An official state beer? Unreal's all over that one! Plus: We ring them bells and play CDs to our dog.

Yes. Her name is Koko, and she understands English perfectly and communicates with sign language. She's extremely famous. She took her own photo for the cover of National Geographic. She's very difficult to get to. She turned down Disney, Porsche, Apple — every major company in the world. We created music for Koko and she vetted the lyrics. She actually changed some of them.

This is stuff you couldn't even think up on drugs! We knew that next we needed to find a Dr. Doolittle — an animal psychic. I saw Dr. Kim Ogden on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. I called her up and asked if she could act as a translator. So she put focus groups of dogs together. She'd play our music and say, "Here's what they liked," and so on. We found out dogs like happy, they don't like sad, and that they equate faster tempos with happy.

Last I knew dogs couldn't talk, let alone express their tastes in music.

Well, when I first started doing this, my opinion of animal psychics was Dionne Warwick/Psychic Friends Network.

And what kind of questions did Dr. Ogden "ask" her 250 canine participants?

She has three ways of communicating: One, through mental images — that's the main way animals communicate. The other one is emotionally: She can tell if they're scared or happy. Third is physically, so if an animal is ill, she'll feel a corresponding twitch or queasy stomach.

And this pays the rent?

We're just now getting into decent money — it's been almost nine years. I've gotten thousands of e-mails about the first CD. It just blew our minds. It calms dogs down. And now we use communicators all the time to really dial into the animals. Sometimes you don't want to hear what they have to say; that's the only thing I don't like about it. We were going to do something with rescued large cats, and when you start delving into those kind of animals, they don't have anything good to say about human beings. It's all about rage.

Hmmm.

We're doing some stuff that's really out there — like, existential — now.

No kidding?

We're working with some communicators that work with plants, because we want to see if we can make music that'll communicate with plants in a certain way.