How's your new drummer Jim Bogios settling in and how has the departure of Ben Mize affected the band?
Adam: It's worked out great. It meant we had less vacation time because we had to do all the rehearsals but Jim's really great - great drummer, great guy. We've all known him for a long time too, so he fits right in. It wasn't like he was a new guy coming in. I've been friends with Jim for years, Immy [David Immergluck, Counting Crows guitarist] used to play in a band with Jim, and I know him through Sheryl [Crow] too. So it's going real well. I mean, you miss Ben because you miss Ben, because you spent nine years together and every once in a while I find myself looking for him to tell him something, but I just have to call him. I did a radio show in Dublin the other day, DJing for two hours, and I had some of Ben's demos with me so we opened the second hour with one of Ben's songs and it made me remember how good they are. I know one of the reasons he wanted to stop is that he wanted to go do his own thing, and he's really good. We've got tapes of that show and our earlier ones too, and we're going to put them up on our website.

'Big Yellow Taxi' is a cover version and is a hidden track on the album, so why did you release it as a single rather than one of your own songs from 'Hard Candy'?
Adam: I don't think we would have released this as a single until some time next year, probably. There were other songs we were planning on doing first. We were in the middle of releasing 'Miami' but this film 'Two Week's Notice' came to us and said 'we want to use this in the credits, we want to use it in the film, we want to build the ad campaign around it, we want to make a video as well and use this song to portray the film'. That was just too big a deal to pass up. It's hidden on the record right now so if we'd had more time we would have planned ahead to it being a single, it would have been listed and now we're dealing with the fact that a lot of people don't even know it's on the record. But they made a video for us, and it's in the movie, which is a hit in America, so there's a lot of reasons why it made sense to do this song. It's probably about six or eight months earlier than we would have but what are you going to do... it's turning out great.

You're on record as being very disappointed by the reception of 'Recovering The Satellites' but that later you felt people came to appreciate it for being as good as it is. How do you feel about the reception of the new album, 'Hard Candy'?
Adam: It's good. You have to understand that at the time of 'Satellites' my entire experience with the record business was that when I put out a record 10 million people bought it, that was just what I assumed happened, and that everyone loved the records we put out. I don't think we got a bad review for 'August And Everything After'. But what you realise after you've been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don't have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record. You can put out a record that's crap but if they loved your last record they're there for you, and you can put out a great record but if they hated or came to hate your last record at some point... I think 'Mr Jones' got on everybody's nerves after a while, it certainly got on mine and I love the song. So by the time 'Satellites' came out I think people were fed up with it, well the critics were in any case. It still sold millions of records.