Joe Gore - Know how she sings here about Joe and Elise? That’s me and my wife, Elise. Is This Desire has so many songs with women’s names. Polly just borrowed names from friends in her circle, but the lyrics aren’t actually about them. But it’s awesome to be name-checked in a great song.

I share everyone‘s high opinion of Polly’s playing! In fact, I met first met her when I interviewed her for Guitar Player right when Rid Of Me came out because I loved her playing so much. Amazingly, she thought of me when she was ready to record To Bring You My Love. I think the original reason I was there was because she wanted to perfect her frontperson role. She was studying dance and going to a lot of theater and dance performances, and she wanted to be able to move without a guitar. On the album, all the big, heavy parts are her. I play the weird, atmospheric/ambient stuff — things that sound like bells, scrapes, moans, and … a toy dinosaur. If the part sounds small (like the guitar on “Working for the Man”) broken (the feeble, fµcked-up fuzz guitar on “Monstah”) or random (the outro noises of “Down by the Water“) that’s me. But the big, front-and-center riffs are 100% Polly. That was true with Is This Desire as well. On the road, John Parish almost always played Polly’s parts, and I did my weird sh1t.

I’m really glad she decided to release the cassette demos for the album. I still have the hand-lettered cassette she sent to the Guitar Player offices, but I’ve never played it for anyone. As anyone who’s heard those demos can confirm, the core of the album was very much spelled out before we went into the studio. I’m not usually a great predictor of the future, but come on, man! How could it not be an important, long-lasting album based on those stunning demos? I just didn’t want to fµck it up! For me, participating was both a great honor and a terrifying ordeal.

I’m kind of weird in that I almost never listen back to projects I worked on. But whenever I hear something from those albums on the radio or at a party, it does sound really good to me