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only I knew all this stuff." Now I know all this stuff, but all of a sudden I'm back at zero again and I say, "Now there's all this stuff to know." That's the eternal chal lenge. That's part of the excitement and the frustration. I realize that that's always going to be there. It's never going to be fin ished.

RF: What are some of the pros of working

together in the studio with people you know so well?

~ We really joke around. It's amazing because the morale is incredibly high for a band that has been together this long. We've been through a lot. When you're in a band, you're married and you start to know all the stuff about each individual, every aspect, musically, emotionally, ego tistically, and that stuff settles. Occasion-

ally, people ruffle their feathers and have their own cloud of dust, but after the dust settles, you kind of know where their boundaries are. You don't know that in a studio situation where you're meeting peo ple for the first time and maybe the only time. But that has its own excitement too and that produces its own demand.

RF: You likened being in a band to a mar riage, and sometimes after a while, maybe some of the passion leaves and is replaced by comfort. But comfort has its negative aspects as well as its pleasures. Do you feel that you can continue to grow or do you find you have to push yourself to grow?

WW: Personally, I'm always pushing my self anyway. I'm my own worst enemy in that aspect, so whether the band situation pushes me or not, I'll do it to myself. Maybe that's my saving grace in the situa tion. Everybody in the band is like that. Having interests outside Utopia kind of keeps kindling that. The band concept is almost like the grand studio concept. You can draw the parallel that we never jam or get together socially except on occasion, and that's had its advantages and disad vantages too. If we were a jamming-type band, I think the music would be a bit dif ferent than what it is. It's a very different situation than I've ever been involved in. I have a lot of friends who are in bands and that's what they do full time. They are put ting their energy into that band, and the members spend the better part of each year thinking about that situation or taking the time to make that record and playing to gether, whether they're on the road all the time or not. They'll go out on the road, play their tunes, get them tight, and then go into the studio and record. We never do that. Our approach is always more-I don't want to say calculated because it makes the situation sound sterile, but in a sense it is-calculated inasmuch as we go in and it's like a laboratory. We go in there, write sections of music and put the situation together. Then we go out and tour. It's fairly business oriented to a de gree. The part that isn't business oriented is that we don't write totally commercial music. So it's funny. It's a calculated as sembly of production, but what we're as sembling isn't calculated.

RF: Since you have known each other for eight years, you can't help but have a bond that transcends business.

WW: Even though we don't hang out all the time; there's a bond that develops through time. What that bond is, I can't even venture to say, but there is a bond.

RF: How did you get involved in Utopia initially?

WW: Todd had produced the War Babies album for Hall & Oates when I was in that band. Daryl and John used Todd's bass player, John Siegler, and Todd to produce the album. John and I became tight as a rhythm section. We really enjoyed each other's playing and became friends. Uto