JustArts: How difficult is the songwriting process with seven band members involved?Bob Schmidt: [Singer and guitarist] Dave [King] is the primary songwriter in the band. He'll bring a skeleton of the song. We'll throw a bridge in and we'll all work on arrangements and we'll all write our parts and it just starts to flesh itself out. Usually we get it right about where we like it and then we'll tear it apart again and start over, and we'll do that three or four times for every song. It's a very democratic process, and that can be frustrating at times because it's a lot of democracy with seven people. In the end I think it works. Everyone's influences are a little bit different and everyone's personality is a little bit different. It takes us around the bend a couple times to get it done but by the time it comes out, we feel like it's the best that it can be.

JA: Flogging Molly is often described as "Celtic punk rock." Is that how you would describe the music?

BS: We're obviously Celtic something. I think we're as much Celtic soul as we're Celtic punk or [as much] Celtic country as we are Celtic soul. I try not to get too hung up on descriptions of the band and just let people create their own impressions of it. Our influences are all over the map. We've got Bowie, we've got Queen, we've got The Clash, we've got Johnny Cash. It's like trying to sum up everything you like about music which is what we try to put into the band, and then spun through the Celtic ringer. Dave's lyrical style is definitely that kind of Irish poetic style and the music is clearly done with the instrumentation of a Celtic band. So you just take all these different fruits and throw them in a juicer and we're what comes out.

JA: Given how energy-driven your music is, and that many of the songs are more geared to a live environment, how difficult is it for the band to maintain that same energy on record?

BS: I don't think it's difficult to translate the energy as much as it is to capture that energy and get it on record. And I don't think we've ever been able to do it, frankly. Until you can record sweat and spilled beer and sticky floors and all those elements and adrenaline and all those things that make a live show great. In a lot of ways we've just given up on doing that and trying to make it sound like the live show because for us albums are just something that the kids can take home with them. They can come to see us, and if they want to remember what a great time they had they can remember it by listening to the album or whatever. And it gives the songs a different kind of life. There are some things you can't do live that you can do on the album. We've started approaching it differently, which isn't to say that we wouldn't still like to capture that same spontaneity and organic feeling of live music. We don't want to go in there and be a studio band that sounds like a box of plastic.

JA: Flogging Molly has really developed its reputation on the road. Are you and the rest of the band comfortable with being described as a live band?

BS: I think if you're not a live band, then what's the use? You don't make music to sit in a bedroom and play it to yourself. You do it because you want to move people. To say that you're a great band just because you're a bunch of spazzes on stage and jump up and down is not necessarily true either. Johnny Cash sat on a stool with a guitar and had two guys that didn't move and it was a great live show. There's a lot of ways to be a great live band. I think that so many of the greatest songwriters I've ever seen, their live shows are great too because the music just comes out of them. If you're not a great live band then you're not a great band. You're not writing great music. People aren't getting off on it. It becomes like Steely Dan or whatever, where it's this clinical exercise in artistic precision. Not to say that they didn't have some great songs, but it just comes from a different place.

JA: Could you talk about the role the Warped Tour played in the success of the band?

BS: The Warped Tour was integral to the start of the band. We were essentially a pub band. We were a house band for this Irish pub, and we all loved the music and thought it was great, but everybody in the industry had been saying that you're a pub band, you're old and you're just not going to make it. We didn't really care, but slowly we got to spread around the West Coast a little bit. Nobody in the rest of the country knew who we were so when we did the Warped Tour, even though we were only playing the side stages, for the first time we'd been to these Podunk little towns in America or events in big towns, and on a bad day we were playing to like 80 people. Generally you're playing to like 200 or 300 kids. Every year [on Warped Tour] there are one or two bands that have something a little bit different. These guys sound nothing like what else is on the warped tour. We got to skip 15 tours of three people in every room. And we met guys like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Bad Religion and NOFX, who became friends of ours and we loved their music. And we met Green Day on that tour and they took us out on some of their last tour.

JA: Tell me about Whiskey on a Sunday, the band's most recent release?

BS: The concept of this thing had been floating around. It'd been brought up before [by many different people]. We didn't want to just do a live show captured on DVD with five cameras and a crowd. It just seemed like everybody does that. Then these documentary guys came to us and had the idea to do it documentary-style. What it's really good for is if there are kids or parents out there who were reluctant to give the band a shot. [It provides] a lot of back story to the band and it sets the record straight in a couple places. Maybe even sets it crooked in some others.