Rick, we're in the basement of a house on Long Island - not exactly the most common location for a recording studio. Tell us about this place.

RD: Actually, it's my mother-in-law's basement. She died, I don't know, five years ago? It's in a town called Hampton Bays, in the Hamptons. You know, we've utilized the basement to put a studio in, and it's worked perfectly well. No problem with the acoustics, it doesn't really leak too much out to the neighbors and everything's done with headphones these days, really. It's just worked perfectly. We've just recently moved from Los Angeles, after being out there for about 23, 24 years, and we have a very small house in East Hampton. So, basically it didn't have a place for a studio and so we decided to utilize this. I kind of commute every day in the week, usually, to do my writing and stuff, and its fine, it's been very good. It's very simple, very simple set-up. I am not a "techno guy," I just press "on" and we go and, you know, build up tracks and get songs together.

Has this personal studio changed the way you create music?

RD: Well, it has because I'm by myself here right now. I don't have a guy who does all the engineering, working things for me like I did in Los Angeles. So I just have to have it that simple that I can build up arrangements of songs and get it to a certain point where I can present it to the other guys in the band, and to the engineers, and they can start to figure out how to really upgrade it a bit.

Has it changed the way in which you approach songwriting?

RD: It's changed the fact that I can really hone in on what I want to do, as far as the form of it, the length of it. I can come back and keep changing and changing until I am really happy with it. Where as before, I felt a little bit like I would leave things up in the air sometimes, where I wasn't really sure if it should be that long or that short, or should do this or that with the arrangements, so this time I can keep playing with it until I am happier with it.

Has the overall result been good for these new songs?

RD: Yeah, I do feel a little bit better about the forms of the songs - have reached pretty much their full potential, more than most things I've done. I'd say that's true.