Well really, until the title was in place, the new songs didn't exist yet. And the truth is, I was really having this delicious bottle of Corton-Charlamagne with my girlfriends in a hotel room at the end of the last tour, and the title started to find its way that night. And once the title was there, for the live album and the b-sides, the songs all started to show up and say, "We're from Venus, sit down."
[How did the title come out and what does it mean to you?]
Through many, many glasses of that stuff.
[What does it mean to you, To Venus and Back?]
Well, I think, mythologically, Venus represents to me the conscious and unconscious feminine. So both things have to exist, not just the love space and all that kind of orbits that, but the darkest places when you're severed from your heart, that had to exist, too. So, the extremes exist on the record.
The live record and the studio record were created by the same team of people. So, the musicians are the same. The band that I played with in '98, this is the first thing we did in the studio together. After living on a bus for nine months and . . . and the engineers recorded the live record and mixed it, and also the studio record.
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