AOL: What was it like playing five of your albums over five nights?
Isaac: It was like 68 songs or something like that.
Zac: Even though we normally play a lot of different songs, half of those records we had to work up and remember. It was a great challenge, really enjoyable, but also something you only want to do once every so often.
Isaac: It was a really fun experience to share with a group of people night after night like that. It was a great thing to be able to look back at the last 13 years of your life and put it into song like that.
Zac: Each night brings back different memories and feelings because it's a time period, a group of songs that represented a place and a time -- not only in our lives, but in the lives of the people that are there watching the shows.
AOL: Why did you decide to go in a different direction with the musical style of this record?
Taylor: Well, records reflect what's going on, in your band, and hopefully some of what's going on in the world around you. This one was about putting together a lot of the pieces of different albums. We're a band that's been doing this a long time now and there was a relaxed feeling about it. We've tackled a lot of things, started a record company, shared our passion for issues in Africa on the last record and rallied our fans behind a pretty intense cause. The last album had really strong themes that used the music as a method to galvanize movement. 'Shout It Out' is made up breadths of remembering why we got into music in the first place and songwriting that was inspired by playing together. We went into making this album comfortable in our own skin. It would be great to capture a record that just gave us a chance to have it be OK to smile, to have it be OK to sing a melody, to reference in a prominent way a lot of the music that we grew up listening to, which was soul music and rock 'n' roll.
