My sister is a journalism instructor at Northeast Missouri State University and on her midterm, she's having you two Johns and Matthew Sweet crash in an airplane in a winter storm. The three of you die, and her students have to do a write-up on the event.

Wow.

My question is, how do you react to that?

(laughs)

And do you plan on taking a bus to Minneapolis, if you play there?

I don't think we'll be flying, but it's a strange thing. I've always had misgivings about the whole thing of being a public person. In general, I feel it's more interesting to just let the work do the talking. We try to soft pedal the personality aspect of what we're doing as much as we can. As much as it is a personal project and it's obviously driven by us, it seems like there's something really diminshed about rock music that's just first person singular. I guess a lot of the writing about bands and rockumentaries seems very superficial to me.

Do you mean it just focuses on the glamour aspect of it?

Well, it's either glamour-driven or anti-glamour driven, but it's always more about celebrity and the drama and the hyped-up bogus drama of performer's lives. They're not that, um, dramatic. A lot of what you do is very straightforward. Most people I know in music work very hard and they're very focused. They're not very caught up in the gossipy stuff that seems to drive a lot of people's interest to music.

It's a mistake when people think they're getting a glimpse inside the soul of somebody when they hear their song.

Are most, or any, of your songs autobiographical?

That's a tough question to answer. I'm not sure what would define an autobiographical song. On some level I feel that all our songs are reflections in some way. I think they're all designed to be presented to an audience. I don't know what it would mean to say, "Yes."

I could say the answer could be either yes or no, and either way I could see that being an appropriate answer. I think that how you define the terms of it is really the key to how people walk away from it. A lot of the songs are metaphorical which doesn't mean they're any more, or less, autobigraphical.

I don't know. Sort of getting back to the issues we were talking about music being persona driven--I think people really want to know or think they know the person that's singing. My interests have always been in things that are more heavily projected, like Roy Orbison whose voice is like completely frictionless. There's nothing really personal about it at all. I think there's something really fascinating about stuff that's got distance to it. A lot of times we're trying to achieve something like that, which is not to say that we don't believe in what we're doing. Or it somehow lacks sincereity. But it's a mistake when people think they're getting a glimpse inside the soul of somebody when they hear their song. I know some seriously people who write beautiful songs who would really give you the impression they were total zen masters.