When we contacted “Interview Your Favorite Band” CL Holiday Auction winner Derek Weiner to find out the bands he was most interested in talking to, he responded with a shortlist of picks. “Admittedly, I may be dreaming a little too big,” he wrote, “but I figured why not give you the wish list and let you be the judge of that?” At the top was platinum-selling alt rock/power pop foursome Jimmy Eat World.

Luckly, after contacting the Jimmy Eat World folks and pitching the story idea – an advance of the Tampa show featuring a Q&A by a fan who’d won the chance to talk to his favorite band via our charity auction – they were totally down. And not only did Weiner get to talk to bassist Rick Burch, but the musician gave Weiner ample time to get in all his questions and offered a well-thought-out answer to each. Check out the complete she-bang below…

Derrick Weiner: Hi Rick, How are you doing?

Rick Burch: I’m good. How are you doing?

I’m good, thank you.

Congratulations on being the lucky winner.

I’ve been a fan of you guys for a while, so I’m excited to ask you all a few questions, and I really appreciate you for doing this for myself and Creative Loafing.

Yeah, cool.

Okay, great! I guess start by asking you what’s going on with the tour right now?

The tour has been really good. The shows are going really well. A lot of people coming out, having a good time. I don’t know if you know this, but Courtney Marie Andrews – she sang on Invented – she’s joining us on stage as well. So, you know, we have a great person up there which is really cool. So, it’s going really good.

Will she be in Tampa with you guys?

Yeah, she’ll be in Tampa.

Great! Can you tell me about your newest album? What were your inspirations and what were you looking to accomplish with it?

When we started working on Invented – whenever we sit down and start working on new stuff – we try not to limit ourselves and not dictate how it’s going to be. We just let it happen, you know, let it develop on it’s own. We don’t try and direct it too much other than trying to maintain our sound, but we also want to grow and try new things. So we keep those things in mind as we’re progressing through the creative process. And I think we did a good job. I think the finished product stays within those parameters, for sure. We’re really proud of it.

You know, I’ve unfortunately never had the patience to be able to make myself learn any instruments, but I’m a huge music fan and I’ve been kind of curious about just the general process that goes into writing music. Do you guys find that it is easier to write music when you’re on tour? Off? In the studio? Out of the studio? How does that normally breakdown?

It’s kind of unpredictable when inspiration is going to hit. Ideas are constantly happening but you don’t necessarily have the ability to always flesh them out into finished songs or whatever. So you try and take notes and document it, so when you actually do have the time to sit down in the studio and actually work with those ideas, they’re there. They aren’t forgotten. And that’s kind of what happens. We’ll get a bunch of ideas together, and sometimes they originated on the road or randomly whenever. We’ll go through them all and pick things that ring with us: things that we like or that we want to expand on. And we work from there putting a song together.

This article appears in Jan 20-26, 2011.