Snow Keim – bass, vocals
Born in Maine – When I was growing up I wanted to be Hank Williams. We were dirt poor, had no money. My family lived in a log cabin out in the woods. Garnet and I are Swamp Yankees. Music was one thing our family did to make ourselves happy. We have a picture of my grandfather’s first band in 1910. We weren’t allowed to listen to rock music growing up – our family’s church burned copies of Loverboy. We did some clinical drug studies in Kansas City on our way North, 27 days long, $90 a day. Then we went near Vancouver, B.C. – my dad’s twin was living out there and he has two daughters and one of them was dating Phil Collins’ son. We ended up doing three songs. We couldn’t get work permits for Canada, so went down to Seattle and were working at the Green Tortoise hostel. They allowed us to earn our rent by washing sheets, doing the laundry, and kitchen duty. We played acoustic guitars at the Pike Place Market but didn’t have a permit. We got busted, went to Seattle Center, made the license money to busk. One of our most popular songs “Don’t Bother Me” has two chords. – We learned it’s not the chord or the structure, it’s the vibe. Drugs and music go together pretty well; not that they should but they do. My brother and I were living in Los Angeles, and they were doing a giant William Blake exhibit at the Huntington Library, which we checked out. A few months later we had this opportunity to record, and Garnet had a dream that we would be The Blakes. If you know about Blake, you know how important music and dreams are – as Vonnegut said, “The only proof of God is music.” I have been slain in the spirit by faith healers. I grew up Charismatic which is considered Satanic by people – brain power has nothing to do with creativity – make me another atomic bomb, fuck-head. – People should get their hackles up, the rebel of America is getting lost. – Putting one foot in front of another, and having faith things will work out. Digging out of dumpsters for food, but we put that out of our mind. Bob wanted to go to school to become a writer; he tried to quit the band a couple times but we wouldn’t let him. We moved to L.A., lived at the Days Inn in one room, cooking Ramen on an iron with no water in it. Went in the bathroom and wrote songs. – We pulled a van out of a junkyard, bolted some seats down, put in some carpet, threw our cheap gear in, and booked ourselves a tour. No booking agent, no label, no manager, no one’s doing press. – Everyone thought we were insane, but our mom never gave up on us. It was always our mom’s dream to do music – maybe she lived vicariously through us.

Garnet Keim – guitar, vocals

I was born in Fairbanks, Alaska. I started on drums, then acoustic and electric guitars, and about eight years of classical piano. – I was so broke that I never had the money to buy records in the first place. – Always wanted to be Brian Wilson. – That dream about William Blake? I didn’t know I was dreaming. Was it an hour or was it just seconds? I remember walking into a workshop and he was working on some sort of copper etchings – We exchanged words as I was interested in what he was doing; then floated out into the street which took me somewhere else. – I was attacked at knife point by five Mexican banditos in a dark alley in the middle of the night in Ensenada, Mexico while trying to get Snow’s wallet back from a transvestite who had propositioned him and promptly stole it. I was a little too late – I kicked a couple of them, punched one and then jumped through a closed gate and made it home without ever losing my billfold but didn’t get Snow’s back. – Bob was the first person we met when we pulled into Seattle. He was working at Tully’s and we bought a coffee from him and started talking. I think he is a great writer. Our previous records were always recorded without any budget in a time crunch and half the time done entirely by us. The end result was not always pretty! – The song’s popularity that surprises us is “Two Times.” It was written in seven minutes on the spot in our lockout. The vocals are screaming, cracking, breaking up – but it turns out that people don’t want perfection or nice voices. We are very human! – We plan on a West Coast tour late this summer, the UK to follow and from there where ever the road takes us; probably a lot more in the States.

Bob Husak — drums

Born in Seattle, Washington – don’t remember which hospital. It was kind of a weird childhood. We moved around a lot. My dad sold T-shirts for Jr. Cadillac. In Spokane I joined a metal band as a bassist just because I wanted to be in a band. When I was growing up I wanted to be Brett fucking Michaels! – I’ve really enjoyed Zane Grey in the past year. It’s one thing to put all kinds of pathos in your work, but genre writers work hard because they have to come up with ideas and keep you interested. I started drumming for The Blakes after we’d been living in L.A. The whole thing came about after we went through a lot of drummers. I felt genuine pain when I had to sell my copies of the original vinyl Martha & the Muffins albums. When I graduated high school I moved to Seattle immediately, and got a job at Tully’s. I met Garnet and Snow when they’d just come down from Vancouver Island. I thought they said that they wanted to do bad things to me behind the coffee shop – but we became friends We don’t try to take the cool retro vibe to an extreme degree – we are as influenced by the Everly Brothers as the Kinks. – We are going to tour the world! We are not Andy Partridge.