What sort of unique issues come with breaking on a cover? I mean, like we immediately thought like, "Do you want to blow up on a cover?" I mean, not really. So that's the first thing that comes into their head, and then you think, we're the ones that recorded it, you know. So we had to step up and deal with it. That it got as big as it did, you just have to kind of embrace it, you know?

Of course. And the song sounds-and the video looks-like it was insanely fun to make. We've all never been a fan of bands that were cool, and I mean ["Smooth Criminal"'s] music's cool, but the whole image thing, maybe we're not really a metal band but growing up, being like, "the cool band" didn't really appeal to us. So the more fun we could inject into videos or imagery�I see kids coming to our shows and I have to admit they look like they come from fun. videos or something like that.

I actually prefer your version of the song to Jackson's. The way the line "Annie are you okay?" wraps around the beat feels more right to me. We knew we wanted to do a cover so we dabbled every night at shows: "Easy Lover," Phil Collins, or "Smooth Operator," Sade. And a bunch of other cover songs. But that one seems to have the most kind of rock feel, you know? We knew we were gonna record a cover, we didn't know DreamWorks was gonna put it out so quickly. I shouldn't say I knew, but when we were recording it and I was hearing the final of it, I thought 'damn, this is going to be a big song,' if it gets thrown out there, and it did. I wouldn't say I imagined it to have the legs that it really did. At home in LA, KROQ still plays it every day, and I'm really surprised it's become one more of those songs that's just there.

Did you consider other Jackson songs or did you know immediately that was the one you wanted to do? That was kind of the one. Obviously it was a hit for him, but not the hugest hit. It was almost like every song for him was a #1 hit and that one wasn't. And we kind of felt like it wasn't the most completely huge No. 1 hit like "Billie Jean" or "Thriller" or something like that. So we kind of knew that would be the one. And like I said, it had kind of a rock feel.