A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that's it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work. Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator. People who look at music as commerce don't understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property. I'm not interested in selling pieces of plastic.

I'm happy with the amount of goodwill that seems to exist between us and our audience. I can only guess as to why that exists, and I've never been in a band where that didn't exist.... We have our collaborators and our patrons, who come to see us play, and I feel like we treated them as patrons of the arts and collaborators.

We needed to get out on the road, because that's how we make money -- we don't make money off of records. So our business model, if you want to call it that... we support ourselves on the road. And having our new record done and wanting to play those songs just meant, well, let's let people hear them so they'll know what's up. And it'll be more fun to play those songs for everybody....

We just can't look at it as any individual thing is how we're going to be supported by anybody. If they get one record free, they might buy another record. If they get one record free, they might come see the show or they might buy a t-shirt at the show... For us, we've managed to keep our heads above water by not focusing on "the lost sales" but by focusing on the people who are there and are supporting us.

Hey Wolverine fans! We know that you're all looking forward to the release of the movie next month. We're excited too! By now you may have heard that an early totally unfinished version has been leaked online. It's missing a whole bunch of stuff -- including some amazing special effects -- and honestly, this version isn't a finished product at all. We think you'll get a much better overall experience by waiting for the full finished product, but we certainly understand that some of you just can't wait (trust us, we feel the same way!). If that's the case, please, feel free to check it out, but please remember that this isn't even close to the final version. If anything, think of this as a "behind-the-scenes" peek of just what a movie looks like before all the real "movie magic" gets put in there. If you do check it out, we hope you'll join us May 1st to check out the finalized version as well on the big screen the way we intended for you to see this awesome movie. It's just a month away!

"Well we made it nearly a month with copies of Wilco the album floating around out there before it leaked. Pretty impressive restraint in this day and age. But the inevitable happened last night. Since we know you're curious and probably have better things to do than scour the internet for a download though we do understand the attraction of the illicit we ve posted a stream of the full album...Feel free to refer to it as wilco the stream if you must."