This is a good (but sad) interview to read now, after the final shows in December.... putting a few of my favorite quotes below. Murphy says. "You're working toward something just like any job; you're building something over a decade or more and then getting to a point with it where you're realizing, ‘Is it time to throw in the towel on this whole thing? Is that going to make our lives better if we did that? Or is this a moment where you push through and keep doing it?' It's an unanswered question because none of us have answered that question at all. But that's the reflection that's coming through on a lot of these lyrics." "Nihilism to hopefulness," Hudson says. "Parts of it are about the idea of giving up vs. acceptance. Is giving up a bad thing? Or is it just a way of accepting something?" I ask everyone if the Albatross anniversary tour activated discussions surrounding the band's existence and longevity, whether it made them think about if they wanted to continue Foxing. Murphy, Torrence, and Hellwig immediately look toward the back of the room at Hudson, who is laughing to himself. "OK, it's hard," he says, still stifling some laughs. "It's hard because it's important to separate it. The shows, the people who came to it, and the people I was on tour with? Great. No issues. It was awesome. Totally no complaints, right?" Except there was a catch. "There were a lot of nights playing The Albatross where I had some of the darkest fucking thoughts I've ever had in my life." The old songs were bringing back memories, often unpleasant ones, that made Hudson reevaluate his life and career path. Hudson quips that the Nearer My God 10-year anniversary is slowly sneaking up on them, which Murphy quickly shuts down. They "definitely learned we'll probably never do an anniversary tour again." Toward the end of the album, during closing track "Crybaby," a voice recording surfaces from a wash of ambience. "I don't think the song is as good as it could be, but it's coming along," it says. The speaker is a prepubescent Hudson, talking about the very first band he was in with Murphy, using an iRiver MP3-player's voice record function. Hudson is the clear perfectionist of the group, who will mix a song for days on end until, in his words, he "unlocks" it. The 13-year-old version of him in that recording may as well be speaking to his current-day self. "I really love that voice clip because it reminds me of when I started doing all of this," he says.