Speaking to LiveDaily before AFI [ tickets ]'s current tour got underway, bassist Hunter Burgan said he was looking forward to the jaunt in support of the band's recently released album, "Crash Love." But there were plenty of things to accomplish in the days leading up to the trip.

"I've been doing a lot of writing and a lot of home repair stuff that I have to take care of before I leave for a year," Burgan said. "It's been a couple years since we've really been gone on tour. It's hard to remember when you're gone, you're gone. It's the little things that I have to remember. But, basically, being in Los Angeles for most of the last few years, I'm starting to get that wanderlust."

The "Crash Love" tour will bring AFI around the world for the next year. Produced by Joe McGrath and Jacknife Lee, and two years in the making, "Crash Love" has been called AFI's most focused, direct and ambitious effort to date. The set follows two consecutive platinum AFI albums: 2006's "Decemberunderground," which entered the US chart at No. 1, and 2003's "Sing the Sorrow." AFI's discography also includes the full-length sets "The Art of Drowning" (2000), "Black Sails in the Sunset" (1999), "Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes" (1997), "Very Proud of Ya" (1996) and "Answer That and Stay Fashionable" (1995).

Burgan--who swept the vote in the music category of the 2008 Shorty Awards, a ceremony held earlier this year in New York City to honor the best producers of content of 140 characters or less on Twitter--is likely to keep fans up-to-date on the goings-on on the road.

"We just started streaming the album on MySpace, so I've been getting a lot of feedback on the Internet from different people listening to it. It's all been really positive. It's exciting to have some people hear it and enjoy it."

Burgan said the new album's title came about easily. The band--which also includes vocalist Davey Havok, guitarist Jade Puget and drummer Adam Carson--looked for a moniker that would embody not only the themes running through the lyrics, but the ideas that AFI was bringing forward musically.

"If you look at the words 'crash love,' 'crash' could mean a number of different things, many of them abrupt and violent," Burgan said. "Love can mean many endearing things. So it could certainly be interpreted as a love for such crashes or crash in love. I think that a lot of that ties in with the lyrics--which I can't really talk about because I didn't write them--certainly with the music and what we're trying to do in terms of making an album that is at the same time something that is endearing and also abrupt and somewhat violent. It's not like we're shredding this crazy hardcore."

Burgan said the themes of the album deal with the death of culture and obsession with celebrity and how a lot of that is "very hollow and very disappointing I suppose."

"I feel like, from one album to the next, we have evolved in our songwriting and musical interests and what we're trying to do," Burgan said. "I think this one is more than just an evolution from the previous album. I think it also embodies a lot of the energy from the earlier albums. I think it definitely fits in very well with the catalog. It's almost like we're showing off everything we've learned in our career in one album."

One of the most important lessons he's learned over the years about making music is to present sounds in a unique way, he said.

"I think that's the challenge we face each time we set out to record," Burgan said. "We're so used to doing things a certain way and so we're just challenging ourselves to push the boundaries and do something that sounds new; we'll always be making fresh music. But I think that's our biggest challenge. Certainly, that's something I've learned from this whole process is that it's not always the easiest thing."

In recording "Crash Love," AFI--which stands for A Fire Inside--had a little help from a few friends. During the "Begin Transmission" contest, AFI members personally went through thousands of fan-made video submissions and chose a handful of entrants to contribute backing vocals to the new album.

"It was really very cool," Burgan said. "In December, we asked our fans to create two-minute videos about themselves and send them to us over the Internet. We chose several of them and flew them to Los Angeles and allowed them to sing with us on the record.

"What we ended up getting was a thousand amazing glimpses into different people's lives. It was just really cool. I'll communicate with some of our fans online or after a show, or different times, but to see them in their own environments is just a really, really cool thing."

Fans were understandably excited to be chosen, but those feelings carried over into the band as well.

"The winners obviously had something special about them," Burgan said. "It was really fun to have people come into the studio. We just sit there all day working on tiny aspects of the songs. At times, it's extremely boring. It's easy day after day to not be as excited about one verse of a song or another thing. It becomes a lot of work. It was so refreshing to have these contest winners come in and just be truly excited to be there. It brings a whole new freshness into the recording process."