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day to be out there, so that they wouldn't have to worry about doing gigs back home
and we could just focus on the thing. Because like I said, all of us are professional
sidemen and we make our living in New Orleans and there's a lot of gigs in New

Orleans, and so I didn't want that distraction. I didn't want that to be a distraction,
and I wanted to focus. It was also an experiment. I'd never done that.

BiTS: It sounds very, very thoughtful to me. I think your colleagues must have been

delighted.

SS: Yeah, it's been an experiment. Like I said, it's gravity-based. So, you know, I
mentioned the idea and there was some head butting after and stuff. Like Alex wasn't

as happy with the result as I was and he was like, man, we should have stayed in
town and done this over a long period of time. I don't know if I want that to be public,
but I'm telling you as a band leader, like it's not all smooth sailing. We definitely

have like push and pulls and compromises, but we eventually gravitate towards
something and when we do something in the spirit of experiment, in the spirit of
not like ego and we all kind of trust each other and give each other a lot of space,

there's a lot of yeses.

BiTS: Now tell me something about the music on the album. How much of it did
you write yourselves?

SS: All of them except for one. All of them except for one song. I mean we recorded
a lot more than seven songs but those are the only songs that made the cut. That
was a whole process in itself too. Alex wrote four of them, and Rob Davis wrote two

of them, and New Orleans rock and roll legend Michael Darby wrote one of them,
and he gave us permission to record it.

BiTS: Do you have a favourite track on the album at all?

SS: I mean, I really like them all, but maybe I like ‘Cringe’ a little more than the others
because it gets down and dirty.

CLICK TO PLAY ‘CRINGE’

BiTS: It certainly does. That's a fabulous track. I was quite surprised by it the first

time I heard it because it's seriously funky.

SS: Yeah, yeah, it takes bigger risks, I think, musically than some of the other songs
and that's one reason I'm really happy that it was included. It made the cut.

BiTS: Who wrote the title track, Smitti?

SS: That was Alex. That was also a last-minute addition. It was the newest song of

all of them. All of the other songs we had played a lot more times than that one. It
was just like all the other songs, a lot of them came together as like, Alex wrote them