If you get started talking about the Joggers it takes along time. So you either have to keep it short or dig in. So, the following is short bio and a lengthier, more revealing, interview. All questions will be answered in both - depending on your interest. After receiving glowing praise across the board for 2003's "Solid Guild" StarTime debut, including the dominant Rolling Stone, the hipster Filter, the indie Stop Smiling, as well as The Washington Post and touring with the likes of the Hot Hot Heat, Weird War, Ted Leo, and label mates the French Kicks, the Joggers needed a break, not just a breather. Lead singer Ben Whitesides found himself on stage singing, but no words came out - a complete breakdown ensued later that evening. So the band shipped him up to his parents place in New England and returned to Portland feeling tentative about their future. The next few months were spent both with grappling with those issues and casting them away.

Luckily for all of us the Joggers got it together, wrote a whole bunch of new songs, and created their next oddball masterpiece "With a Cape and Cane." One guitarist lighter, but stronger as a band, the group entered the same studio where they recorded "Solid Guild", reuniting with analog studio wiz and editor of Tape Op magazine, Larry Crane. A Cape and a Cane is noticeably free of Pro-Tools effects and mix-down wizardry, and this rawness is exactly how The Joggers like it. "To us the ideas in the song are much more important and exciting than the perfection of its execution," says Whitesides. "As long as the medium can get the ideas and vibe and essence of a song across, that is far more important. Of course you want it to sound good. But a shitty recording can never prevent a great song from being great, and no shitty song can be saved with immaculate studio perfection." This is not too diminish the raw, incredible chops, of "With a Cane and a Cape" or, more importantly, its painstaking precision in songwriting and playing. It also has a big heart, as evidenced on songs like "Night of the Horsepills," which eloquently speaks of an old flame reignited.

The band plans to tour the country non-stop throughout the year. Check them out, their shows are inspiring. We encourage you to read on:

Interview between Lead Guitarist and Songwriter Ben Whitesides and Isaac Green, owner of StarTime Internation

You talked about a value for, I think the word you used was, "abrasive" music. Obviously you weren't trying to pen a bunch of watered down "hits" on this album.What sort of dissonance were you trying to create?And can you re-articulate this idea better?

Although it's not the only thing they're good for, I think that the combination of guitar, bass, and drums provides one of the greatest methods on earth to express frustration (among many other expressions). Sometimes it's scary to try to figure out where that frustration comes from - often I think it's futile to try. The Joggers are all children of the middle-class who grew up in relatively loving, stable homes. What do we have to bitch about? Why do we feel the need to get up on stage and belt out what ever it is we belt out for an hour a night? Why do I like to sit in my room with a guitar chasing bizarre and often neurotic musical ideas for 12 hours at a stretch? I suppose I sometimes believe that most bands' greatest frustration, their greatest inspiration, is that they love music so much, music has meant so much to them in their lives, that they want to contribute to it so badly they're almost besides themselves. I know I've felt this way before. At any rate there are bands we love that can articulate the letdowns and exhilarations of existence so perfectly, express every rough edge so viscerally - like the Fall, like the Monorchid, like a lot of Zeppelin. There's no softening of blows. No mollifying.

Although some of the songs don't fit the traditional verse, chorus pattern and there is an effort to make the music more challenging it is, also, meticulously constructed. Ethan D'ercole called you the "scientist" which I thought was apt and (typically Ethan) why so much structure to the songs? What does it add?

It is funny Ethan said that - because my dad is literally a scientist - and even though we spend our time working on very different endeavors, I think in many of the ways I approach things I learned from my dad. I kind of ceaselessly edit stuff; ceaselessly scrutinize whatever I'm working on. But unlike him I'm terrible about letting something go and saying "this is done." Often this means something will be over-thought and less moving, less direct as a result. But for better or for worse it's the way I go about writing music. And the upside, I think (if there is an upside to this approach), is that the music is less likely to have a lot of "filler" in it. I am just not the "let's roll the tape and see what happens" kind of player, because I know from experience and I know from knowing my own limitations that if I do that then I just create complete shit. My tendency to write somewhat "structured" song isn't a habit I came across by chance, I came to it by necessity, because if I didn't then I wouldn't make anything remotely worth listening to.

When you stopped touring in 2004 you talked about a certain melancholy that had pervaded your life before the making of the record and how you hoped or thought once "Solid Guild" had been released that maybe that would change. But it didn't - How do you cope with that?

This is a big question. I will try to answer it soon.

When did you decide you wanted to keep making music?

Strangely enough I didn't decide. I wrapped myself in knots thinking "Is music too intense for me"? - Someone who is fairly neurotic and anxious to begin with? Will it draw out the worst sides of me and make life miserable? I asked myself that over and over again. Music is as dangerous as it is rewarding. It can cut you to pieces because it can shine a light on things in a way nothing else can.

Really what happened to me was that I took time off - and very gradually began to feel better. There was no lightning-bolt revelation. It was a slow reaction. Once I felt like I was on relatively solid ground again I began to do what I have always done: fuck around with the guitar. Ironically as I write this I feel that circumstances have placed me in a place almost as precarious as the one I was in when I had my meltdown. I didn't see that one coming, just I didn't see any of this coming. But the experience I gained with the previous sturm und drang is worth something. I feel toughened to this sort of shit. I hope I'm right.

How did your band mates react to your retreat and then re-commitment to the group?

They were great. They understood that what I was going through was not trivial, and they never pressured me to continue with the tour we were on. I think intuitively they understood that I needed to take a break immediately. It was dire straits. They drove me back to my parents house in Boston, and I saw shrinks, who helped. But there was no panacea. It took me a long time to return to Portland. I spent a lot of time on the east coast, and as far as I understood they suspected I would remain there. When I did return - they were pretty cautious. I don't think they knew what was going to happen, because they rightfully suspected that I didn't know what was going to happen.

What was going through your mind when you decided to start writing again? Both musically and lyrically?

I didn't stop writing for very long - maybe two months. At that point I was such a nervous wreck that almost everything would terrify me and threaten to trigger a panic attack. Merely looking at my guitar sitting silently in my parent's basement made me nervous, if you can believe that. But slowly, eventually, the gears started moving again.

I like lyrics, so to me they are inherently inseparable with writing music. But I started writing again reflexively. Because on an empty afternoon that's what I do: I don't pick up a football or good book or watch a movie - it's simply what I've found I like to do (SO FAR!).

One of my favorite songs on the record is also one of the most personal, Night of the Horse Pills. Can you talk about the writing of it and its import?

Night of the Horsepills is a conflation of my experiences with a number of different girlfriends. The sentiments in it aren't really linear but cut close to the bone for me. It's just about how you fall for these girls so seriously, and then something happens, and you lose them - but they're always with you. You always love them, and you continue to think about them forever . . . t's just about the sadness of knowing someone so intimately, so fucking closely, and knowing you might never even see them again in your life, let alone share again whatever it was you shared. I don't like to be a sap but I guess that sort of thing gets me down.

I think the city where bands reside can have a large influence on their music, or at least their creative process. With Chicago you see a certain smug "hipster-dom" which, I think, leads to laziness, with L.A. and New York you get a lot of careerist second guessing. What is like being in the Portland? Or the great Northwest for that matter?

In my experience there seems to be a rock aristocracy in every city. And there's a competative phony hipness that permeates them. That doesn't mean that if you have style I necessarily think you're a phony. What I'm talking about are the people who can't cite one genuinely unfashionable album when asked what their favorite music is. I speak of the ones that are the first to recant loyalty to a band as soon as that band is not as cool and new as they once were. To me that proves music is just armor for your ego and your bullshit. These chameleons and fakes come in many different forms and traffic in all styles of music, but Portland definitely has its fair share of them.

This city really is a contradiction to me. In one sense it has the most open-minded, genuine, no-bullshit approach to music and art and living off all the places I've lived (East Coast, Midwest, California included). I think there's a general rejection of the garish tell-all the media has made of music the last 15 years, which has feuled an interested in home-made music. This phenomenon goes double for portland, a city that has always relished unconventional approaches to music writing, recording, and appreciation. It's a place accustomed to thinking about things at the city-scale, and purporting to screw everything beyond.

But Portland can also be one of the most scathingly elitist, the most aggressively hip, the most cold and competitive places too - as bad as New York, as bad as Chicago. It's really balkenized out here right now, as I suspect it is everywhere. Lots of lots of little circles of bands persuing their particular fetish - and the interaction between these little tribes is sometimes there, and sometimes not. No band, the joggers included, likes to think of itself as part of a scene, but it's true that certain bands with certain shared musical interests and inspirations naturally find one another and play shows together. There are spheres of music in Portland that I have chosen not to stay informed about, because I haven't found them terribly rewarding in the past things; and its probably to my detriment, because surely there is some good music being made that I will miss out on merely by the necessity of prejudice. And I say the necessity of prejudice because there are simply so many people making so many different kinds of music, in Portland and everywhere, right now, that if you don't find a way to filter through it for the things you might be interested in - you wouldn't have time to eat sleep or breathe.

It is literally becoming difficult to find someone who hasn't created a "record" with Garageband or whatever. And although the democratization of recording technology is great from the perspective of a musician - as a listener it can become more and more time-consuming to cull the wheat from the chaff. And I know people might call me a dinosaur for saying so, but there really is a lot of chaff out there. There is music that is better than other music. Merely because it speaks more deeply and more universally to people. I don't know and will never know where we fall in this state of things.

Most bands would, if given the option, spend a lot of money and time making the "perfect" record. You're the only band I've worked with that like to work fast. Why?

To us the ideas in the song are much more important and exciting than the perfection of its execution. What would you rather read? A dog-eared coffee-stained dime-store paperback Salinger or Maugham or Joyce - or the latest collector-edition's lovingly-hand-stitched tract by anne rice? Would you rather hear a wobbly sun-bleached falling-apart cassette of new songs by your favorite band - or would you prefer to hear Bowling for Soup's Latest on 180-gram pristine virgin audiophile vinyl? As long as the medium can get the ideas and vibe and essence of a song across, that is far more important, to us. Of course you want it to sound good. But a shitty recording can never prevent a great song from being great, and no shitty song can be saved with immaculate studio perfection. Don't get us wrong - we'd like to make the perfect record too. But we also know that we are not technically capable-enough players to achieve studio perfection, and we also know that there is no perfect record, just really really really good ones.

Why did you decide to work at Jackpot studios again?

Jackpot is relatively inexpensive, very close to where we all live in Portland, and we've always simply liked the overall ethos of the place. They are professionals, they know what they're doing - but they're not some clinical behemoth of a studio with no sense of humor and no flexibility about recording. They want the music to sound the best it can, but understand that a "wrong" note here or there might be the price that has to be paid for acquiring a take that has a good vibe and feel to it. The only other option we were tempted by would be to record at home. But there are a few reasons we decided not to. For one, we need deadlines in order to finish songs. I have about two hundred song-lets or riffs on my computer, but unless there's a deadline set in stone, I don't finish them as songs, I just keep on doodling away writing short ideas that rarely get developed into something more. Secondly, When you're recording, so much of your mind is focused on simply playing the music correctly: "did this fucking part go to Gdim7 or not?" "Was that last take abhorrent unto the Lord, or was it transcendent genius that will dampen panties across the nations, was it both?" Your mind is so focused on that side of things, where it should be, that to add all the additional concerns of being your own engineer: "is drum isolation right for this tune? are the mics placed correctly with the best possible pre-amps blah blah blah." I think that we would be spread way too thin trying to do both sides.

You described this album as being a "snapshot" where as "solid guild" was recorded over a couple of years. This a common theme for second albums - first voiced by Elvis Costello who said he had 25 years to write his first record and 8 months to write his second - how does this new album differ from that?

Yeah he had 25 years to write his first album but that's a little disingenuous. When you get going writing songs you create a storm of ideas. You pick you favorites for your first recording but have begun to amass a bank of material that you hope might work with some other tune somewhere down the line. By the time the engines are running and your first record comes out most bands are working full steam ahead creating and collecting other ideas they know might make sense in a song some time later. We knew with Solid Guild we had an opportunity to put out a recording and we know that it was one we didn't want to squander. Doubtless the fact that you (Isaac) had expressed affection for certain numbers on our first recording - compelled us to include some of those because we wanted to make the relationship something lasting. It didn't hurt that we didn't hate those tunes anyway. But after our long break, we didn't know what was going to happen. A fair amount of turbulence had been crossed in the interim. But we were psyched that someone was still interested in our music, and we wanted to make another recording. This new record is a "snapshot" - but it's a snapshot taken over many years. We played a version of "plenty of room" at our first show in New York at Northsix, 2002 - a show you saw. But the point is that this material feels cohesive to us. Like many bands we have tinkered with the material for years but really put it together in the months before the recording time is set. We just didn't want it to sound like a compilation - we wanted it to sound like a band at a certain moment in its life. Those are the best records. So if we had the freedom to use all "new" material we used it. Simple as that.