wow, can't believe this group has been silent for over a year.
well, some good news:

Three Mile Pilot Recording New Album

John Schacht and Kati Llewellyn report:
Typically, when a band with two strong songwriting voices goes
belly-up and two new bands form from the wreckage, fans are offered
the audio emollient of now having twice the music to blow their
paychecks on.

It looks like San Diego's Three Mile Pilot plan to go their fans one
better. The prog-ish indie band never officially broke up, of course,
but their progeny-- noir-meisters Black Heart Procession and the more
angular, pop-oriented Pinback-- proved successful enough that Three
Mile's hiatus after 1997's Another Desert, Another Sea appeared terminal.

But Black Heart's Pall Jenkins and Pinback's Armistead Burwell Smith
IV (aka Zach) both recently confirmed that new Three Mile Pilot
material has been recorded in earnest over the last month. Touch & Go
Records, home to both Pinback and Black Heart, also confirmed plans
for a 2007 release.

"We wanted to have the label situated so we could light a fire under
our asses and get it done," says Jenkins, ignoring a suggestion that
the reformed unit should go by the name Black Arse Procession.

"We'd talked about it for years," Smith says, "but it's a lot easier
to let things slip by when you don't have a label asking you 'hey,
when's that coming out?'"

Another inducement was the new studio both bands now share at Smith's
home in San Diego's Little Italy district, where proximity is
apparently breeding productivity. That's where Black Heart's latest
album, The Spell (due out May 9) was recorded, and where Smith and
Pinback co-writer Rob Crow will adjourn after their current tour to
begin work on their next record.

Jenkins and Smith say they're just as curious as their fans as to what
the new Three Mile Pilot will wind up sounding like.

"We keep experimenting with different things, we don't want it to be
Black Heart, we don't want it to be Pinback, we want it to be Three
Mile Pilot, but we want it to be a more current thing because we've
all changed," Jenkins says.

"A lot of the songs from back then I hear now and go, 'why did I do
that?'" Smith says. "But at the same time I love what they are and
what we were doing back then, just exploring, and we don't want to
lose that feeling."

Black Heart co-leader/pianist Tobias Nathaniel, who joined Three Mile
Pilot mid-tenure, won't be in the band's new-but-familiar incarnation
because he now lives in Portland, Oregon. That leaves Three Mile with
its original lineup: Jenkins on guitar, Smith on bass and drummer Tom
Zinser.

http://pitchforkmedia.com/news/06-04/25.shtml#threemilepilot