The Very Best is trio of musicians from Malawi, Sweden and France who met in the London and now make music that combines southern African choral traditions, traditional African pop, and the latest trends in DJ club pop and techno.  They are part of what we’ve been calling World Music 2.0, “Nu-Whirled Music.”  In fact their introduction to the world was not a conventional CD, but a mix tape distributed free over the internet.  Afropop’s Banning Eyre caught up with Esau Mwamwaya, Johan Karlberg and Etienne Tron in New York City shortly before the September, 2009, release of their debut CD “Warm Heart of Africa” on Green Owl.  Here’s their conversation.

B.E.:  Esau, why don’t introduce yourself?  We’ll start with that.

Esau Mwamwaya:  My name is Esau Mwamwaya.  I’m from Malawi, South East Africa.  Born there in 1975.  And I hooked up with guys from Radioclit in England, some few years ago. And then we started making music together.

B.E.:  So you grew up in Malawi.  Tell me about your musical life there when you were young.

E.M.:  I’ll say like three-quarters of my life I grew up in Malawi.  When I was about 9 years old, I developed this kind of interest in music, because it’s like we had so many records in the house. And I used to play around and listen to them most of the time. I mean, this interest started growing up in me.  In the mid 1990s--that’s when one of my friends introduced me to one of the local bands by the name of Masaka Band. So I went there as a vocalist. Actually they gave me an audition anyway.

B.E.:  Masaka Band.  I think I’ve heard of that band.  What was the music like?

E.M.:  We used to do some Malawian traditional stuff, covers as well. So it was kind of mixed. So it’s the kind of thing also that made me able to work with these guys Etienne and Johan. Because I have that kind of background. I was exposed to different kinds of music you know, like Western kind of music, Caribbean stuff—music from all over the world.

B.E.:  What were some of your favorites at that time. Did you have musical heroes?

E.M.:  I did.  I used to have people like Phil Collins, Peter Tosh, Bob Marley, Elton John, Ken Boothe… quite a lot of them.

B.E.:  Any African artists?

E.M.:  Yeah, they were there too. Mostly our local, our local African artists, like Robert Fumulani, and also we used to have Lucias Banda.  Robert Fumulani was like one of the most influential musicians in Malawi, one of the oldest ones.  We also have some of them most of which were doing like proper traditional Malawian music, like Doctor Daniel Kachemba.  Yeah, but I think he passed away a long time ago. He was a genius, and his brother too. I think it might be Daniel and Donald. One is older and the other one is younger. But both of them are dead now but they were quite geniuses. Yeah, I’ll say when I was in the village alone, I played with Masaka. In 1999 I decided to move to London simply because I wanted to have a different life experience. So I didn’t make music when I was in London, from 1999 to 2006, until I met Etienne and Johan.

B.E.:  How did you guys meet?

E.M.:  It just happened that I had a shop myself, just in between their houses. And Etienne was moving to a new accommodation, so he was my usual customer. And he poked in one day and asked me what I used to do outside of the shop and I said I was a drummer in one of the local churches, just in London there.  And he said, “Oh fun, we’re looking for an African percussionist, so maybe you might be the one.  Why don’t you come to the studio and try something?”  So then he had like a house warming party, and he invited me to the party, and that is where I met Johan too.  So the studio is in Johan’s house, and after the party he took me straight away to the studio to do some percussion.  But he thought maybe I was a proper African percussionist but he didn’t know I was a normal drummer, so as we were in the studio he kind of put some of the tracks, some of his tracks, he was just playing so I could hear what he does. And I was humming on top of it, singing, but I didn’t know it Johan would like what I was singing. He said, it looks like you are going to be a good singer too, can we try something?  And then we recorded a song, so I ended up being a singer and not a drummer any more.

B.E.:  So back in Malawi when you played with Masaka you were drumming not singing?

E.M.:  I was a drummer and I used to be a singer as well, and most of the times I was like a backup singer.

B.E.:  Cool, Esau.  I’ll come back to you.  But first, Johan, tell me a bit of your story.

Johan Karlberg:  My name is Johan Karlberg, I was born in Linkoping, Sweden, a small town a couple hours south of Stockholm, I grew up there wanting to be a nature photographer all my life. I got into photography a lot in high school and was working as a photographer during high school. All my friends were a little bit older, living in Amsterdam or London, moving around Europe—you know how people tend to do it at that age. And, so when I finished high school I wanted to do something different as well, so I moved to London and gave up the photography, at least professionally, and I started squatting for the first 3 years with a bunch of friends and a backpack. I was making music from I was probably around 12 – 13. A friend of mine told me how to produce in Fast Tracker this old Swedish music program that you could program very basic things in. So we had this rap group, me and a few friends called Excess Stamina, which we would do for many years.  Then I moved to London met Etienne through some common friends from France when I was producing a rap group as well called TDC and from there Radioclit was born and we moved in together with my girlfriend.  Me and Etienne thought, we’ll try and do like a fake radio like a pirate radio. You know, pirate radio is really big in London, and we were really inspired by that.  It brought out all these rural kinds of music, rough music, in the way that wasn’t really that wasn’t really allowed on normal radio. But we didn’t have the equipment or the knowledge to do that properly ourselves, so we recorded fake radio shows at home with the music that we liked and put them on the internet.

B.E.:  How about the name. Radioclit, where’d that come from?

J.K.:  It kind of was a combination of all these things.  It was very much about radio in the beginning, kind of like radio pleasure button or like a music pleasure button, that you switch it on and you get all the good stuff. At the same time it was a reference to the ghetto music and stuff, that was on this Screwed Upclick, was that Lil Flip’s crew, Etienne? Yeah it’s the screw, so we had Screwed Up Clit for a while and it was this little word play—yeah, that’s how it came about basically.

B.E.:  And so that gets you up basically to the point where you met Esau?

J.K.:  Yeah. I mean with a lot of production in between. We produced the Banda Derollas album, for a bunch of other artists and did a lot of tracks and singles and club tracks, which we produced on our own, which we still do as well. But yeah, it kind of leads up to the point where we ended up on the same street in Hackney.

B.E.:  So at the point when you started working with Esau what was your awareness of African music?

J.K.:  We were very curious about music from all over the world for a while before that especially African music.  How much we knew about it?  I don’t know.  I knew enough to know that I really liked a lot of what was coming out from there, old and new, especially interesting was the kind of the new kwaito scene, when kwaito started turning into house. That was working really well with our club set. It sounded really European in a lot of ways, like Pretoria house and the kuduro and coupé decallé—these things just started to sort of bubble in the background. I started to find out about them. At the same time, like I always really liked the South, Southeast African way of singing, like someone standing on a mountain top and kind of singing to the whole country, a lot of harmonies and beautiful melodies and stuff. Paul Simon’s Graceland was one of my dad’s favorite records, grew up listening to that a lot, and I think even though it was my dad listening to it, it always stuck with me, and I liked the feel of it. And as I came along I brought something quite similar to that, even though what we are doing now is different, it was those big songs with a lot of harmonies. We usually record like 40 back-up tracks with different harmonies when we record it, so Esau is doing all the harmonies and everything.

B.E.:  Thanks, Johan.  What about you, Etienne?

Etienne Tron:  So my name is Etienne Tron. I’m French. I’m 28. I spent all my life in Paris until I was 22 or something when I move to London , and that’s when I met Johan.  I’ve been a DJ for a good 10 years now. And I’ve been making music like, not professionally, since I was like 14 or 15.  I only started to make serious music production with Johan for 4 or 5. Yeah, I mean that’s it, if you want to talk about more my history with African music and culture, I would say that I’m a big big, big music listener and I spend a lot of my time digging for music.  My approach has always been very genre-less meaning that I was really always into a lot of black music, a lot of hip hop. I was really into rock as well, electronic music pretty early as well. Being French, it was pretty big out there. But my interest for proper African music is fairly recent.  It was just when I started being not as excited any more about hip hop and soul and like all of the black music that people have been really exposed to and reggae that I started to feel like I should go and explore the African continent.  I would say that was around 2005.

B.E.:  That sounds familiar.

E.T.:  The great thing is that being from Paris and living in London, those are two cities with a lot of those cultures really present.  So that’s been exciting for me.  Exploring African music was as much exploring Africa as it was exploring certain parts of Paris or London, parts that were unknown, that were exotic to me.  For instance, one of my African  favorite musics is coupé decallé and it’s a music that was created as much in Abidjan in Ivory Coast as in Paris in France. It’s like a music that is really in between that belongs to those two places.

B.E.:  Well, let’s talk about the first project you guys did together, the mix tape. Was that your first project together?

E.T.:  It’s not actually.  Basically we started working together on that night that Esau told you about when he came over to the studio. We made one track straight away and its “Chalo” from the album coming out now. It’s the one of the tracks that we’ve kept.  So we kept on working on the album for almost a year, just took it slow. It took us probably six months to realize that we were making an album. Esau would come in once a week, once every two weeks, and record, and sooner or later we kind of realized we had six or seven really good tracks here.  Maybe we should actually mix this into an album cause as Radioclit we were never really planning on making an album and we were kind of doing things here with no real like project focus. All of a sudden we realized that we had that like really good album going and a really good artist and something quite unique, we thought.

So last year, 2008, in April we set ourselves a deadline to finish the album. And during those last 6 months, almost a year actually, MIA’s new album, Kala, came out and we got the “Paper Planes” track a couple weeks before the album was released, and we thought it’d be a good idea to have Esau make a version of it and put that on internet the same day Kala was released. W wanted to kind of ride on the hype a little bit and to introduce Esau because it would be one of the first times he was exposed. So we did that and that quickly grew into a real buzz, on internet at least. We got a lot of calls from journalists.  Everybody was intrigued by the story of how we met in the furniture shop on our street.  So once we were done our album last April, we’d done a few tracks like that with other people’s music.  The mix tape kind of came along the way that we used for hype tools because we really wanted to keep the album secret but we still wanted to gain some exposure.  At the point when the real album was done, we were like--there’s no real point in stopping recording because we’re having so much fun and everything’s working so well and we could be sitting around for a year waiting for someone to sign this and so we just decided to keep on going and so during the summer and up to September last year we recorded little mix tape tracks. So those were actually done after the album. But we put it out in November as a free download while we were shopping for a deal for the proper album.  Then we came back to the album ever so briefly and did a couple more tracks. We mixed and mastered the album and retouched it this spring for it to be released in September, 2009.

B.E.:  Tell me the story of the Vampire Weekend remix, the “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” remix, which is how I discovered you.

Johan Karlberg:  You know, we were massive Vampire Weekend fans. Etienne was working as a scout for Domino Records in London and got the demo before they were signed from Lawrence “Debolster” and we were in New York at that point and managed to get their number and hooked up with them in Brooklyn ‘cause we really wanted to produce their album. This was before they even signed to XL. And that didn’t happen, of course, but we kept in contact a lot and we were talking to XL a lot, they were interested in Esau, and The Very Best and at some point XL asked us to do a remix.  That’s actually an official remix likr another couple of tracks on the mix tape as well. We just wanted to beef it up a little more. And keep the riff in there and just have Esau do his thing in there.

B.E.:  Tell me, Esau, about how you approached that song. That’s you doing all that extra singing.

Essau Mwamwaya:  Yeah, that’s exactly how it is. It’s like Johan, he gives me some tracks.  Maybe he gives me a few tracks, maybe I try to get some ideas from them. I get inspired by so many things when I am given a track. Maybe the drum beat, or maybe the melody, maybe the guitar.  Maybe one of the instruments gives me ideas of what I can sing about and in what language also I can sing, because I sing in different languages in my songs too.

B.E.:  What are you singing on the “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa Remix”?

E.M.:  Oh, that one’s like, you don’t judge a gun by the size. It’s same like saying you can’t judge the book by the cover.  That’s what it’s talking about.

E.T.:  It’s a Malawian proverb saying you don’t judge the gun by the size.

E.M.:  We have it in Malawi also.  But this is in English now,  It’s a love song.

B.E.:  But you’re singing in an African language too?

E.M.:  It’s Chichewa. Sometimes too I have like a song that I composed already so when Johan gives some bass, I just translate those songs into the beat. You see what I’m trying to say?

J.K.:  Is that how it happened with “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”?

E.M.:  “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” I had some ideas already for it.

J.K.:  And part of the hook is a traditional Malawian song right as well.

E.M.:  [SINGS]  That’s what I sing. That’s proper, like Malawian kind of like tradition. I can say like a folk song. Children like singing as well.  I think it’s also used for weddings, and occasions like those.

J.K.:  I realized that only when I came to Malawi last October.  Because on the album we were trying to keep it fairly strict and make sure that all the recordings were original things, even if they were influenced by something.  A couple of them might have been influenced by traditional songs, but that one, because it was a remix, it was a non-album track for us, so it’s like we had more leeway to kind of explore stuff that would just work and as soon as we came back to Malawi, and like all the kids, you’d play it on the street and everybody sang a long because everybody knows that hook.

B.E.:  So you visited Malawi?

J.K.:  Yep. Esau moved back to Malawi from London last September. And in October every year there is a festival in Malawi called Lake of Stars, which is mainly organized by English people, London people, some of them living in Malawi these days. And we’ve gotten to know some of these guys over the last few years because he realized we were working with Esau a Malawian artist.  There are not that many Malawians in London in comparison to other countries I guess.  So yeah, I went down there to shoot, to do video for “Kamphopo,” which was one of the mix tape tracks and to play the festival with Esau.  I was down there with Esau for a couple of weeks. We’re going back now in October again, which will be exciting to go back again.

B.E.:  Going back to Vampire Weekend for a second, you actually recorded the CD title track, “Warm Heart of Africa,” with Ezra Koenig.  What’s the story of that track?

J.K.:  Uh, that happened in March 2008.  Vampire Weekend was on tour in Europe and we’d been talking to them.  We really wanted to do something for the album with them and Ezra was up for it, but it was really hard to coordinate times because we were traveling and they had a crazy schedule. And one day just Ezra was in London and his drummer was sick I think and he got two days off.  It was like a week before we were planning on closing the album so that day we did that song with Esau and Ezra.  So yeah, it worked out really well.

B.E.:  Did you record the song from scratch, or was there something there?

J.K.:  Actually me and Esau had quite a specific idea for what we wanted Ezra to sing.  It was on the track that became “Kada Manja” on the album, which was way darker, like really really dark and kind of big sounding.  When he came, he said he wasn’t sure he could do it because he thought it was a bit dark for him and I just happened to play the beat that I had done for what became “Warm Heart of Africa,” to use as a kind of last resort and he said, “Oh perfect.  Let’s do this one.”  There were barely any drums on it, basically just a loop of the guitar and some small drums on it, and then we build it up and Esau’s brother Milo played bass, which he did on a couple of other tracks as well.

E.T.:  Etienne. It’s interesting because I wasn’t actually there when Ezra recorded these parts and when I heard it I was shocked by how good it was, and like how much work it felt there was into it. And I couldn’t believe that he wrote this and recorded this whole thing in like three hours the way it happened.  Actually, I learned later that there were some lyrics and it was a hook that he had written a long, long time ago, I think before even Vampire Weekend and he could never have fitted this ever in any song before so he was just like saving it and that’s why like I think things clicked so easily. That’s why we got something really great from it I think.

B.E.:  Let’s talk about the song with MIA on it, “Rain Dance.”  That’s also a very interesting track.

J.K.:  Yeah, the same thing again.  We really wanted to get MIA in.   We knew MIA for many years from London and through Diplo and all these things when there was not that big of scene.  Back in the day there in London, MIA was one of these people that we saw a lot but never managed to get in the studio with.  So we were making this track for Santigold that we wanted on the album and we wanted MIA to be on that one, so when she came in to do that we also sat her down and played her the Esau stuff. I think just around that time we’d done the “Rain Dance” track and I think she really liked it so she jumped on that as well. And then we lost the multitrack files for that track and for the Santi track too.  Two days later my hard drive crashed before I had a chance to back up so what’s actually on the album is a demo that’s been recorded on top of again to layer more Esau’s vocals and then mastering and trying to make it sound as good as possible.  That’s why it’s slightly rougher than a lot of that album but I think it’s got a cool character to it.

B.E.:  So Esau, tell me about some of the other tracks.  Tell me what you’re singing about.  Just pick a few you’d like to talk about.

E.M.:  In “Chalo,” I sing about the sort of catastrophes the world is facing, especially things like crime, war, starvation, things like that. “Julia” is a love song.  It’s all about a girl that I meet and all of a sudden she makes my dreams come true. And in “Rain Dance,” this is like a tribal kind of song where I’m talking about old people, our ancestors.  You know, people pray when there’s no rain, when they’re stricken by drought.  They prayed for rain and the rain used to come, it’s like that time when nature used to listen to them. Whatever they said, it was happening.

J.K.:  There’s a really funny story about “Rain Dance.”  MIA  was on tour here in America she got on iChat to me in London, and she said, “The most amazing thing just happened. We’re driving on the tour bus in the desert some where and we were listening to ‘Rain Dance’ over and over.”  And you know how the track ends with all the rains?  It’s raining, raining everywhere.  And she took off her headphones and it’s raining and she could still hear rain, she didn’t understand what was going on she looked outside and it started raining in the desert in the most random place where it really shouldn’t be raining it was like pissing down. And she was super excited and she came on iChat and she was like, “That’s what happens when I listen to ‘Rain Dance.’”

E.M.:  I think I did a vice versa there. “Julia” is a song which I say is about a girl that you meet and she makes your dreams come true, but Julia is about when you find like love you have to handle with care cause just like an egg it can easily break and so that’s Julia now. So I just did a mistake there, I was just trying to correct.

J.K.:  Talk a bit about the song “Angonde.” properly.

E.M.:  Angonde.  That’s my tribe, so it’s like Angonde have this kind of tradition that when someone dies, when a member of the family dies, they bury them in the back yard because each and every house has their own grave yard. That’s the strange thing about Angonde, and that’s my tribe.  It’s not every part of Malawi that they do that, only my tribe, so that’s what I’m singing about here.

B.E.:  You bury the family dead right on the property?

E.M.:  Exactly, we don’t have public graveyards, no. Every family has their own graveyard.

B.E.:  That’s interesting.  That’s like Madagascar. Did you know that? Every homestead has the family graves there, right close to them?

E.M.:  I think so.  I was telling Etienne as well that we have some similarities with Madagascar, because even the way they do their music, even the way they sing, the way they play their guitars is very similar to Malawian kind of music as well. So maybe they might be a little bit more that I don’t even know, like that’s quite strong.

B.E.:  Yeah.  Madagascar is a really interesting place.  Now, you say the rhythms are similar, because they have those very fast kind of 12/8 rhythms. “da-KA-da, da-KA-da, da-KA-da…”

E.M.:  It’s something like that with our country as well.  We have the same kind of thing. And so then we got this song “Mfumu” here, “Mfumu” is about a binge drinker, someone who spends a lot of money and he likes buying a lot of beers for other people too. But at the same time, he’s a nice person though because he makes people happy.

B.E.:  Uh huh.  You know, I’ve never been to Malawi, but I’ve spent a lot of time in Zimbabwe, and that sounds like some people I met Zimbabwe.

E.M.:  That was so close to Malawi, you should have just stepped one step forward and you’re in Malawi.

B.E.:  Next time.  Let’s hear about more of these songs.

E.M.:  The title song“Warm Heart of Africa” is from Malawi itself, which is called Warm Heart of Africa. I did not just make it up. So it’s like, Malawi is a very peaceful country, so it’s the kind of country that welcomes everybody. The people are so friendly and there’s a lot of hospitality as well. It’s the kind of place that even a visitor, they don’t have to doubt, they just have to go there. There’s a lot of attraction as well in terms of tourism. Lake Malawi is like one of the biggest lakes in Africa . And we got some beautiful national parks as well. So Warm Heart of Africa . We also use it as a slogan for tourism as well.

B.E.:  What about the name the Very Best, where did that come from?

E.T.:  The Very Best was the name of a rock band of my little cousin back in France.  He had a band with his friend but nothing really serious. They were all studying on the side and none of them wanted to be professional musicians. So I just I really liked the name so I waited patiently for the band to die, and took it.  [LAUGHS] With the approval of my cousin though. We lost a bit of royalties on that one.

B.E.:  Scavengers, eh?  Well, that’s the way it works.  Let me hear a little bit about how you work, especially all those vocal harmonies.  Is that all you, Esau

E.M.:  Yeah, yeah.  It’s quite funny because most of the singers, before they do music like this do, maybe once they were members of a choir and then changed, but I’ve never been there myself.  I don’t even know what soprano is, or what alto is. I don’t know that kind of things. What I know is this is my first voice. This is going to be my second voice. Third voice.  Fifth voice.  That’s what I know.

B.E.:  You just hear it.

E.M.:  To me it’s just natural.  I just use my ears. I don’t have any kind of basic background of voices and that.  I’ve never been in a choir either.  It’s just natural.

B.E.:  A lot of times music is like that.  Some people need to have it all explained and taught to them, and other people just hear it and do it.?

J.K.:  You know, when we first started to record, I played Esau the beat that became “Chalo.”   He was kind of humming along and that became a nice melody. And he wrote something off of it and we recorded it.  And I had never worked with this kind of thing before.  This just brought back that memory now.  I haven’t thought about this for a long time actually.  And I remember how I was like, “Oh!  That’s really good.  Let’s double that. Just same voice again so we can make it a bit bigger.”  And we did that and I was like okay that that part is done.  Esau’s like, “No, no.  Now we do the harmony.” Oh, okay. And he started humming a little bit more and it was okay I’m ready and we started recording all this harmony and all of a sudden I’m like, “Damn!  The whole track just opened up.”  And we did a bunch more of those ones. And it’s like, “This sounds really beautiful now.”  Okay now, next harmony, and I was like, another one? And that’s kind of how we went.  You know, he sings from his throat so normally he has at least three harmonies on top of whatever the main vocal. Because Esau’s got a really high voice but not a very low voice. But it works very well.  It’s amazing.  Some of the tracks have four harmonies on top of the main one.

B.E.:  So what do you do in live shows?

J.K.:  At the moment when we play, it’s quite a basic setup.  The backing harmonies are on the track that’s playing back, so as long as the live engineer is good, you don’t actually notice.  You just hear how something lifts, how that one comes in. Obviously we would love to have a choir some day to have to do it properly, but for now that’s how we do it live.

B.E.:  The sound aesthetic on the CD is very much about beat--percussion, drums--and vocals.  There are not a lot of instruments.  It’s really the vocals and the rhythm that come forward.  I assume that is intentional.  Talk about that.

J.K.:  I wouldn’t say a whole lot is intentional on this record at all.  The whole thing kind of just happened and there was very little thought that went into it, so I can relate to what you’re saying and Esau is like an instrument and with all these harmonies he makes a big impact on any kind of song. Anything that’s got too much stuff going on will have too much stuff going on. By far, once Esau’s on it. So that’s what I liked, I could just like sit in the studio and make a little beat. It might take five minutes or half an hour. But we have something that we like and you could almost take that as it was and Esau would basically write so much melody and all these different parts out of it and then you kind of just follow that a bit with the beat and you had a track because his vocals were just, so prominent.

E.T.:  I think there’s a similarity between Esau’s history with music and ours.  The same way that he was not classically trained or never took a singing lesson, me and Johan are not classically trained either. We don’t know… we don’t really use chords so we’re not trying to make music with chord progressions, and like, we can end up using a lot of tricks and it’s very much instinctive.

B.E.:  Anything you guys want to add?

J.K.:  We’re really excited to see where this record is gonna go. The mixtape did really well.  The shows we’ve done here in America so far have been great and we’ve been really excited that people have been supportive and open-minded enough to take this in properly. I think it’s the right time for it. I think we’re very, very good timing wise.

E.T.:  And also, we’re really happy about the fact that nobody really feels offend that a bunch of European guys decided to make an album with an African guy.  You can’t really fit the album either in the purely African music or the purely European music or only talk about fusion music which would really be limited as well.  People seem to be treating our work like just a piece of music and that’s really satisfying.

B.E.:  It’s true.  The old genre boundaries are really breaking down these days.

E.T.:  I think it would have been harder for us to come out with this a few years ago.  Times are a lot easier now for people like us and that’s a good thing.

J.K.:  I mean, yeah, it’s taken three years.,  We’ve been working together for three years and we always had that feeling that there’s no rush.  There’s no rush, like “this is going so well this is leading up perfectly to…”  So whatever time this is ready, that would be the time for this to come out. Let’s get a mix tape we’re not in any rush, if the album is out next year we’re still going to be on good timing, let’s not get it out too early, and I think we  managed to get the timing very well.

B.E.:  Any final thoughts, Esau?

E.M.:  Well, the name, we’ve been asked a few times, “Why did you choose the name The Very Best?”  And people should know that we like having fun among ourselves and I’m asking people to think much more about our music and not the name itself. There are a lot weird names in this music business.  People think much more about the music, instead of thinking about the name itself.

B.E.:  Thanks, guys.  And good luck. 

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