I resolved to commiserate with them in their gloom, and started by talking about this weird meet 'n' greet dinner the band had at an East Village Indian restaurant a couple nights before. It was full of industry types as well as suckers like me unwilling to pass up free Korma and Miki and Emma, thankfully, didn't seem to enjoy these kind of things. "You're in a band and you want to play music and write songs," Emma said, "but there's all this other stuff that you feel you have to do and you don't really want to do it, but you feel that you're pushed into it."

Miki echoed her sentiments, saying of the big-biz guys, "What they've tried to do is make it a kind of organized thing, like 'Here they are, here's the band: Everyone has to get on really well and everyone has to walk away going "They're really nice." ' It's a sort of forced situation that just really doesn't work."

I can relate to that, seeing as how I never even met them that night because there were so many other people currying (whoops) their favor and because it felt really odd to just walk up to a total stranger while they were eating dinner. Anyway, Emma summed this up nicely: "It's weird making people in bands be that corporate because in a way you feel that we're standing against that, that's why you want to be in a band."

That's pretty cool, I'm thinking. These guys were right to be weary of me.