Josh:  I want to say this first to kind of get it out of the way since it will probably be the stupidest thing I say tonight, even though I don’t want to sell myself short just yet.   Now, two of you live in Washington and one lives in Los Angeles.  Why is it like that?

Sissy:  We all met in Los Angeles and started there a few years ago.  And then they moved to Washington.   Erin moved first and then Amber.   And I stayed.  Sometimes I ask myself why I didn’t move up there too.   But that’s another story.  We just find that it works right now.  Maybe in the future we’ll all live in the same city.   Right now it works with rehearsing, recording and getting together to tour once or twice a year.  If we ever started doing the band then we might have to move to the same city.  If for some odd reason we get as big as Dashboard Confessional...  Then I’ll move closer to them. 

Josh:  It doesn’t effect you with getting together to practice or anything though?

Amber: No.   We just wrote seven new songs in about a month.  It’s mostly just sending tapes back and forth since Erin does guitar and all the music.   If we had a full band it would be different.

Sissy:  That would suck. 

Amber:  It works because I’m there with her so I can hear stuff, and then she can send tapes and I can work on that.   Then when we see each other we can kind of adapt to each other’s lyrics. 

Josh:  Ok, we’re going to transition into this now since you brought it up.   You’re not like a traditional band in the sense that there are three of you and one plays bass, one plays guitar, one plays drums, like that... Erin actually does the music stuff and then you two sing.   How does that really effect you musically?  I’d think that you really wouldn’t be able to play electric unless if you were to get more people. 

Sissy:  Right.  Because Erin does everything. 

Josh:  And I could see her trying, but I don’t think she could do it all at the same time. 

Erin:  I think it’s really cool because I think that they let me do whatever I want musically.   And we all let each other do whatever we wanna do.  No one’s like, “You have to sing this part this way because this is how I wrote it” or “No, you can’t do that Erin because...”  We all kind of work together.   Everyone has as much creative freedom as possible.   I haven’t really had that in a lot of other bands.   Since I play every instrument, it’s really rad to be like, in charge of whether it will be electric or not. I get to add stuff to my songs that I hear that I don’t get to do live.   It’s good for me. 

Sissy:  Yeah, it’s fun for us.

Erin:   It’s really easy for us to tour now tooo with just a guitar and a car.   We can play any where.  It’s the cheapest, easiest way to tour.  If a show falls through or something, we could just set up in someone’s living room. 

Sissy:  So far I haven’t ran into anyone who thinks that we should be all electric.  I don’t think we’re psyching too many people out with our album.   It’s just like an added bonus on the CD.  Lots of people do that- add instruments on the CD.  Sometimes when we play live people aren’t expecting us to be acoustic.  But I think those people are impressed that we are.  Some people say we’d be a lot more popular if we were electric, but we don’t really care about that.    We play what we play, we do what we do.   If you don’t do it, make your own record. 

(I got goofy)

Josh:  I heard this acoustic CD once and then went to see him and he had this whole band, it was awful.  That was, um, Dashboard, that’s what I was laughing about to myself.

Sissy:  I like his music, I just think that we could kick his butt at a frisby game.  We want to have a frisby tournament. 

Amber:  I think he feels intimidated by us. 

Sissy:  We’re more emo than he is.

(everyone laughs)

Josh:  This is about the only time this will flow in transition nicely so I’ll use it.  I actually read this review that pretty much just generalized you as a typical female band on Kill Rock Stars, something like that.  Now I don’t know if I’m just not that down with Kill Rock Stars or if they’re wrong, but I just remember two months ago when I got “Fight or Flight” and I just thought it was one of the most original things I had heard in a long time.    It’s not like Sleater Kinney.

Sissy:  Yeah, we get that a lot.

Erin:  I get annoyed by that a lot.  I feel like it’s really unoriginal and easy to compare us to Sleater Kinney.  I think every band I’ve ever been in has been compared to them over the past few years, and they’ve all been very different.   I think people just don’t have anything else to compare us too.  People see women playing music and we’re from the northwest/west coast and we look punk.   It’s like, “Oh, they must sound like this”.

Sissy:  Or “Oh, they must be influenced by them”.  I hate that. 

Erin:  Someone can compare us to Sleater Kinney, but you know what?  I was making music before I was even listening to that band so what does that say?  I haven’t listened to that band in two years and it isn’t even really in that realm of music that I’m aware of.   I just don’t understand where it comes from. 

Sissy:  I think a lot of people think it’s a compliment.   They have to put us in a catagory, so this is the catagory we go into. 

Erin:  I think that even in the mainstream and indie scene of music there’s only really so much room for successful female bands.   And I feel like getting compared to these bands is a way to invalidate that other girls play music.   Because there’s not a lot of space in the world for powerful women.  No one wants that space there, so if there’s another band that people think is good they’ll just catagorize them into another band that exists because they don’t really want it to exist. 

Josh:  But I’m not insane for thinking you don’t sound like them, right?

Sissy:  We just heard a song from them the other day- our friend made us a mixed tape- and I didn’t hear anything in there that sounded like Delta Dart.   Except that there’s two female vocalists that sing together and picking guitars sometimes.   But there’s lots and lots of other music where you can see that.  And there’s lots of bands that have two guys singing. 

Amber:  If we seem over defensive, it’s just because we get it every time we see a review.  Like, Erin doesn’t even want to read reviews any more.   It’s like, whatever, tell us something I don’t know.  Get original with your reviews. 

Josh:  Well, I don’t think that I’m really not aware of a lot of female music as much as just the fact that I can’t really compare to any other music. 

Sissy:  We appreciate that.

Josh:  I just tried to play you off as goth though. 

(everyone laughs)

Sissy:  The inner goth.    We’re down with that.

Josh:  It just has this eerie sense to it.

Sissy:  Yeah.

Josh:  There’s the morbid kind of thing.

Sissy:  I agree with you.

Erin: Someone called us a pop band in one review and we were just like, no kidding.  It just goes to show that people hear the same music and the same songs so differently every where that it’s cool. 

Sissy:  No one hear musics the way that I hear music because we’re listening for different things.   And that’s just me.  That’s cool. 

Josh:  It’s funny because there are bands that are female, and if they’re being reviewed, they’ll be compared to male bands like, “This band sounds like [male band] only with female vocals”.  But I find that when people review male music, they won’t say, “This band sounds like [female band] only with male vocals”.   But when I first started listening to your CD, I didn’t even really think of it in terms of gender.  It was just kind of an afterthought sometimes when I would tell people about it, you know? 

Sissy:  That’s good. 

Erin:  That’s what it should be like.

Sissy:  That’s because you’re really smart. 

Erin:  It’s smart because you’re not catagorizing it, it’s just music.

Josh:  But it’s just that when you think of female music you think of more upbeat songs about kittens and butterflies and stuff.

Sissy:  Like Britney?

Josh:  Yeah, but there’s even bands like that.   And I mean, yeah, I listen to some of that, but I just didn’t feel your music was very gender specific. 

Sissy:  Yeah, it’s not your first immediate thought like, “It’s a girl band”.  Well, thank you because nobody should do that to anyone’s music or art.  It is what it is, it doesn’t have to be gender specific.  That’s just going backwards in my mind. 

Josh:  Without really having to talk about “Fight or Flight” as a follow up, I know that it’s half acoustic and half electric.  I’m not complaining- I wouldn’t have it any other way- but why is it that way and even just not the first half acoustic, like the songs are scatterred? 

Sissy:  That would be boring.    When we were originally trying to figure out the order, I just thought let’s mix it up.   I think we all kind of agreed on that.  If it was split that would have been kind of like making it two bands and we’re the same band all of the time. 

Josh:  I guess I take back my thought earlier of that being my stupidest question.

Erin:  No, it’s ok, people ask us stuff like that all the time.

Sissy:  There is no stupid question.

Josh:  Oh, but there is, we just haven’t got to it yet.

Sissy:  Well, then, come on, we’re waiting.