1) In the liner notes for the song "Double Trouble," you refer to finally achieving a "sonic dirt sound" on the drums after many attempts/trial/error/etc. and you allude to finally figuring out what the missing ingredient was but you were very trademark-crypto?uest about it.

Welp, 20 years have passed and it's likely that none of the methods you even used to record back then are even what you probably utilize now. So what was it???

2) This is maybe a little "inside baseball" and not related exclusively to the album itself but...revisited TFA when this post came back up...watched footage of the Picnic performance (looked/sounded *awesome*). Certain replies in this thread blatantly state the obvious, which is that many of the key players in the group at the time are not in the Roots any more. And this is nothing new (I remember like maybe Phren/post-Phren era reacting to a member leaving the band on some "whoa! the group is never gonna be the same" and...obviously the show goes on). Basically to the public and even those more in the know, the Roots are gonna be the Roots as long as you and Thought are there (though I *did* actually attend one of the rare Roots shows that you were absent for lol).

So my question is: as the founding members, was this kind of always the design/strategy from the jump? That there would always be a "core" of the group and that everything else would be rotational and/or replaceable? Or did that just become the modus operandi over time as people fell by the wayside/etc.? We all know that the whole idea of the "merry band of brothers" is often fiction when it comes to the artists we know and love, but I guess there are "hired gun" bands and "sum is greater than the parts" bands and I am just wondering what/how the concept may have changed or evolved over time...

(and this in no way diminishes the value of anyone in the band before or currently. No one has ever been short of amazing! But the fact is it's 2019 and I still thoroughly enjoy a band minus Malik B, Rahzel, Hub, Ben Kenney, etc...and I never could have predicted that at the time that TFA came out).