The main thing former American Music Club frontman Mark Eitzel learned while working with R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck on the album "West" is that you don't always have to suffer for your art. "I've never worked with anybody who will be in the studio and just say, 'You know what? I think we should all get margaritas,'" Eitzel recalls. "To me, it's always been, you get into the studio and bust your ass. It was amazing."

\\Despite their casual work ethic, the duo was able to write an album's worth of material in about three days, with Buck composing the music and Eitzel writing the lyrics. Calling upon the services of Buck's bandmates in the experimental supergroup Tuatara -- which includes Screaming Trees percussionist Barrett Martin, Young Fresh Fellows bassist Scott McCaughey and Critters Buggin keyboardist Skerik -- the entire project was recorded in a week. "I didn't even know until after the fact that we had made the next Mark Eitzel record," Eitzel laughs.

\\The breadth of material on "West," which ranges from the rocking "In Your Life" to the contemplative "Lower Eastside Tourist," shows why the two men have become alternative rock's favorite odd couple. In separate phone conversations -- Eitzel from his San Francisco home and Buck from his Hawaiian hideaway -- the duo discussed the finer points of their unlikely collaboration.

\\Rolling Stone.com: The obvious question is, how did the two of you meet?

\\Eitzel: We were in Seattle, and Peter came to see me play and said he liked my record (1996's "60-Watt Silver Lining"). We hung out and we had drinks. I gave him my number and said, "If you ever come to San Francisco, I know all the good restaurants." So he came to San Francisco and we went to a restaurant. We talked, and he suggested that we do something. He said he would bring his family down and they would spend a week in San Francisco and just make a vacation out of it. It was like, whatever. So he came down, and it was really simple to write songs. So we wrote a lot of songs.

\\Buck: I saw American Music Club around the time their first album came out, and I had been a fan all these years. Mark played a small club in Seattle and I just started talking to him. We went out for a few drinks ...We weren't planning on making a record.

\\What was the atmosphere like when you started writing and recording together?

\\Buck: The first day we were writing, we wrote three songs really quickly. The next day we wrote four more, and on the third day we just said, 'We have seven songs, let's do a whole album.' On the last day we wrote five, but we forgot to tape one of them. We talked at dinner that night and decided to book a studio, an engineer and players. Within a couple of days I had arranged the whole thing without even telling the manager or record company.

\\Eitzel: I don't have any expectations anymore, so I thought five out of the 11 songs would be good. Maybe I'd come back to Seattle at some other point and we would do the other six, but all of the songs were great. Seven days is not a long time to record 11 songs. It was great. I've never experienced anything like that before in my whole life.

\\Was there any hesitation in releasing this as a Mark Eitzel solo album?

\\Buck: I think his voice is so distinctive, I don't think there's any point in making up a name for a band and sticking it on there just for the sake of having a name. It will be good if it can help him out a little bit. Anyone that listens to it will realize what my input is -- I don't have to have my name on the cover.

\\Eitzel: When I heard the record objectively a few times, I decided I liked it and that it was me. Even though it was a weird project and we went to pains to show everybody that we recorded it quickly, I feel fine about it being under my name. It's Peter's music, obviously.

\\REM and American Music Club had parallel careers up to a point -- you both started on independent labels, moved on to Warner Bros., and made critically-acclaimed records that have had very different commercial receptions. Is that strange at all?

\\Buck: Not really. I think people who have played music for a long time for their livelihood have more in common than two people who meet on a bus. Sometimes petty things are similar, like none of us has to get up early in the morning, neither one of us has a boss, our work comes straight out of our head ... Basically, it's more of a difference of a bank account and how many people we play to. But I saw Mark play a solo show in San Francisco with 800 people giving total rapt attention. It was a great experience, and it wasn't a lesser experience because there weren't 18,000 people there.

\\Eitzel: I think REM worked really hard and they rocked a lot more than we did. We played real quiet music a lot of times. They stayed together as a unit. They wrote songs together and we never did. At first, we tried, but then the rest of AMC weren't writing songs. They also have a really good