It's not about how many people buy your records," says Matt Pryor, singer and guitarist for the Get Up Kids. "It's about how big people think you are. Let's get the hype machine rolling!" The Kids' last emo-flavored record, Something to Write Home About, actually sold 150,000 copies -- extremely quietly. But On a Wire, their third and best studio album, is a kaleidoscope of hazy melodies and heartfelt Americana, reminiscent of Wilco and the Dream Syndicate. When you listen to it, you might think the Get Up Kids are superstars.

The Get Up Kids' main forms of entertainment are drinking, making music and arguing. When they disagree, it's over the trivial stuff - but with white-hot passion. Bassist Rob Pope says, "Matt and Jim [Suptic: guitar, vocals] had an argument one time about who wrote 'Under Pressure': David Bowie or Queen. We ended up driving twenty minutes out of the way to find a Queen record, and, of course, they both wrote it."

The band formed in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1995, on Suptic's eighteenth birthday. They were almost called the Suburban Get Up Kids but reasoned that there weren't as many bands in the G section of the record store as in the S section. "All I ever really wanted was to go on tour," Pryor says. Now the band's resume includes opening stints for Green Day (who were incredibly friendly) and Weezer (who weren't). "It was a little bit unusual to tour with Weezer and never meet them," Pryor says.

For On a Wire, the Kids wrote twenty-five songs, exploring new sounds and structures. "We wanted not to do the things that had become easy for us," Pryor says, "like playing half-time at the end of songs." The album's title comes from "Walking on a Wire," a stately ballad about the failure of a relationship. "We used to call that song 'Career Killer,' " says Pope. "I can't believe we named the record after that."

Producer Scott Litt (R.E.M., Incubus) had never heard the band before the Kids contacted him, but he loved their demos; they all relocated to a studio in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for six weeks. "Scott made us work really hard," Pryor says. "You'd have three or four days in a row where you realized you hadn't left the building. We'd take Sundays off, go to New York and get really drunk." The only distraction was the foosball table bought by the fraternal rhythm section of Ryan and Rob Pope.

"We'd stop recording at 11 p.m. and play for three hours," Rob Pope says. "Me and my brother got really good -- after a while, Matt and James [DeWees: keyboards] said they weren't playing with us." The Get Up Kids should be preparing for upcoming tours of Japan and Europe, but the Pope brothers have other priorities: "We've been running around the bar scene, trying to find people to have a foosball tournament."