I really don't think we sound like them, to be completely honest. I'm not in denial or self-deception, it's my honest belief that if you listen to our music, we don't sound like the Cocteau Twins.

It's hard to think of a band name; we had to think of one rather quickly to send our demo tape out. We should have just sent it as Ryan and Suzanne! Anyway, our choice of band name didn't follow from our wanting to associate ourselves with the drug.

We weren't trying to be a band, so we were shocked and surprised when there was any response at all. We mailed out the tape to three companies: 4AD, Creation, and Projekt - who we didn't know about, we heard of it through a friend of a friend. Sam wrote us back a letter of interest. He didn't say he would sign us or anything, but he wanted to hear more stuff.

Why did we even send it out? I guess I was recording another band here and they were making a tape to send out places, so we figured, 'Hey, we can do that!'

It's been an important pursuit of mine, but I never had any intention of pursuing music as a sort of career, on a 'professional' level. I just always made music for myself. It made me happy. I'd been doing that for years, until Suzanne came into the picture.

We were boyfriend/girlfriend for maybe a year or two before I had her sing on my music. I knew her two years and I never knew she sang that well!

I'll come up with some chord sequences that I like on acoustic guitar and build from there. After that, it's all very intuitive. An idea comes in the studio and it's recorded right then.

It's really weird to have these songs - some on Idylls have been out for years - and going back and playing them now. The only time they existed is us recording them -- we never rehearsed the songs once in our lives. I'm not kidding.