Buzzine: How did you come up with your name, LoveLikeFire?

Robert Kissinger: Simple, actually. It’s an old Generation X song, Billy Idol’s old punk band.

Ann Yu: Yeah, we were actually looking through a pile of old records when we saw it and we thought, “Oh, sweet! That is so cool.” And so we just made it our own.

BZ: Was it much harder recording an album than your previous EPs?

RK: It was hard. It was like a massive undertaking, the sheer volume. We’ve only ever done seven songs at a time before.

AY: With the EPs, we would have a handful of songs and say “let’s record them,” but with an album, we had to book the studio time and get 20 songs ready to go. It was a total concerted effort on a scale we’ve never done before.

RK: Basically, we just worked on it for a full year, playing and trying a bunch of different song ideas and demos and more songs, and getting some tour in, and after literally a full year, we were in the studio making the album.

BZ: But you’re still independent?

RK: For the most part. We’ve actually just signed in Europe to the UK label Heist or Hit.

AY: And we’ll be looking for US representation for the album.

BZ: …Which means you’re footing the bill for your current tour yourselves?

RK: More or less, yeah.

AY: Well, originally it was just a handful of dates, starting with Costa Mesa, and then the Monolith Festival (in Colorado), and then CMJ a little later in New York, so we thought, “Let’s just keep driving and do some more shows!”

BZ: In the past, independent bands and tours used to rely on DIY resources like “Book Your Own Fucking Life.” What do independent bands use now?

RK: We use MySpace and Priceline [laughs]… the Internet.

AY: Since every single venue now has their own website, everyone everywhere is at the tip of your fingers.

Ted Parker: Yeah, I remember the days of making cassette tapes and handing them out to venues all over the place, and waiting for a phone call or a letter back.

RK: Basically, if we’re going to a town we have played before and we don’t already have a relationship with, we’ll first look up which venues we’d like to play. We’ll see who’s playing there, look at MySpace, and get an idea of which bands are similar to us in those cities, try to introduce ourselves, and get something set up with them. Usually, if we can go through a band that’s local to a city, we get better luck at getting into a place we’ve never played before.

AY: We’ve streamlined the process. Bob has this amazing spreadsheet. [Laughs]

TP: At this point, we’re totally nerdy — we have this spreadsheet of the contact list of every single venue, every band, every MySpace.

AY: A lot of times, the hotels we stay in give us breakfast! So we get a place to stay, then we get breakfast taken care of, so we only have to worry about two more meals for the day. But being independent is still really challenging. For example, yesterday, in the van, we had a bunch of mailings we had to do for CDs and posters.

RK: Yeah, when people buy stuff and we’re on the road, we have to mail it from the van.

AY: And it all came to a screeching halt: “Wait, who’s going to do what? Wait, we need tubes!”

RK: It was a mess. We have these new posters, but we didn’t have tubes for them, so we had to go get the tubes, but the tubes were super expensive at Kinkos. So where can we get cheap tubes? Okay, we can only get cheap tubes online, so we have to order them and have them delivered… But where will we be in three days? All right, screw it, let’s go to Kinko’s and buy the expensive tubes.

AY: We’re at the post office and we have to put all orders through PayPal, but we only have our iPhones, so how do we figure it out? That’s basically the story of our lives — doing it on our own.

BZ: Ann, your bio says you were a closet musician for a big part of your life. What’s that all about?

AY: When I was a young girl, my parents got me violin lessons, and I guess I took it a little too seriously.

RK: She was practicing so hard that she had a big scab on her chin. It was so bad that her parents took the violin away.

AY: It’s true. When I turned 14, they told me, “You’ve just gotten way too serious with the violin. You can’t play anymore. We need to enroll you in some business/law classes.” So I snuck into the youth orchestra to try out, made it in, I was totally kicking ass, and then they found out I wasn’t enrolled in it because my parents wouldn’t let me be in the high school orchestra, so they kicked me out of it. But when I turned 16, I was able to drive. My dad had bought me a toy guitar and I decided to take guitar lessons. I was so heartbroken about the violin thing that I thought, “Fuck it. I’m just going to do my own thing,” and I was able to write songs and indulge myself in music.

BZ: Who is the William that you sing about?

AY: That’s a good question. William is just a figurehead for all the abusive and emotionally manipulative relationships we’ve all had, even as children. It’s an amalgamation of friends that I’ve had that are girls and friends that I’ve had that are boys, and boyfriends and everything all wrapped up into one…and all the pain you go through having to have a one-on-one with someone and how hard that can be when it’s not working out.

LoveLikeFire is on tour through November. Be sure to check out upcoming dates on the band’s MySpace, and keep an eye out for their soon-to-be-released debut album.