What have been your inspirations for song writing nowadays?

CEBU, Philippines - Haseltine: From a song writing perspective, we’ve been immersed in a community of people that are in transitions, things that seemed pretty well-known are becoming unknown. We’re just enjoying and embracing the mystery of life a little bit more, finding the excitement we don’t know as much about.

Mason: We got a lot from our relationships, friends and family, a lot of “Blood: Water Mission” in Africa stories; stories of people on break, their stories of healing, and their stories of great tragedy to HIV/Aids and water crisis there. We’re taking that from stories of humanities.

What are your next projects?

Haseltine: We’ve been doing a lot of independent music lately. As a band, we’ve been in our own way which is kind of nice. There’s a lot of opportunity for us to chase some ideas down that we had for beautiful projects. We have wanted to do re-recordings of songs from each of our records. We’re gonna wrap that up in May.

What would like to say to those yearning to be songwriters?

Mason: Well, write true stories. I think, the worst music lies about the way you finish it.

Haseltine: I think song writing really starts with conversing, looking up the world carefully and thoughtfully, and then trying to figure out how you describe that back to yourself and to other people. I think that’s the discipline. (FREEMAN)