"Well, I'll tell you what, about that album title," says Tim DeLaughter, the singer an primary creative force within Tripping Daisy, "we really didn't realize what we were making until we were completely done. We went in there to do what everybody does, wit the intention of making songs come out well in a recording, to do them justice. We actually created a record and a feeling that, to me, represent a much bigger picture. I needed a title that meant something as broad as my thoughts, to embrace this record that I thought was heavy."

The larger perspective was something DeLaughter had initially wanted to encompass within one simple word: Guts. However a former Island artist John Cale--he worked with the Velvet Underground: you might've heard them--had actually released a compilation album of the same title in 1977. This was a piece of news that DeLaughter found dismaying. "It nearly crushed my world," he admits. (It may be just as well: Cale's song, "Guts," opens with the announcement that "the bugger in the short sleeves fucked my wife.") Another long-departed gospel band, present in vinyl in one of the rooms where Tripping Daisy finished up their record, provided the answer.

"Laying right there on the kitchen table was a record called The Best of the Pilgrim Travelers," DeLaughter says. "One of the songs on there was 'Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb'. Something went through me like a bolt of lightening, and we were all saying, 'That's It! That says everything we're feeling about this record.'"

Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb takes the Tripping Daisy you knew to familiar places; the difference is in the new fullness of the landscape. In a little under an hour, all the hipness encrusted like barnacles of cool upon the Alternative Nation falls away to reveal something earnest and innocent, epitomized and expressed by DeLaughter's childlike voice. It's as if Tripping Daisy, instead of getting cynical as they get older, have gotten more wide-eyed. You can hear the influence of the Beatles in the willingness to do anything that comes to mind, and in the complexity laid over the simplest of sentiments. "Love gets inside of me/Makes me invisible...I can't believe it happened to me," DeLaughter sings on the winsome "Sonic Bloom," and he sounds as though he means it.

"I have finally made a record and been a part of something that I've wanted to achieve for a long time," DeLaughter says. "that's to express honesty and be able to give something in art. Before, there was always something missing, and I can't tell what it is. When I had completed other projects, they weren't as fulfilling as this record is. I think we weren't embracing the true things we were hinting at."

In the gently lilting, swaying chorus of "Human Contact", DeLaughter phrases it straight: "human contact is needed." This is obvious, or at least it ought to be--yet it took the better part of this decade for Tripping Daisy to understand it. It also took a major success, which was the 1995 album i am an ELASTIC FIRECRACKER. It sold 300,000 copies in the U.S. alone, spawned a huge (and eventually hugely annoying) hit, "I Got a Girl", and put the band under the usual amount of pressure to come up with something bigger, and soon.

"We had gotten caught in the system, being kind of vulnerable at the time and being manipulated by the big machine," DeLaughter explains. "It was the grind of being pushed by something that wasn't music, further and further away fromt he music and more about the single and sales. It gave me a bad taste in my mouth, but we had been so wrapped up in the touring and so eager to please that we didn't think about it."

Tripping Daisy responded by dissipating. They returned to Dallas, their home base, and took more time off than they expected. It was druing this time that DeLaughter experienced a flash of satori.

"It was a revelation, by God," he adds evenly. "It may be a combination of drugs and my age, but I woke up and started seeing everything differently. I never looked at a tree the same again, or a blade of grass--saw it growing in the middle of the road an asked myself why. I realized my worth. I created Tripping Daisy out of a vision I had, and I took years to reflect on the fact that I had created something out of nothing."

"I realized I was capable of doing anything I had envisioned. Whatever it is, it's the best thing that ever happened to me."

Thus fired up and writing songs again, DeLaughter reassembled his band with a couple of new pieces. Keeping bassist Mark Pirro and guitarist/pianist Wes Berggren, he added Philip Karnats, whose guitar and trumpet add crunch and sparkle to tracks like "Geeareohdoubleyou". From the defunct UFOFU, a free-flowing band Tripping Daisy frequently brought along on tour, DeLaughter picked up drummer Ben Curtis. After hearing a diverse record from Deus, a Belgian group, DeLaughter sent a tape to that band's producer, Eric Drew Feldman.

Sounds I heard on the Deus record were part of a world we wanted to be able to play in," DeLaughter says. Although nobody expected and enthusiastic reply from a man who had also worked with Captain Beefheart and Frank Black, Feldman agreed to join in the proceedings. Shortly thereafter, in October 1997, everyone adjourned to Dreamland Studio, in the vicinity of Woodstock, NY. By this time their A&R; representative, Chris Blackwell, had left Island, subsequently to start Island Life, another label. Although Blackwell had been an important supporter of Tripping Daisy, his departure turned out to be a perverse stroke of luck.

We had nobody from the record company disturbing us," DeLaughter says. "It was bascially, 'Here's the money, make a record, we won't bug you.' We were a victim of circumstances that out in our favor. It's the only way to make a record: no one to fuck with you. There was no second-guessing. The producer wanted to put it all on there, even the mistakes."

Interestingly, with Feldman's assistance, Tripping Daisy spent two months making a record that takes advantageof the studio. Through headphones, Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb fascinates and mesmerizes; it defines Tripping Daisy as a studio band as clearly as Sgt. Pepper did for the Beatles, although it's not quite so varied (Let's not get carried away here). For a long time, Tripping Daisy garnered their reputation through their live show, which is exactly how they wanted it.

"We always had a philosophy of breaking ourselves," DeLaughter says. "We won't take tour support, we'll fund our tours ourselves and put the money back into the band. How dow we do that? Well, we put on great shows and therefore, you reap the benefits of that. But it got tiring. We did that for almost seven years and it sucked the soul out of the band."

Before the Elastic Firecracker tour, which may have been the most grueling because of the expectations, Tripping Daisy's live reputation also rested upon a combination of improvisational playing and visual stimuli. While the former rarely turned into pointless jams, the latter got out of hand.

"For the first three years, we were like Spiritualized: it was a massive overload of visuals going while we played," DeLaughter notes. "Then we had gotten so grossly overdone--we had eight 16mm projectors and 14 slide projectors and two overheads and it was almost to the point where you might as well stop playing, go rent a theater, and show films. Now we're thinking about incorporating a little bit of that back into the show."

If DeLaughter sounds as though he's moving with caution, the range of Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb suggests otherwise. Smashing Pumpkins should be so reckless, so willing to take chances outside the reflective rock 'n' roll gestureof acting like a teenager, when one is over 30. It might be a bit much, and cliched, to say the scales have dropped from DeLaughter's eyes, but it's almost not enough to suppose he has become something of a crusader. Beck once told and interviewer that Odelay was a means to get someplace else, to do other things. DeLaughter clearly thinks the same of Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb. He wants to open others' eyes.

"I am outside the machine and I'm looking for the plug," he says of the industry that, in a sense, brought him or pushed him to his present place. "I'm going to exploit the radio stations, the record companies, to denounce the situation right now, becuase it's out of control. I with someone had done it when I was growing up. I always wanted to hear things. I was always frustrated that I couldn't hear the things I knew I would like on the radio."

"Even now, you turn on the radio it's calculator music. It's all bout numbers, predictable, sounding like 10 other bands going on at the same time. They're programming people not to accept anything different. It's far deeper than missing music; they're missing the opportunity to accept change."

It's not easy to come to grips with this, especially after several years of consultants and demographics--and now, the Telecommunications Act that allows one corporation to own virtually unliited number of radio stations. DeLaughter calls it the "Blockbuster mentality" and Tripping Daisy's new record is his key into the system.