Lots of bands as popular as Deerhoof still work day jobs. Why is that?
That’s a good question, and I doubt that anybody really knows the answer. All of us were working different jobs — I was working doing data entry at a law firm, Greg was doing filing, Satomi [Matsuzaki, bassist and vocalist] was an editor for a magazine and Chris Cohen [Deerhoof’s other guitarist] was waiting tables. After awhile, it seemed like we were doing okay on tours, so we wanted to see what would happen if we all just quit our jobs. Basically what we’ve found is there’s a critical amount of touring that we have to do in order to survive in a given year. Do you have that down to a science? No, and that’s the thing — it is a science, and it’s a science in which we are not privy to all of the computations. We don’t know what all of the variables are, and we are constantly learning. You guys opened for Wilco not too long ago. What was that experience like? That was a new thing for us. We played in venues much bigger and fancier than anything we ever played in before. For us, it wa
