Harley Prechtel-Cortez: The new EP has a guy who we recorded with, his name is Raymond Richards, and he plays pedal steel on there. When you see us play live, it's a lot more stripped down but on record, we're starting to become a little more versed and prolific and we're also able to incorporate a lot of instruments. We don't go overboard with a whole orchestra though, at least not yet. "All Ye People" is a song written on the road. Lyrically, it's how death affects you, kind of dark but there's a redemption quality to it a la Neil Young. There's a dark element to it but there's also hope in it. It's one of our favorite songs too, and when you hear it, it's amazing and really big. It probably has very little to do with us and everything to do with the recording.

You mentioned that it has a dark theme to it. Is that something that flows throughout all the songs?

HPC: No, no, no. Just that one in particular. Most of our songs are actually pretty uplifting, to a degree. We do have songs that deal with social consciousness and different things, like "How Many Operations," which is the acronym HMO, so it deals with the healthcare industry here in the United States. There's a Spanish song that we have on the new EP called "The Fight Song for the Desajolos." Desajolos--it's kind of slang. My cousin [Shoichi Bagley], who's also the guitar player in the band, we're both half Guatemalan. Actually, in December, we went to Guatemala to visit. He hadn't been there for ages, so we went to visit and went literally throughout the whole country. So, lyrically, that song comes from that experience. We wrote it before we went but, lyrically, it was finalized after we went because, in Guatemala, "desajolos" means "evacuees." There are these indigenous evacuees who are taken off their land by Canadian mining companies. [The companies] buy these lands and they promise [the evacuees] work and then [the companies] eventually evict them from the land. There are those kinds of things in the music, too. We try to do it in a way that has hope to it. We're certainly not sounding anything like Rage Against the Machine. Our influences are all over the board, but primarily things like The Clash, that's where it kind of comes from, that sort of ethos. Musically, we love stuff like the Beatles and a lot of old blues and jazz--all kinds of stuff.

What are some of your influences right now or some of the influences for the band at the moment?

HPC: There are a couple cool bands from our part of town: Delta Spirit, We Barbarians. We listen to so much. We just played a couple runs up the West Coast, and all we were listening to in the van was old Ice Cube and Dr. Dre. Normally, we'd put on Okkervil River, Grand Archives, Neil Young or something like that ... we listen to that so much that, when you're in a van with four guys and the scenery is this open land, there's nothing better than listening to Ice Cube. It's actually like the best thing in the world.

You mentioned some local bands, or local to Los Angeles. Is your band from Silver Lake?

HPC: Yes, primarily, but we come from all over. That's where we basically reside, though.

There are a lot of bands that have been labeled a "Silver Lake band," whatever that is. How do you feel about that? Do you want to be lumped into that or do you think you stand outside of that group or that label?

HPC: It's weird because I don't think that we necessarily are part of any of that scene, as much as we love a lot of the music that comes out of it and as much as we get the same respect back, but I don't really feel like we're a part of any scene. For us, we've always stood out and done things separately, not by choice but by circumstance. We've never actually been part of any scene. We've had a lot of friends' bands that have helped us and done a lot of great things for us. We've always stood out, maybe because of our sound or an inability to pinpoint it--an "alone with everybody" kind of thing to quote Charles Bukowski. There's a band called the Parson Redheads…they're good friends of ours. There are tons of great bands from that scene.

So it's not one unifying sound ...

HPC: Exactly. I can see certain bands being similar and I think that's a beautiful thing, it's just, for one reason or another, we've never been part of that. We're starting to get to know a lot of other bands that we're becoming good friends with, but typically they're not from Silverlake or East LA or anything. There's a cool band, Francisco The Man, from Riverside and we're becoming good friends with them. We love a lot of music, it's just that we're not necessarily part of a scene.

Talk a little bit about touring. Do you like playing outside of Los Angeles? Have you played other states or other countries?

HPC: Definitely. Our shows are not always pristine and perfect; sometimes, they're very shambolic, but one thing we can always say is that you'll always remember our shows. Typically, that is where we feel like we're in our element. In the past, people have gotten our demos before we released an EP and they were like, "This is great but it doesn't sound anything like you guys sound live." We're always like, "Yeah, we know. We're trying." What we realized is, when we're in the studio, we try to capture as much as possible but we're also trying to do other things. It's a recording; it's one moment in time captured, whereas when you're doing something live, it's in that moment and so cathartic and dependent on the people in the audience. It's give and take. Every single element is involved in that. We tend to be very prolific with recording but we're starting to be conscious of making it a separate thing.

The band name, Weather Underground, has the ring to it of 1960s social activism. What's behind that choice for the band's name?

HPC: It's more of an expression than a designation, is what I tend to say all the time. It doesn't designate us to any particular thing. We all have family who are very conservative and we all believe in various different things and respect each others convictions but the idea behind the name was not only to convey that sort of Clash ethos, but really to make it clear that despite wanting to make music, there also is something lyrically there, in the poetry and literary sense as well as in an activist sort of sense. We wanted to make that clear and have that sort of ethos but, contextually, we also wanted it to have that same relationship with that era with Bob Dylan, where that name comes from, the weatherman, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," the Bob Dylan lyric. And the Beat Generation and Bob Kaufman and all these figures that we're trying to go out and tout. So, that's where the name comes from, really. It's an important thing to us for people to reference that and understand it and realize that it doesn't really pigeonhole us either.