Some bands choose their names. Some have their names thrust upon them.

Major: "Seldom. Sometimes. Sure."

TK Major started playing guitar during college, horrifying the patrons at the open mic in his student union's basement not long after. Sensing one of the important lessons of music -- timing -- he took his 18 dollar plywood axe and woodshedded for a few years, learning how to write songs with short words, action verbs, and comprehensible metaphors instead of packing every line with references to indic literature, obscure contemporary philosophers and the kind of lexical mashups that made him justly famous among his long-suffering college instructors....

Marty Robbins and Spade Cooley were big influences on Major when he was growing up. He loved the Sons of the Pioneers, too. He also had a soft spot for the Everlies, the Coasters, Gene Chandler. In junior high he discovered folk, jazz and bossa nova while his contemporaries were going gaga for the Brit invasion. Finally relenting to the cultural juggernaut of the mid-60s, Major plunged into hippie music, acid rock, jazz rock and back around to country with Gram Parsons and the rest of the hippie country crowd. In '75, Major was introduced to Reggae, seeing Bob Marley and the Wailers for the first time in July of '76. The nihilistic boredom of the mid-70s pushed Major to the cultural extremes embodied by the early punk/no wave movement for a few heady years. In the 80s, Major's taste grew even more eclectic, expanding to African and world music and ever deeper into synths and electronica. Veering suddenly at the end of the 80s, Major plunged back into folk. When dub and psychedelic neo-folk collided in the trip hop scene of the mid-90s, Major found himself hypnotized by bands like Portishead. Major found himself among the next generation of post-modern outsider pop bands when he stopped recording on tape and began recording on the computer in 1996. The ability to chop up his performances into tiny pieces and scatter them willy nilly on the timeline appealed to Major's primal artisitc impulses. But the pendulum swings and Major has spend the last few years catching up on all the great roots and country music that managed to sneak past him, people like Gillian Welch, who, he will rush to tell you, knocks him out.

Long Beach, California, USA, followed with breathtaking closeness by Paris, France, and Amsterdam.

"What I got."