JCS: Those were sort of situation-specific, they weren’t born out of some sort of new well of inspiration?

NH: Up until very recently, I was not as interested in just recording some shows and making a record out of that. We like to have records that stand alone of souvenirs of some concept or another, not just tape shows and put out that year’s jokes. I’ve done a dozen albums, probably, so we were trying to come up with something different. You do as many records as that, it would be very easy to tap out and say, “you know what, maybe we should stop making these goddamned records.” I hope that people enjoy them. We were very excited to do that country and western record, which started out not so much planned as a country record as much planned as a personality record. If you’ve heard the records of folks like Leonard Nimoy or Telly Savalas, you know that these sorts of record have their charm and their appeal to fans of these great actors. We were hoping to have a record in that vein, but when we hooked up with some of the hottest country musicians, it was obvious that was the style in which to do it. Particularly because the country vocals were things I felt I could handle little bit easier than I might be able to handle if we’d done an album of free-jazz with scat vocals.

JCS: Sure, and the classic country aesthetic fits with your hard-luck story.

NH: Exactly. These are tales of woe and sadness and truth. And a lot of the great country vocalists might sound like they’re talking half the time. If you’ve heard Hank Williams records, he made those “Luke The Drifter” records where it’s just talking for God’s sake, and sometimes that’s the best way to get the message across.

JCS: You mentioned earlier that it can get tiring to put out a similar format, even if the jokes have changed or the audience is different this time, it’s still just a recording of a stand up set. You’ve put out a couple different kinds of experiments, you did the music, but you also released Great Moments At DiPresa’s Pizza House, an audio documentary of how your career intersected with the the pizza place, was that just another way to try to break the mold of another stand up album or was there more to that?