Dom: No doubt it is. One of the highlights of the last time I saw you perform was the contrast and cohesiveness (did I just say that?) of Epilogue which you sing, Val and Hardly a Day which you sing Kristine. The two are so different yet so similar.
a) Help us understand the meaning of these two songs?
b) What was the driving force behind the lyrics?
Kristine: The name Epilogue was to "round off" the album. We didn't want to call it Hardly A Day Part II because it is so very different, therefore Epilogue, meaning ending. We wanted to end the album in the same way we started it.
Actually, coming down to the name of the album, Mobius, I know I am going off on a little bit of a chat, but..
Dom: Go right ahead
Kristine: The name Mobius is a Mobius Strip, which is never ending and..
Valentin: Rolls back on itself. Hardly a day and Epilogue. Like I said before, it's star crossing lovers, from two different perspectives. I had done a lot of the initial writing with an acoustic guitar and just my voice. The intention was for it to be a dance track with Kris's voice, but I got attached to (and there were a lot of lyrics as well) it and I thought this would really work well both ways. Also having a history as a rock guitarist, I felt it was something I needed to get out for the album. Like I said "I gotta do this" and everyone looked at me as if I had three eyeballs or something.
Initially we had a number of sheets written, without getting too weird about it, the thing that inspired us to complete the writing of the lyrics, were the events of September 11th.
It wasn't specifically about it, but it was about that sense of "OK. Something really cataclysmic happened. Something horrible. And there were a lot people wondering, OK am I ever going to see this person again, and did they make it, did they not."
Unfortunately, so many people didn't. But In that moment, creatively there was this incredible emotion that we both felt. Maybe these people in Hardly a Day, let's just imagine for a second, what it must feel like, because the feeling was in front of us right there, what would it feel like if these people didn't even know if the other person made it, or if they were able to get to them. Those emotions got us to finish very quickly the lyrics that we had been playing with and struggling with for a little bit of time. So that helped to channel this massive emotion that we were (I think everybody was) feeling at the time. And with all that emotion, that maybe why we ended up with so much material. Enough to actually get two songs out of it.
Kristine: (agreeing) But also coming from a different perspective, if you listen to the lyrics they in essence are the same song. Hardly a Day goes by, and obviously males and females feel differently about different things.
And it's trying to get a different perspective on it. We put the song on the album and that was not a criticism but people think of it as a dance album and we definitely wanted to put (Epilogue) on the album because it's so much more than just a dance album. It's an album of musicians; it's not specifically one style or another.
Valentin: Dance has a lot to do with it, there are obviously a good number of dance songs on there. But it was also to give a little foreshadowing, that we're going to take this a lot further than just dance music. And I don't mean, "just dance music" in a derogatory way, but there are a lot of different styles we enjoy working with and we'll definitely be doing that.
Kristine: Val is like a sponge and he soaks all that up, so it's great to be able to work with him.
Dom: Epilogue takes you off the path of the sounds we have come to know from Love Bites and Hardly a Day. Is this part of the "Grand Plan?"
Valentin: There's definitely a grand plan (Kris laughs) to experiment with more things like that. We're actually working on a couple of tracks right now that people would think are hip-hop influenced. But our idea is to always take a little different slant, then let the inspiration guide us a little bit in what we do. When I say hip-hop, a lot of people will think one or two chord songs that are very, very catchy, but don't as songs in their own merits really continue for very long. What we plan on doing is taking a couple of songs we have already written and applying the production styles to it and seeing what comes out, because one of the things that could be done with the hip-hop style is that -- speaking kind of loosely here -- will allow them to be done in a more song-oriented way where people will carry on with them a lot more than the tremendous pop attention these songs typically get right now.
Kristine: A lot of people want to also go toward the pop direction because it reaches out to more people and obviously we want to get our message out.
