Artistically (and in many other ways), the band was liberated by the fact that they’d never sign to a major label. “In a way, we were cheating because we didn’t have that light at the end of the tunnel,” Prescott says. “And who knows? We were human—if the light had been there, maybe we would have turned crappy quicker. It’s a really hard thing to say. Now I’m glad that it was like it was.”
