Lawrence.com

If there is a God, he/she must not be a fan of power pop. Otherwise, Dead Girls Ruin Everything wouldn’t have lost half a record to a careless intern with a trigger-happy delete finger – and very nearly lost their minds in the process.

Instead of throwing in the towel and going to Arby’s, the band responded by redoubling its efforts and knocking out 20-plus songs. Change was in the air, and the group was no longer in the mood to “Ruin Everything.” Hence, The Dead Girls kick off 2009 with a new name and a new EP. It’s the start of what figures to be a very busy year, with another EP and a full-length to follow. The band will also be firing up “The Dead Girls Project”—an interactive website wherein fans can remix new material.

Eric Melin, Nick Colby, JoJo Longbottom and Cameron Hawk stopped by to share tracks from The Hair Trigger EP and discuss the fine art of 5-for-$5 economics.

lawrence.com: So you guys no longer “ruin everything,” but we’re glad to have you here anyways.

Melin: We still ruin everything. We just decided not to advertise it anymore.

Hawk: In this time of economic hardship, people don’t want their stuff ruined.

Melin: They need their rock bands to go from four words down to three.

What’s the story behind the song “Tied to the Tracks”?

Longbottom: The song was written about my girlfriend in Spain on the last day that she was in town.

When you should have been hanging out with her?

Longbottom: No! She took off, I went straight to Arby’s, got the 5-for-$5, wallowed in my Arby’s sauce, picked up my guitar and wrote that ditty. I felt bad for the Arby’s lady because I was like (crying voice), “Can I get five roast beef sandwiches?”

Album Mp3s

Hair Trigger EP

• "Hair Trigger"

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Aren’t you supposed to get two roast beef sandwiches and some fries and a soda?

Longbottom: No man, c’mon. If you were a proper economist you’d think about that.

Colby: Have you ever had a woman leave you to go back to Spain? You gotta go 5-for-5 on that one.

Longbottom: You need a lot of beef.

Creatively, how does that Arby’s sauce affect you?

Longbottom: Well, it made me fat and I probably fell asleep for a little bit. But once I woke up I was energized and ready to write.

I always feel slighted when I buy an EP.

Melin: Well, we’re going to give you another EP and another record before the year is over.

You could have put those two EPs together and made another record.

Hawk: It doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes it just flows better in a shorter format.

Melin: Especially when you record at like six different places over two years. There’s one cohesive record out of all these songs and there are two EPs.

Longbottom: Are you going to tell Walt Whitman when to start and stop writing?

2009 is shaping up to be a big year for you guys.

Longbottom: We worked really hard in 2008 so that 2009 could be awesome.

Melin: We had a number of impairments, and not the usual kind that you would expect from us.

What would the usual ones be?

Hawk: Gaining weight.

Melin: The people who have seen our shows for about three years know what we’re talking about.

Longbottom: We had an intern at an unnamed studio erase five songs from months of recording. Every thing we did felt like a rough draft … I felt like I was an actor in “Satan’s Alley” going “WHYYYYYY?”

Melin: But in the meantime JoJo became a badass home producer, so that’s why we have a lot of extra tracks.

Seems like there are a lot of acoustic guitars on this new EP.

Longbottom: I used all my student loan money to buy really expensive guitars. I got a Gibson Hummingbird, which is like $2,000, so we like to use it a lot.

And your loans – how are they?

Longbottom: They’ll be fine. My future wife will help pay those off.

What’s “The Dead Girls Project” all about?

Melin: JoJo and Chris Cosgrove – who recorded most of the tracks on our record – have teamed up and JoJo has been filming Chris talking about specific recording techniques. We’re also going to give people basic tracks from our record before it’s out.

Realistically, what do you hope will come of this?

Melin: There are a lot of people out there who have all this equipment and they don’t know what to do with it. We’re going to be on the site talking about what we’ve done and finding out what other people have done. It will also be a place where people can go and talk about home recording.

Longbottom: It’s interactive … You can take a vocal harmony or a guitar lick or a drum track and put it in your hip-hop song, and we’ll post it.

Let’s talk about Ultimate Fakebook for a sec. You reunited for a Christmas show and you’re playing a benefit show February 5th at the Uptown Theater.

Colby: The reunion thing was a birthday party for our friend Randy, who went to a thousand Fakebook shows … Then they asked us to do the JayDoc Benefit.

Melin: They caught us in that weird moment where we were feeling excited. Bill (McShane) left his guitar here and they’re flying him back (from California) so we can do it again … We’re going to make sure that this is the UFB show we wanted to put on when we really didn’t have any money at all. This is going to be as close to KISS as we get. If you’re at the Uptown, you might as well blow something up.