Pop goes the Ballard. Alanis Morissette, Dave Matthews, Aerosmith, the Goo Goo Dolls. Producer Glen Ballard seems to create hit pop albums every time he sneezes. Having him produce your record assures you of two things: (1)You have an above-average chance of creating a smash hit, and (2)you know you're in for a sonic journey unlike any previous studio experience you've had. "Glen Ballard is really interested in sounds, so it's cool to sit with him and discuss possibilities of sounds, then go in the studio and experiment a little bit. He'll be really critical of cymbal sounds, which I really like and appreciate. I usually agree with him and understand what he means when he wants me to track a song again with a different ride cymbal. If I didn't like the way a song was feeling, we'd sit there and talk about it for a half hour, then go track it again. He thinks so musically.

"And one of Ballard's best traits, and a trait of any good producer, it that he makes you feel very comfortable in the studio. We told him from the get-go that we wanted to experiment and make a great record. So we wanted to try things and then redo them if we needed to, and sometimes it's hard to do that in a studio if you're not feeling totally comfortable. Especially young bands. They go in a studio intimidated, and they just want to kick ass really quickly. That's not always the best way to do it period."

And the almost ritualistic nightly dinners we've heard so much about? "Yeah, he likes to have a formal dinner every night. Again, it really helps with making everyone comfortable. Every night is a proper dinner with proper silverware and nice bottles of wine. It makes the whole experience a lot of fun. I had so much more fun in the studio with this album than I've ever had with this band. It was so relaxed. But at the same time Ballard is a working guy. He gets in there and he goes to work. Which is great. Musicians, of course, have no attention span whatsoever and things can take so long to get done, but Ballard is a great worker. "Working with him allows you to try so many different things. In the song 'Without You Here,' I play a side stick through the first two choruses and I wanted to do something heavier later in the song. So Ballard and I started experimenting with different sounds and we ended up getting a 5" snare drum, turning it upside down, and playing the bottom head with Blastix. It gave us a cool tone to fill out the choruses a little bit. I'm still playing a side stick, but then there's this weird little buzz you'll hear over it. Neither of us had ever done anything like that, but somehow we came to it and it worked."

Buy the click a beer. "My advice on playing to a click is the same advice I got 20 years ago: Get to know it. Practice as much as you can with a metronome. Most drummers rush their fills, and that's why they have a difficult time with the click. And their band gets used to following them, but a click track won't compromise. That causes a lot of people to get intimidated. You need to treat the click like an instrument and listen to it rather than ignore it and be afraid of it. Remember that the click is a machine, so no matter how good you are you're never going to be exactly on it. So it's best to treat it like another instrument and play in and out of it. It ends up being a cool thing."

Malinin's mastery of the metronome is now reaching beyond the soundproof studio walls. "I'm actually playing to a click now with most of the songs when we play live. We decided it'd be a cool thing to try to help keep everything under control. There were a lot of songs ("Slide," "Broadway," ect.) that we didn't record with a click. So we obviously don't use a live click with those songs. Probably about half the songs are played to a click. And it works - it does help keep things more in check. It took awhile for everyone to get used to it because I'm the only one hearing the click so they're following me, no matter what. And after listening back to the board tapes I think it's a good idea. A lot more bands are starting to do it.

"Sometimes it does sound slow because you're fighting that natural adrenaline-driven tendency to play fast, but it ends up sounding right because you're playing the actual tempo that the song is supposed to be played. And I tweek the live tempos a little bit from the tempos we recorded in; just to make them fit the live feel better. The best part of playing live with a click is that now nobody can yell at me for playing to fast."

The road, the run, the band. "I actually love touring. You get tired in phases, of course, but I actually love the touring lifestyle. As you get older, you have to be a little more mellow about it. I'm not out at the hotel bar until 2:00 in the morning any more, I tend to take advantage of the travel more now too. That's something I've learned. No matter how tired you are, you need to get out of your hotel room and go do something in the city each day - because it's a luxury that I get to see the world and I need to take advantage of it."

Malinin isn't talking about tooling around town in the backseat of a taxi, hopping from burger joint to ice cream stand to dive bar. He'd rather lace up the Nikes and pound the pavement - for miles. And miles. And miles. The distance running has to happen at least five times a week "just to keep me sane," and the real running hits between tours.

"The last marathon I ran was the Rock And Roll Marathon in Arizona. I stopped and played drums with every band on the course, then we were the headlining band at the end of the race. So I played with 26 bands on the course, then we did a full show. [laughs] I played an awful lot of 'Sweet Home Alabama' and 'Brown Eyed Girl.' The race director just told each band to stick to standards so I could play with them, so there was a lot of overlapping. I felt sorry for the runners who kept having to hear 'Brown Eyed Girl' over and over, but what can you do?

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