Between the addition of new drummer Tom Polce, collaborating for the first time with producer Peter Collins (Jewel, Sneaker Pimps) and a year of sitting on their butts, the members of Letters To Cleo understandably feel like they are in a new band. And it's evident from the punkish tempo of the opening notes of "I Got Time," the song that kicks off Go!    Throughout the record's 11 songs the quintet continue the energetic pace found on "I Got Time." Kay Hanley supplies the fervor to "Anchor" (the lead single from the CD) with her impassioned vocals, while "Sparkle Girl" showcases a rocking 60s-influenced sound, "Find You Dead" resonates with a heavy mid-tempo beat and the band demonstrates its long-standing gift for peppy pop on "I'm A Fool."    The new attitude can not only be found on the band's latest album, but also in the words of the group's personable lead singer, Kay Hanley. Hanley spoke for over an hour by phone from her Boston home about everything from her penchant for playing pool to her method of songwriting. How do you feel the band has grown in the last two years? For the year that proceeded and the year that came after we made the last album we were on the road constantly. So, as a live band, we became really tight and intuitive as to how to play with one another. After that we took a break, we were all completely exhausted. So, we wanted to take, like, six months off and just recoup. Our drummer Stacy got really restless, so he decided to leave and we got a new drummer. So we have a brand-new member in the band, which is very strange, but productive and awesome for us. Who's the new drummer? His name is Tom Polce. When Tom joined last year what were you looking for in a new member? We didn't know. It was really fucked up because we had been together for so long and had established such a rapport with one another that it seemed to me, when thinking about it, that anyone we brought in would be an invasion. But having Tom has been... when we met him, we were like, "Wow." First of all, he was the opposite of Stacy personality-wise and even playing-wise, he was a complete change, but for some reason it made perfect sense. Do you find that having a new member into the band adds a freshness? Oh, definitely. It's like getting a shpt of adrenaline. It really does make it a whole new band. What did you, personally, do during your year off? Shot a lot of pool. I definitely shot a lot of pool, drank a lot of beer, hung around a lot, sat on my ass a lot and wrote songs. Was it easy to write during your time off? No. I'm not good if I don't have a deadline. I had quite a bout of writer's block when we first got home and it lasted an uncomfortably long time. I think that we had to just get a deadline, say, "Alright, this is when we're making the record and that's that. This is when it's coming out and this is when we're gonna start touring again." Once I got into the mind-set of that, I started writing again because I had to. Actually, it worked out really well. I'm incredibly proud of what we've done. I was afraid I didn't have it to write, so it was a really nice surprise. Do you think it was writer's block or that you just didn't want to do it? I think I was just avoiding it. I'm always surprised when I write a song, I'm like, "Where did that come from?" Truthfully, I never know where it comes from and I don't know if every song that I write is gonna be the last one, cause I don't know where the fuck I'm gonna get another one from. I psyche myself out. But once the reality set in that I had to, this is what I do with my life-I write songs, we started writing again. What was the span the songs on the album were written? "Because Of You" was written over a year ago, and "Find You Dead" was written on June 1; it was recorded eight hours before we met with our producer for the first time to start pre-production. It took a year to write the whole body of work, that sounds really pretentious (laughs), but a lot of it was written within the last couple of months. Do you see a difference between the songs written a year ago and the more recent ones? Yeah, definitely. Especially the stuff that didn't make it to the record. A lot of what we were writing when we first got back from the road was complete shit, which is a lot of the reason why I was like, "Fuck this, I can't do it anymore." But I think the stuff that we wrote after Tom joined the band is a lot more thoughtful in terms of the arrangements. It sounds to me like we took a lot of time to think things over. Do songs get changed around a lot in the studio? On albums past, by the time we got the songs to the stage that we're making a record out of them, we've been playing them out live for a year. So everything was pretty much worked out. On this record it was a little more spontaneous. We did rearrange things at the very last minute and worked stuff out as we were playing them in the studio; a lot of that was because we didn't play the stuff live. In the case of "Find You Dead," it was a day old. I liked doing it that way. I really liked being surprised at how things were unfolding in the studio. It was fun to do it this way, and the way the album came out was a surprise. Was this the first time you'd worked with Peter Collins? Yes. How'd that come about? Basically, it was a blind date. He didn't know us and we didn't know him. Our A&R guy, Jeff Aldridge, had been tossing around names and he talked about Peter Collins. We were like, "We don't know this guy." I guess Jeff heard back from Peter and Peter was interested in doing it. I think that Jeff, quite honestly, was surprised that he was interested in doing it. The owner of our label has sent something like 80 projects Peter's way, and Peter has turned all of them down. So, I don't think anyone was expecting that he was going to want to work with us, but he did. We met with him and really liked him. He's this wonderful British gentleman, really polite, with this incredibly nice vibe to him. It was just upon having supper with him that I felt like it was going to be a good collaboration. Were you nervous about working with someone you hadn't met before? Very. Plus, we've always worked with this guy Mike Denneen, who has a studio here in Boston. He was like another member in the band in that when we would go to make an album, we'd just lay all of our shit on the table with Mike and all six of us would go through the arrangements and work things out together. So, working with someone new, we weren't sure that we were going to get that sort of direction from Peter. In pre-production, he was just genius; he was awesome. He had such clear ideas of what we were going for, he got it immediately. Between the new drummer and new producer, it is almost like a new band. It feels like a whole 'nother thing. It really does. Is it important to you to stay up on "the scene?" I have shied away from modern music a little. I'm not sure how much of that has to do with my iadedness and how much of that has to do with my general taste as I get older. Although there have been some awesome records in the last two years. That Imperial Teen album just knocked me out, and the Lilies album is really cool. And there's some local stuff around here that's pretty impressive. I really like the new Foo Fighters record, I think that's really pretty. Although I'm not sure how cool that is. Cause I've read really bad, nasty stuff about it. I think he just writes awesome melodies. You turn on the radio and there's no melody. No one has any songs. It's all really earnest boys singing out of an 11-yearold girl's diary. It's just awful. But he's got a really awesome sense of melody and a really great sense of how to write a good solid pop song. You lived in Boston your whole life. Do you ever have any desire to move someplace else? Very recently, my boy and I were trying to find a place to live and we were having a difficult time trying to find someplace around here, because the real estate in Boston has just gone through the roof. So we were like, "Fuck it, let's just move to LA." Why LA? Because we had just been there. We had just left and we'd had a great time. Of course, we were envisioning just a three-year vacation in LA. Which is funny, because I've always said that I hate LA. So it's kind of a funny that that's where we picked, on a whim, to go live. We talked about it very briefly. I don't know if I could live in another place. I'm a domesticated animal, I suppose. What are your favorite places to play? Anywhere in Texas. Really just anywhere down South, from Texas eastward. Anywhere below the Mason-Dixon line, I suppose, are my favorite places to play. I think audiences down there are not snotty, jaded city-dwelling music listeners. They get really, really into it. Not that they're country bumpkins either, I think that there's a great deal of sophistication in the average rocker down south, but they're just happier to see ya. They're more grateful to go out and see a band and they'll reward you with actual applause, which is nice. It seems like these songs will translate well to the stage. I hope so. We're doing this so ass-backwards. We've never done things like this before. I just wanna get on the road and start doing the East Coast now. Do you play in Boston a lot? No. We used to always play in Boston, like any local band would, once a month. Even after we had a small taste of success outside of Boston, we still played in Boston whenever we came home from touring. We do the Hemp Rally every year. But we haven't played in Boston in a year, which is really fucked up. I don't know why we haven't. It sounds like you try to stay active in the community. I know Safe & Sound was brought about by a local incident. It's really a cool validating thing when people are familiar with Safe & Sound, what it's all about. It's awesome having been involved in it, it's excellent when people know about it. Are there any other political things that motivate you that much? Well, the only other political involvement that I have is, compared to Safe & Sound some may find it trite, but over the years I've been pretty involved with the legalization movement. Do you smoke? Yes, I do. But not very much. When I first got involved, I didn't smoke at all. And then, I guess through all the talking about it, I just had to get more physically involved (laughs). There was a couple of years that I smoked quite a bit, but I don't smoke very much now. But I'm still very interested in how this plant became illegal in the first place and the sort of socioeconomic effects it's having on all of our lives now. I'm very interested in being part of a movement that will make it legal again - it's a plant! So that subject gets me excited, but lots of political things get me probably a little too excited (laughs). The song "Alouette & Me" sounds so different from the rest of the album. Yeah. With that Wurlitzer piano on it, it's really bare. It's hard to listen to for me, because it's just so bare. I hate hearing my voice in that context. In other words, you'll never be doing an acoustic tour? (Laughs). No, actually we are. Michael and I are gonna go do a promo tour of radio stations and we're gonna bring a couple of acoustics. We've never done it though; it's gonna be terrifying. Which of the songs off the album do you think will translate best to acoustic versions? "Co-Pilot," I think, would be a good little acoustic number. Obviously, if you're doing a radio promo tour, you've gotta do "Anchor." We should, shouldn't we? (laughs) Especially since they won't have the album yet. What was your reaction when "Here & Now" started getting played on radio? I was horrified because... this is just my very skewed translation of integrity or whatever, I thought it was an affront to my integrity, which is so fucking stupid. Even though we never had any indie cred or anything to start with, I thought I had lost my chance at ever having it (laughs). That was something that I thought would be really important to have, but of course, once those fucking royalty checks started coming in, that all went out of the window. I'm just kidding. But it really did translate into something good later on. I started to enjoy playing in front of a thousand people in Louisville instead of four. We had toured a lot before that song was on the radio so we were used to playing around the country in front of nobody and not minding it one little bit. We just liked to be on the road. But I loved people hearing our music; I loved people coming out to shows and seeing us play live. People caring about what we were doing was really cool. Ultimately I felt really good about it, but at the beginning I think I was just scared. Isn't it funny how if you have indie cred, nobody actually hears you, even if they claim to like you? Totally. In fact, we were gonna start this thing a couple of years ago where us and all of our friends would start talking about this band Tube Socks and how awesome they were. We would sit down and we would meet people from the trades and program directors from radio stations, we'd be doing interviews and we'd be talking about this band Tube Socks. We were trying to get this non-existent band off the ground, so that people would be like, "Oh, have you heard them?" We wanted to start a bidding war for this non-existent band, which seemed completely possible at the time because there were all these bands that were supposedly so fucking cool, but that no one had heard. But now that I'm a little bit older and a little bit more experienced at life, I've realized that those things are just made up by people who a) were never successful and b) don't want you to be either. But when I was younger I really bought into that and I do not anymore. I wanna sell a million records; I want people to hear our music. What else do you want for the band? I want the next logical step from wherever we are right now, which is touring, selling more records to more people who really like our band a lot; I want people to hear us. I'd like to keep touring, I'd like to keep writing songs and making more records.