BWF: You guys have an interesting sound, who/what are your influences? Andres: My major influence is definitely The Beatles- growing up, I listened to a lot of their stuff and was a big fan of the McCartney basslines and how everything was melodic and things like that. I listened to a lot of INXS, The Police as well, and lately got turned onto Blur- so that's where a lot of my basslines (are) derivative of that kind of style/sound. Justin: I'm a pretty huge Midnight Oil fan, the whole hard rock and politics, I always thought they were such a cool band because they had a little bit of everything about them. They actually had some sort of purpose other than just rock music, which was kinda cool. I was always into Blur, Radiohead, The Cure, Underworld...a lot of that early 90's Britpop stuff. When all the grunge/alternative stuff was going on here, I really was attached to that kind of stuff. Esfand: You can pretty much see where I come from...It's funny because growing up with my father I have a Middle-Eastern background, so the Middle-Eastern influence is definitely there. The Daf is a Middle-Eastern instrument and it ends a bunch of our songs. Then during college, when the Grunge phase was going on, I was totally far away from that into the Pink Floyd kinda feel. But about five/four years ago, The Cure just blew me away. I would say, they're the main band that influences my songwriting and the band as well. BWF: It's funny you mentioned Midnight Oil earlier because the lead singer is running for office in Australia...Besides the political themes in your music, would you ever consider getting into politics, and getting involved beyond just the musical aspect of it? Justin: Yeah, I think we already do- with the music itself I think the whole point of what the music is about is really to just believe in something, whatever the hell it is- if you want to be an environmentalist, or you want to be party affiliated, whatever it is you want to do- just to have some sorta belief in something, because we always make the real cynical observation of how people just tune out most of the time and it gets frustrating, seeing a lot of what goes on in pop culture right now, it's really discouraging and just kinda sucks the life out of us really. People don't really believe in anything, they just want to believe in nothing but themselves... Esfand: I just wanted to take a shot at politics- when you say "politics" as an organized thing, personally, I would never want to get into that aspect just because I think politics, in general, carries that filth that kinda weighs down on us. So, in a way it's extremely tough for a person to take a political position and not be influenced by that filth and take on some of it. So I'd rather personally stay away from the entity of politics. But I second what Justin said about (how) everything we do basically influences the politics around us, at (the) workplace- the administration, unfortunately...I could talk about that for a long time! But I won't go on. BWF: When you guys write your songs, is it like: oh this is going to be a political song, or does it just come out like that? Is there a separation? Esfand: No, it's funny but a lot of people say, "are you a political band or a humanitarian band? I don't see it that way at all, and we can't label ourselves. It's what the everyday life has influenced us personally, that's what we write about. Obviously politics living in New York with all the wars that are going around, it's gonna be extremely tough not to get involved in politics, not to write about politics. If you're writing about what you're influenced by, it's very tough to avoid that. Obviously we have songs that are love songs as well, you know, we are influenced by that aspect of it as well. So no, we don't approach it and say let's write a political song. It's really what i open up the paper and what i see and what i really want to write about on that day. Justin: Music comes first most of the time anyways. You know like, either Esfand will come in with a song or with a song I wrote up or sorta have a framework of a song worked out, we'll just sort it out or Andreas will start playing something on the bass; about a half hour later it'll just turn into a song, you know. Like I'll read something in the newspaper and be like oh yeah, you know we should call this birth to box or something like that because I was reading an article and the whole mad cow thing was going on. They had a second line that really struck me about how the government was going to insure everybody that the meat would be clean from birth to box. Ha, I couldn't believe the way it was printed. I don't know, it was pretty...I don't know, eloquent and twisted the way they put that. So i was like that would be a pretty good name for a song. That was it, you know. Andres: I think the, I mean, yea I definitely agree, but when we write songs, Esfand will have something, he'll come into the studio and we'll pretty much just develop it. I guess once we're in here, Justin will throw in his little mixes and you know figure out what's good, where we should stop or do certain things, but all in all, overall I think we develop every song in the studio. ...more