Alien Ant Farm was able to entertain a packed house at this year’s FallFest with their hit single, “”Smooth Criminal.”” Lindsay Boyd of the UCSD Guardian was able to catch up with the drummer, Mike Cosgrove.

LB: So how did you guys like FallFest?

MC: It was cool. It was a lot of fun. I was surprised that that many people were there. San Diego was like a difficult place for us. We were out there and we did shows but we never really broke into there. We had done some shows at ‘Canes and all that, so it was a really good feeling to come in and have such a good show there.

LB: So where on the road is the band now?

MC: We’re actually in Boise; we’re taking the day off between Vancouver and Denver. It’s pretty mellow. I’ve only been here once. We played the Warped Tour, here and we had cool show it was fun. We’re about to go run around the mall and see what it has to offer.

LB: So is this your first headlining tour?

MC: Yeah. We’ve been doing a whole bunch of support. We did support for Linkin Park and Tap Root, Orgy, Papa Roach and Snap Case. It’s a lot of fun. We got a [support] band called Dredg.

LB: What is different between touring now and touring when you guys first started out?

MC: Well, we really didn’t tour four years ago. We did some smaller tours. We did one like two years ago in Europe. But now we’re taken care of a little bit better. Everything we were doing before was really ghetto, just vans and shit . . . now we get cool meal tickets.

LB: So Alien Ant Farm played the infamous Reading Festival this past summer. How was that?

MC: It was really cool. Those festivals like Reading, Leeds, Gig on the Green in Scotland are all like really big. It was cool we got to play with a bunch of cool bands and see how the English do it . . . The fans over there, they just kind of receive you better.

LB: So has the rock world been affected by the recent bombings in Afghanistan? Does that affect you out on the road at all?

MC: Yeah, it’s affected a lot of things. There’s a lot of song titles that are too much for these quote sensitive times. I’m sure “”Drowning Pool With Bodies at the Floor”” isn’t doing too well right now.

LB: What would you say is the highlight of your band’s rise to fame so far?

MC: Seeing our families proud. I don’t know, I would say just meeting a lot of different heroes. I got to meet Danny Carey, he’s the drummer for Tool and 311. We got to play with on the Warped tour and we were big fans of them and now we’re good friends. That kind of stuff. You go from being a kid, totally being a fan, wondering how they do what they do, to being their friend and getting lessons from them.

LB: Were you worried at all about becoming too popular off of the cover of “”Smooth Criminal””?

MC: Yeah, it’s one of those things, we don’t want to release it at the top of our record. We actually had ideally planned on doing it at the end of the record cycle to maybe where it would carry us over to the next record, and radio, pretty much, took and did what it did and there’s nothing you can do. I don’t know, I’m not worried about it. I think we’re all secure in our repertoire. We chose to do [the song] … I think our crowds are digging every song, they sing along to all the songs. I don’t think we’re always going to be having singles that are going to reach that great of success, but we never planned on being a number one band like that, we just want to be able to keep our head above water on tour and do what we love.

LB: Have you guys been writing songs or working on the next album?

MC: We got some recording gear on the road and we’re just settling into this tour. As we’ve been on the other tours we haven’t been fortunate enough to take advantage of the times because we’ve been in a crappy busses or over in Europe. Now we have a nice bus and this recording gear, so we’re going to start taking advantage of it. But we’re still planning to tour for the next year … and we have a lot of old material that we totally want to bring back … there’s tons to be done.

LB: So, do you know any good drummer jokes?

MC: NO! Besides myself (laughs).

LB: I had to ask.