In the first installment of our three-part Road Journals interview with Cold War Kids frontman Nathan Willett, the vocalist wrote from a smoky dressing room in Berlin to share his thoughts on the state of decline in the music industry, spirituality and the simple pleasures that make a musician’s vagabond life worth living.

Part two of our interview arrives from Munich, the next stop on the band’s European tour in support of their new album, Loyalty To Loyalty. This time around, Nathan shares his thoughts on author David Foster Wallace, the pitfalls of a musician re-recording their own songs and the emerging culture of isolation in America.

[Editor's note: We originally intended to publish a review of Kanye West's new album on Friday of last week. However, as the (arbitrary) deadline drew near, we began to realize that the album deserved more time before judgment could conscientiously be passed. So journalistically, we may be late to this party, but we feel our review is fairer than most- to you, as well as to Mr. West.]

There’s plenty of reason to call Kanye West an asshole; the guy’s as peacockish and egomaniacal as they come, and he makes no apologies about it. The multi-platinum rapper / producer went way beyond comparing himself to the greats in a recent interview, planting the flag on what he considers his place in music history: “I’m doing pretty good as far as geniuses go,” he said. “I’m going down as a legend, whether you like me or not. I am the new Jim Morrison. I am the new Kurt Cobain. They feel like, ‘Yo, he’s got a God complex, because he said if they wrote the Bible again that he would be in it’. Duh, yeah, I would be in it. I feel like I’m one of the more important people in pop culture right now. The Bible had 20, 30, 40, 50 characters in it. You don’t think that I would be one of the characters of today’s modern Bible? And people have their own forms of bibles now. It’s a new day and age…”

Down is one of the best, and one of the coolest, metal bands working today. Its members are purebreds: Jimmy Bower of Eyehategod, Kirk Windstein of Crowbar, Pepper Keenan of Corrosion Of Conformity, Rex Brown of Pantera, and of course, also from Pantera, Philip Anselmo. Formed in New Orleans in ‘91, Down welds heavy metal together with soulful southern country blues, and there’s nothing quite like it out there.

Anselmo, like many musicians, is as talented as he is troubled. While he insists on being the indestructible machine all men should aspire to be, as fans we’ve been sincerely concerned for his well being, especially after seeing some of his recent interviews. However, when the man called- on time- Thursday, to chat with us during some downtime on Down’s tour with Metallica, we found him to be a personable, genuinely down to earth dude, and he helped us set the record straight and put some things in perspective.

Was Chinese Democracy worth the wait? When we got our hands on a bunch of damn-near finished songs in June, we said it was. And we had always suspected it was going to be, for years leading up to that moment, as rumors and rough demos trickled out of whatever mansion / studio / nudie bar Axl Rose was holed up in.

After all this time, all fans east of psychotic had the common sense to at least suspect that the big secret had been built up too much, that if and when the moment of truth finally came, it would likely be an anticlimax. Of course, the most amazing thing about this album is that it’s in our hands.

Walking into the tour-closing Guns N’ Roses show in Universal City, I had good cause for the skepticism I felt. With only one original member, no new material released in over a decade and a tornado of negative hype surrounding the mere name, the modern version of Guns N’ Roses should, by all accounts, be a recipe for colossal failure.

How do you replace the dirty swagger, the serpentine energy, the explosive chemistry of the band that brought an endgame to hair metal? The vacancies left by the original members seem too vast to be occupied by anyone else, and it’s been the upside of a decade since Axl Rose’s signature wailing dominated the rock landscape. I fully expected the same ugly disappointment and vicarious embarrassment I felt while watching GNR’s “big comeback” performance on the 2002 MTV Music Awards, where my attention was split between Axl’s surgically altered wax-museum face and his embarrassingly off-key performance.