Have you read Dave Bidini's book yet, and if so, what were your impressions?

Downie: Yeah, I read it in a night. Chewed it up. It was awesome. It was really flattering. And interesting. He's a great writer. He captured something that's not easy to capture. Not just the tour, but impressions; his own impressions about his own band were heart-stopping. Talking about their inner conflicts, and things that are very real to any band, any group of people that get together and decide to do something. Making a career out of their imagination. You get a group of four or five people who have ideas, and it's like trying to do it all on the ass of an elephant. It's very difficult, very hard. So I thought it was a book that depicted that very well. Stories that are entirely relevant. To anybody. Really good stuff. Hilarious, too.

Do you think the fact of having to tour across Canada, and the hardships that come with that - especially if you're traveling during winter by van, or whatever - does that perhaps help to strengthen Canadian bands, in the sense that the ones that survive are the strongest, because they have to come together and stick together to survive it?

Downie: It certainly helped Rush. Have you heard their new live record at all? I kind of came to them late in life, but Different Stages? That's killer. There's a band - and I don't know if the Canadian landscape had anything to do with it — but man, they're tight. And you listen to it, there's this disc from '72, and then one from the '90s, and you can't tell the difference. Eminently entertaining.

Contreras: "I think it's a double-edged thing. It can either bring you closer together or rip you apart. I think for a lot of people it's very demoralizing. A lot of people go on tour and then they break up. Even successful bands; the smallest thing can just rip you in half. But it's totally a rewarding thing, and it's also like a total leap of faith, at least for us. On our first couple of tours I went on tour with five dollars. That's what I had in my pocket. It's just madness. They're sort of, like, zealots.

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