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Through Mute Math, a big part of what we're trying to do is digest thoughts and concepts a little more in the songs and spend more time with concise lyric creations—letting the point come across a bit more simply. That's not to downplay the poetic part in the songs; just a personal challenge to me as a songwriter. As a lyricist, I'm always trying to balance between phonetically what sounds right and emotionally trying to capture something.

Where did you find your topics coming from on Reset?

Meany A lot of the songs seem to come from prayers, and that's a tough place for me to pull from because it's so personal. I wrote a lot of these songs originally not intending I was going to start a band with them. At the time Earthsuit was winding down, sometimes I would just write songs for the exercise of it. Some of it is prayers or my take on life in general. I don't think lyrically all the songs can be categorized in one particular approach except for honesty, a sense of searching and always asking questions. There's also an optimism to a lot of the songs. I want people to hear this record and make it hard for them to feel hopeless.

When Earthsuit didn't work out, how did that affect you? And do you have any fears this time around that it won't work out?

Meany Well I was pretty convinced Earthsuit would work, and I poured everything I had into it—and then the verdict comes back with "Okay, that didn't work." You're basically only left with the damage and rubble, and you've got to figure out what to do with broken pieces. I thought about just striking Earthsuit up again by recruiting new musicians and coming up bigger and better than before, but it didn't feel like the right thing to do. I felt it was time to move on and in a sense start over, which was scary because the transitional time is always the most challenging. We're doing a lot on blind faith at this point, and I've written a lot of songs about letting go and trusting God with whatever I've considered to be my dreams.

How did you know Darren and Greg were the right guys for the job?

Meany I met those guys when traveling with Earthsuit. They were originally from Springfield, Missouri, a city we played a lot. Darren had interned with Earthsuit after we landed our first record deal, and Greg moved to New Orleans shortly after that, joined our church and played with Earthsuit for awhile. When the group fell apart, we all stayed in touch and then this relationship slowly developed. We all played in our church band at some point, and that kind of led us to start creating.

Tell me about your record label, Teleprompt, and why the band chose it.

Meany Teleprompt is [producer] Tedd T.'s label, which he created with a vision of bridging Christian artists with the general market. It's distributed through Warner Brothers, so that's a great place to start. I actually connected with Tedd creatively a long time ago, and it was a real answer to prayer that we were able to get on board with him. He's one of those rare gems of a guy on the business side and someone I could really trust and open up to. He's also very liberating to work with, and we've been able to make decisions together that we all love. Right now we're just trying to build it slow, which is why we're starting with the EP, and we trust that everything else will fall in line when it's supposed to.

So when can we expect that full record, and can you hint at the direction?

Meany: It's slated for the spring, but we've yet to decide if it will be all new songs or have some from the EP on it. We're just going to finish all the song ideas we have right now, which is 15 or 16, and see what ones make the record. I think Reset is a good representation of what is to come. It touches on a lot of dynamics of places to explore deeper on the record. Consider Reset a good prelude to the full-length.

Check out the band's artist page to learn more about Mute Math, and click here to read our review of the Reset EP. Visit Christianbook.com to hear sound clips and purchase Mute Math's music

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