Taking nearly a decade to make an album and ending it with a song called “How Did It Used To Be So Easy?” – that’s pretty funny. But Dave Mackinder isn’t really joking. In fact, the Fireworks frontman makes multiple references throughout Higher Lonely Power to the band’s relatively carefree days as literal lab rats. “Sure you have to sleep overnight at a Pfizer facility and get poked 50 times, but 1,000 bucks for what became Lipitor? That seemed like a lot of money,” he explains. And it certainly was a reliable way to make ends meet, at least compared to the “15 or so jobs I couldn’t keep for the life of me while actively trying to tour.” Guitarist Chris Mojan chimes in with his experience testing capsaicin creams on his skin “to see if it would burn too much.” Both have more legitimate ways to make ends meet now, holding down the kind of stable day jobs that can be paused as the bomb cyclone cripples the Midwest during the Christmas holiday weekend. And the very second the calendar flips to 2023, they’ll finally share the fourth Fireworks LP, more than three years after it was first announced. But no one outside of Fireworks’ inner circle knows that right now.