When asked about a pinnacle in their career, most musicians will never admit to the fact they've felt the pressure to equal that feat.

Most musicians are lying.

When Ed Kowalczyk says it about his dramatic rock band Live's massive 1994 release Throwing Copper, though, you're inclined to believe him.

That's because the frontman truly believes the success of the disc and its hits such as All Over You and Lightning Crashes, was more a matter of right sound, right time.

"The success of Throwing Copper was because of things mostly things that were out of our control," Kowalczyk says of the 12 million copies it sold.

"We look at is an anomaly, like something that hit a chord at a time when it was right for that kind of thing to take off commercially."

Of course the vocalist is certain to distinguish between commercial success and creative success, because in his mind and in the mind of longtime Live fans, each of the Pensylvannia act's other four albums -- including its last release V -- has been a winner.

"You really can't measure the success of a record by how much it sells," says Kowalczyk, who brings Live to Coyotes for a show Monday night.

"We're just doing our thing and trying to move forward as songwriters and friends."

That said, the one aspect of Live that most people connect with, Kowalczyk's spiritually positive and heartfelt lyrics, he feels hearken back to another era in rock music's history

"It's why I love music so much as a means of uplifting people. That's the kind of music I grew up loving and why I wanted to be in a band," he says, with U2 being an obvious influence.

"I take pride in trying to make lyrics that you can sink your teeth into ...

"That's one thing I think has been lacking in rock and roll over the last five or 10 years. It's hard to get off some of the stuff that's out there. It just seems to me lyrically about nothing, and that's sad.

"It makes me long -- even though I wasn't born -- for 1969, where everybody was writing songs about something.

"I think we can always use more of that."

The quartet will deliver another dose of that late this year or early next year, as they head back into the studio this summer with longtime producer and former Talking Heads member Jerry Harrison.

Kowalczyk says fans can expect a return to the "classic Live sound" after they stepped out a little on last year's V.

"(V) was much more experimental in the sonic palate with synthesizers and things that we were using to augment (our sound) that we'd never used before," he says.

"But I think that this record we're going to go back and learn the songs as a band and go in and bang 'em out with instruments that we've grown up on rather than a whole lot of other things on it."