a lyrically meta-concept song about the process of recording the EP itself and the effect it has on the music and the listener. Cursive toured extensively throughout 2001 and 2002, to the point of exhaustion and Kasher suffering a collapsed lung. The band had to cancel the rest of the tour and returned to writing new material. The Ugly Organ and hiatus (2003–05) Cursive released The Ugly Organ, their fourth album, in 2003 on Saddle Creek Records to critical and commercial success. Music magazine Rolling Stone gave the album a 4-star rating, while alternative music magazine Alternative Press rated the album a perfect 5 out of 5. At the time of The Ugly Organ's tenth anniversary reissue in 2014, the album had sold over 170,000 records. The Ugly Organ is a loose concept album about the ideas of what art and music are, how the song, singer, and audience all relate and influence each other, and the emotional effects of the songwriting process on the writer. Kasher stated in an interview with Alternative Press in 2014 that the songs he wrote were not written to be tight conceptually, and credits guitarist and sometimes-vocalist Ted Stevens with finding the theme to the album, saying, "Really, Ted [Stevens, guitar] had a large role in laying the songs out and considering what they all meant and how they related to each other and creating a higher concept from the artwork, of the theatrical layout." The addition of Cohn's cello to the music was noted by Adam Finley of Pop Matters as helping to give songs a "sense of epic scale" and "threatening edge," and that the songs overall sounded as though "all roads led through a haunted house of grotesque situations and twisted characters, each a reflection through a broken carnival mirror of Kasher converting pounds of flesh into something saleable." After extensive touring to support The Ugly Organ in 2003 and early 2004, Kasher surprised fans and critics by announcing an indefinite hiatus for Cursive in the fall of 2004 once they finished their tour with The Cure. Lead singer and songwriter Tim Kasher took time to focus on his other band, The Good Life, which he had formed in 2000 and whose third release, 2004's Album of the Year, was enjoying critical success. Ted Stevens worked on his other band, Mayday, along with bassist Matt Maginn, releasing their third album, Bushido