw from it could be really cool.” Thematically, when the artwork and the lyrics and the mood of the record all tie together—well, a lot of my favorite records are that way. We weren’t afraid of making a concept album. Interviewers have been like, “Aren’t you afraid of the terms ‘concept album’ or ‘prog rock’?” Well, no, I listen to a lot of prog rock. I’m not afraid of it.

What are you doing now, direction-wise?
I have no idea. Six months after Remission came out we had no idea where we were going. All of us throw out ideas and say things, but really what happens is, from the gut, we just write riffs and put stuff together. What sounds good sounds good; and what doesn’t, doesn’t.

What do you wish you could do musically that you can’t?
I wish I could be decent at the piano. It would help so much with composition. That would be nice. Hopefully I have a long life ahead of me, and then I can learn to do that.

Hypothetically, if you had to write another album based on another work of art, what would you choose and why?
Hmmm…see that’s what’s going on right now. We’re beating each other up trying to think about what to do for the next record. But it’s not going to be on another work of art again.

I wouldn’t expect you to repeat yourself.
No, we can’t do that or people will think we’re Masterpiece Theatre. We don’t want to fall into some bizarre trap. We have to jump out of this on the next record, [snaps his fingers] get away from it! But I don’t know, what would be cool to pick? It might be lame, but maybe some Salvador Dali painting or something. But why do frat boys always have Dali posters? You know? They’re like “Aww, yeah dude!” That’s too bad, you know? So yeah, I guess we’d have to steer clear of that, but it’d be cool to base stuff around a painting, try to match a sound with the image. We’ve been having all these crazy, fucked up dreams on this tour bus. It’s haunted. It breeds nightmares. We’ve been murdering a bunch of people. Troy’s been killing like two people a night. I killed a whole bunch of people the other day; I was hitting someone in the head with a jack. It was horrible. Everyday you wake up feeling like the worst person in the world. We’ve been thinking about writing them down, chronicling them. But it’s the best when you have a good dream, and you’re like “Fuck, that was incredible!” You should write those down immediately. It’d be cool to have a whole album based on the dreams that you’ve had.

Do you have a favorite concept album?
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis.

Peter Gabriel?
Yeah, oh yeah! There is a soft place in my heart for some of the Phil Collins vocal-driven stuff. When he first took over it was OK, it was sticking a little bit prog, but then he just went totally pop. My mom used to do exercises to Phil Collins stuff.

“Sussudio?” Have you seen that American Psycho movie?
Yeah, it’s hilarious! I love it! But yeah, Lamb Lies Down… is probably my favorite album of all time.

Really, of all time?
It’s got every element of music. I just love it. Genesis was able to do everything and get away with it—goofy at times, abstract, poppy, then completely fucking weird and bizarre. Peter Gabriel is amazing. The last song on their album Foxtrot, “Supper’s Ready,” is 22 minutes long and amazing. That album is kind of what we modeled Leviathan after, in a way. There’s a grouping of rocking songs between the four and five minute mark. Just bam! Bam! Bam! And then there’s this big long epic to take you out. We were like “We can have that, we can do something like that.” It wasn’t the inspiration for the whole album, but we kind of modeled it after Foxtrot.