Psychedelic alt. country rockers I See Hawks in LA ponder the dark side of the 110 and how Dick Cheney threw a curve at their career…

Your first album came out on September 11, 2001. How spooky is that?

Not spooky at all for us. We got a memo from Dick Cheney saying something big would be going down that day, so we chose 9/11 for publicity reasons.

As it turns out, it really backfired. Our release got buried in all the terror hoopla. We don’t make a big deal out of it because there’s nothing more boring than listening to a musician complain about his career.

Sometimes your music veers into a sort of modern Gothic Western territory, like on “Hope Against Hope” or “Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses.” Do the Hawks sometimes journey on the dark side?

We like to think that we live on the lighght side, where the quality of illumination is richer, where the Great Blue Whales wash on shore and then rise up and walk across the continent, resurrected like so many Jesuses.

I think the plural of Jesus is Jesae. What’s the scariest thing about LA?

Sitting on the 110 at 6 PM, a darkening October eve, endless red tail lights to the horizon, traffic frozen.

And then the doors swing open on the Ryder truck up ahead and angry, blond-bearded
Norsemen toting Kalashnikovs tumble forth, taking aim at our soft and vulnerable heads. One by one they pick us off, turning the Harbor Freeway into the bloodiest traffic jam yet.

Same thing happened to me last week. Which ghosts of musicians who have passed on are your guiding spirits?

Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts, Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban, Brooks & Dunn, Carrie Underwood, Faith Hill. These are the undead.

The Hawks fourth album, Hallowed Ground, will be released in early 2008.