Gogol Bordello Perform Live on the Interface

Sam Comen for AOL

There are some exaggerated stories out there about Gogol Bordello, like the time frontman Eugene Hutz allegedly told PETA that his uncle had trained bears in the circus or that the gypsy motto the band lives by is a lifestyle.

"It's not lifestyle," Hutz told Spinner during a recent taping in our Los Angeles studios. "It's like being Irish, it's like being Russian. Gypsy is an actual word that comes from mistaken belief that Gypsies come from Egypt. They don't. Gypsies come from Rajasthan in India, and yeah, as white as I look, my ancestors actually do come from India in Rajasthan." With a hodgepodge of international members, Gogel Bordello are pretty much, as Hutz puts it, "a United Nations on the wheels." The movement started when Hutz hooked up with a group of musicians who agreed to morph gypsy music into rock 'n' roll.

"Oren from Israel; Yuri, Sergey from Russia; Pedro from Ecuador; Thomas, our bass player, from Ethiopia; Elizabeth Sun from Scotland; and Oliver Charles is from L.A.," he said of the band's origins. Together, they've put the pieces of 'Trans-Continental Hustle' together with the help of famed producer Rick Rubin, an experience made Hutz focus more on songwriting.

"Rick Rubin helped me to realize that that's actually my strongest material," Hutz said. "Sometimes you just don't know what your strongest stuff is."

There's 'Immigraniada (We Comin' Rougher),' a song that channels Bordello's reasons for making music, and the Brazilian-inspired 'Sun Is on My Side.' "It's so we can feel at home too," Hutz said of how fans relate to his music. "I was always enchanted by Brazilian culture and music. Of course, sooner or later in your life, you will meet a Brazilian girl, that pretty much lands you down there."

Hutz's nomadic lifestyle eventually took him to Brazil to write the album. "From then on, I fell in love with the whole country," he said, revealing the song is actually about a dream about dying "in a very extraordinary peace with oneself. Suddenly I wasn't afraid of death anymore."

If it sounds deep, it is, at least compared to when Hutz wrote his 1999 breakthrough hit 'Start Wearing Purple,' which was written for his girlfriend. "It's a song about growing old together, basically," he said. "It's just ruffled up with all kind of obscure references to Michel Foucault and genius, but essentially it's a song about growing old together with your girlfriend."

Another personal note is the shout-out to Hutz's uncles on 'Trans-Continental Hustle,' a tune called 'My Strange Uncles From Abroad.' "That song is about growing up in Ukraine. I listened to a lot of western music -- Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan. I listened to a lot of it and I pretty much felt that those were my uncles that I just never met. I felt such a close relationship with what they do, even though they never heard about me and maybe never will, I don't know. That was the song: 'My strange uncles from abroad. Yes, I've never met them, but I took everything they wrote and I'll never forget them."

Watch Gogol Bordello on the Interface