are not getting paid much, if anything. It was a small group of people, but man, was it ever the best thing. Those guys and girls just went crazy. It's what we know, and we can't really conceive of doing it any other way when we get up there to play. Do Toronto and Ottawa have specific musical tendencies? Well, yeah. Ottawa is the capital city; it's the government city. You either work for the government or you serve the people who work for the government. And there's not much night life, everyone's in bed early, so we just kind of had to make our own thing. That's when the punk scene in Ottawa came out of. And it's not as political as D.C., the conditions aren't anything like the same, but I do think the fact that it was kind of like a sleepy government city made the perfect condition for an actual real community to come about and to spawn some really cool stuff. I think our record, lyrically, is a complete product of living in Toronto. Most of it is dealing with the modern way of life in a gigantic city and feeling some of those conditions starting to weigh down on you: the anxiety, the hysteria, the speed at which you. That's where the lyrics are coming from. How do you guys work when you put songs together? It's a hundred per cent collective. We very rarely will come to the rehearsal space with even a