Touring

"Touring is all we've ever known. I mean, we started out in an Expedition and two Ford Explorers, cramming all our friends into the car, just to have an audience to play to," Mosley said. "One time, we had all the equipment piled in a van, and we're driving through a blizzard in Colorado, and we had a mattress on top of the equipment so we could sleep on top of all that. And it's really dangerous up there, because if the van flips over, you would've been crushed. And we're all asleep at 4 a.m. and we hear our tour manager be like, 'Somebody pray!' because we were sliding off this mountain into this void, and we floated over into oncoming traffic, but luckily we missed all the other cars and just sort of pinballed into the guardrail."

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Soaring Sales

Aside from nearly dying, something else happened while Flyleaf — which also includes guitarists Sameer Bhattacharya and Jared Hartmann, bassist Pat Seals and drummer James Culpepper — were out on tour. The tune "I'm So Sick" began to pick up steam on modern-rock radio. And before Flyleaf knew it, they saw sales of their album begin to soar. (It sits at #90 on the Billboard albums chart and has sold more than 100,000 copies with little-to-no promotion.)

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Staying at the Oakwoods

"We were staying at Oakwoods, working on the new album, and we would be in the hot tub, and there would be all these little 5- and 6-year-olds in there, just talking about how they blew auditions and how stressed out they were. It was brutal," Mosley said. "And here I was with all these really dark songs. It was just a bad place. We didn't see a lot of drugs, but we heard a lot about them. The whole thing was a struggle."

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Working with our new producer

Working with noted producer Howard Benson (My Chemical Romance's Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge), Mosley and Flyleaf worked their feelings of alienation and angst into an album's worth of chugging, spiky riffs and razor-sharp self-dissection. They released the self-titled disc in late September (on tiny Octone Records) and then did what they'd been doing since they formed in Belton in 2001: They hit the road. Hard.

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Bhattacharya

The song would normally be considered typical alt-rock fare — what with Bhattacharya's spiky lead guitar and Seals' thundering bottom end — but "So Sick" manages to separate itself from the pack thanks to Mosley's lyrical tightrope act, in which she carefully balances between brutal self evisceration and wide-eyed, unabashed spirituality.