Work begins on second album

The band began work on a second album in January 1999, directly after finishing their 1998 tour with Eve 6. By March, Jenkins reported that there were already 30 songs in contention for the follow-up album, and that recording would start in April. The band were given a tight deadline of six months to submit a completely recorded album by October 1999. While Jenkins would publicly state that sessions were fast and carefree at the time, both Cadogan and Jenkins would retrospectively reflect on the sessions being very difficult. Cadogan and Jenkins were already not getting along while touring in support of their self-titled album, and Cadogan was outraged to finally find out that Jenkins had secretly legally and financially put himself in charge of the band, and of Salazar and Hargreaves’s indifference to it. Cadogan recounted that he later found out that Jenkins and Godtland had started to make plans to replace Cadogan prior to even beginning work on a second album, but the plans were not acted on. Cadogan stated that he and Jenkins agreed to put aside their differences and work together on further music; Cadogan set up a two-week period where the band would write and record early song ideas in Cadogan’s house with sound engineer Jason Carmer. Cadogan noted that it was the only time in the six-month period where the band collaborated and worked together in the same room; the rest of the parts were written and recorded independently at separate times in the studio and then later compiled together into the finished album because of the animosity between them. A major point of contention was which songs to keep on the album and which ones to cut; Jenkins and Cadogan had each written songs individually, and each of them fought for more of his own songs to make the final track list. Godtland set up a voting system where each member could vote for a certain number of songs, and that process led to further animosity. Among particular contention was the track “Slow Motion”, a controversial ballad written by Jenkins about a student shooting a teacher’s son. While Jenkins insisted that the song was satirical parody , and actually anti-violence , Elektra disapproved of the track being on the album, feeling it could cause controversy because of the recent Columbine High School massacre , which had just happened in April of that year. The band and the label fought over the song’s inclusion for four months, with the label proposing a compromise that would allow only the instrumental to be on the album, and in return, the label would finance an EP to be released after the album, where the band could release the song in its entirety and have complete creative freedom, without restriction. Cadogan, already unhappy with his lack of ownership over the band, was the sole member of the band to object to the deal, knowing he would not have any control over the deal’s terms of a cash advance and imprint label creation for the EP.