The fastest way to understanding New Jersey’s break out underground phenoms, The Gay Blades, is to keep in mind the key to the band: they embody many conflicting principles. These guys are half sincere indie rockers and half bullshit artists, but even the seemingly insincere bits ARE sincere, if that makes any sense. It’s something that comes across in their music to the astute listener but doesn’t capsize the tunes. The ironic side to the band’s grandiose trash-pop never undermines the fact that these two goons are great songwriters and entertainers first and foremost.

Originally in a band together called Hello Lovely, hipsters, tunesters and general libertines James Wells (vocals, guitar) and Quinn English (vocals, drums) soon mutated into The Gay Blades. It wasn’t long before the renamed pair strode forth on a seemingly quixotic mission to kick ass and take names. The Gay Blades are armed with audacious chutzpah and it often feels like their aim is to be the best band in the world by hook or by crook. Yet they are more than talented enough to damn near back up the not-quite-so-delusional grandeur. These guys are at turns hilarious and completely rockin’ troubadours of sonic bad-itude and, intermittently, sugar sweet balladry. Their Triple Crown Records debut Ghosts was easily one of 2008’s most engaging records and more than deserves to put these guys on the map.

No worries there. The Gay Blades are always on the road, it seems playing with everyone from your neighbor’s folk punk band to STP/Velvet Revolver front man Scott Weiland. There’s a sense of friendship and drive between these guys that keeps the tunes intimate, fun, and yet meaningful, even at their silliest. [And by silly I mean that they lead alternate identities/lives as Clark Westfield (Wells) and Puppy Mills (English) and sing songs with titles like “Robots Can Fuck Your Shit Up” and “We Wear Mittens”.]

Straddling the divide between underground success and the cusp of potential mainstream awareness, The Gay Blades are well armed to pull it off with aplomb. Their mid-fi sonic approach on Ghosts encapsulates everything from glam to gutter-rock to arena rock cliché, deliciously twisted and reacquired by two naughty indie-rock dudes, while containing enough pop bliss to stick in your head, and even a fair share of angst-wrought singer/songwriter pathos. At times Wells/Westfield sounds as if a sarcastically acidic Connor Oberst was really sweetly telling us all to go fuck ourselves in the nicest croon possible while wrapping his arms around us and inviting us into the greatest show on earth.

There’s a real sense of bombast to what these guys are doing at times. Perhaps the secret is in the album title, Ghosts. A ghost can pass through walls and obstacles with ease, as these two seem to vault over limits of genre and “taste” nearly seamlessly. At the same time, ghosts embody aspects of the past and yet aren’t entirely there, as is the case with these guys wielding their irony and aliases with glee.

Still, let’s not overstate the snark at the total expense of the song craft, because as fun as the wink and nod between the band and their too-cool-for-school fans can be, The Gay Blades are first and foremost about music and DO deeply care about it.

Again, it comes back down to the push and pull in the band between rock star aspiration and indie bookishness. It’s almost like they are “arena-fetishists”! Ghosts features all manner of instrumentation, but live they strip it down to just James and Quinn battering guitar and drums to a pulp like freak flag flying monsters, or at times dueting or breaking the music down to a shape akin to walking into a coffee house open mic night and getting your socks knocked off by some purposefully unknown collegiate-savant snob wunderkinds. The Sex Pistols blacked out the Queen’s eyes on their God Save The Queen record to imply she was a regular person and to rip away the aura of infallibility. Fugazi eradicated their faces on the insert to End Hits. These two pranksters black out their eyes in damn near every photograph on their MySpace page, which would seem to imply punk anonymity, but the band’s music reeks of persona and the aforementioned pictures are ridiculously over the top! The images feature them standing with ballerinas and jockeys or attempting to cop poses that would bring out the aristocratic envy in F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I spoke via phone with James (who will henceforth be referred to as his adopted persona Clark Westfield) right as he was hitting shitty traffic and preparing to do some very last minute “insensitive and rushed Christmas shopping”. It wasn’t working out and so he called me back hours later while on a train into Manhattan with Puppy Mills, (yes, they really hang out!) to catch a rock show.

MORGAN Y. EVANS: How’d your Christmas shopping go, man?

CLARK WESTFIELD: Oh, man. It was exciting. I told you about the old lady and the gimp, right?

MYE: You told me you killed six old ladies with your car but no gimps.

CW: I had a gimp in a headlock to get the last Nintendo Wii. It was for my sister and her husband. They’re a heavy group so I wanted to get them the Wii Fit, to lose some of the weight.

MYE: That’s thoughtful, even for last minute shopping.

CW: Yeah, yeah, yeah…No. Nothing I did today was thoughtful, believe me.

MYE: Would you say, on a personal level, you earned coal or toys this year?

CW: I probably had my most self-absorbed year of my entire life, but it yielded such great results that I think Santa, the bearded freak, would be stoked to leave me some toys. I worked so hard, but I was self-absorbed, so I don’t know. It’s a toss up. How about you, man?

MYE: I didn’t even do anything, man. I’ve got two days to go. [laughing]

CW: [laughing] Are you serious?

MYE: Dead serious. I’m worse than you.

CW: You certainly are. Like today earlier you told me “Oh, I’m just hanging around drinking beers.”

MYE: I can’t say I haven’t left it to the last minute. [laughing] Let’s see, as far as getting to some music stuff…

CW: Hey, I like music.

MYE: Good, that helps. As far as Ghosts, some of the music really operates on a grand scale and on the recording you have a lot more instruments, but live you pull it off as just a two-piece. Still, I was wondering if there was a secret reason for this and you really just wanted to keep more money for yourselves.

CW: Um, no, but that is obviously beneficial that we get to just keep all the money. The reason we did it is that a long time ago and in the course of many bands we found that if the live experience is replicated the exact way as the CD, it becomes incredibly boring. Potentially a boring experience. We also love to go in the studio and put on all the bells and whistles. We grew up listening to amazing, textured studio albums, everything from Elvis Costello and The Attractions to The Beach Boys and The Beatles to Queen. We wanted to have a rich texture but also have it still be the two of us in balls-out rock n’ roll situations. You just have to think of it as two different animals with a common face. I think most people are okay with it, to be honest.

MYE: A lot of bands have mental trauma trying to decide between one or the other.

CW: We don’t need to. Live schizophrenically, you know?

MYE: It’s their Catholic guilt or something. It’s one or the other.

CW: [laughing] We don’t have to sound exactly like the record, and it doesn’t have to sound exactly as we do live. I don’t think either of those things are musically exclusive.

MYE: Yeah, but you can still pull off a great live show. It’s not like you’re hacks. You do a lot of different styles, though. It’s got to have a fun aspect to it. “Prologue For The Pure Of Heart” even has a lounge aspect to it. I like that song. Would you say you’re equally comfortable doing all these styles? It seems tongue in cheek at times but do you thrive on the uncomfortable side of putting yourself into different roles as well?

CW: The basis of this band is that Puppy Mills and I were in different bands together and we always wrote music that fit the scope of what the band was. With The Gay Blades we decided not to eliminate any ideas because if they come from us we should have no problem fleshing them out and giving them back to people. All those things exist within our artistic spectrum. Sometimes we’ll sit down and bang out a fuckin’ rip roarin’ guitar onslaught and Puppy Mills will throw his sticks through the skins and other times we have something different to say and a different way to say it. It’s fun. It’s not always fun to just dance around on stage. Sometimes it’s fun to belt out this song and lift your guts out trying to get to the note in an otherwise quiet room.

MYE: It doesn’t seem like identity crisis with you guys.

CW: We’re older dudes. We’re 27and 28, respectively, and have seen other bands struggle to define who they are. We have a good concept of who we are, and it is schizophrenic, but it’s okay. We’re very proud of that because the records we love are all over the map. You don’t see it as much anymore and it’s something we’re proud of, to have a slower mid-section in our records and then come back up in the end. It’s cool.

MYE: You guys have gotten a lot of press this year and are growing as a band in the public eye, and yeah, it seems like a lot of bands struggle with only being perceived one way or with what they should stand for. It’s like they feel a weight of how they want to be perceived or a responsibility to say certain things. Others are narcissistic fucks and have something they need to express and don’t care if an eight year-old in the crowd saw their penis, they just had to take their clothes off onstage and roll around in front of everyone.

CW: [laughing]

MYE: There’s a little of that in everybody. [laughing]

CW: Really!? [laughing]

MYE: I mean, people want to be seen and looked at, although others, it’s their art and they have to do it no matter what. Where do you think you fit in on either side of things?

CW: Hmm. I think it’s a little bit of everything. I wish I had a really bold answer. Part of us want to shock and wow the audience. Part of us wants to win their hearts. Part of us wants to fight them. It’s an interesting question. I think for us it’s to create the art and just get as sweaty playing it as possible, you know what I mean? Make the music that’s real. Ours is certainly a little snarky and that mainly comes across in the lyrics, but it’s basically pop songwriting. In our lyrics there’s a little bit of a crooked smile on the exterior, but when we play live it really doesn’t matter because we’ve got rip roaring guitar and are drum driven or it’s the slowest ballad. I want to stamp my foot through the stage and have people feel that. It’s about playing the music and hopefully leaving an impression on people through the band that makes it easier to understand where the music is coming from. Otherwise, we’ve had some pretty different views of our music by the public, but once you see it live you get it better. It’s pop music. I’ve checked out Crusher Magazine and I see you cover a lot of heavy bands. We’re not a “heavy” band. We play loud and fast but we’re not heavy. We’re just trying to communicate.

MYE: Hey, it’s not Gwar, but you put on an awesome show. We like all sorts of stuff over here and you guys still basically seem from the heart even with the snarky elements involved.

CW: Yeah, absolutely. The methods are still from the heart. There’s just a quirky way of getting to that point.

MYE: Would you say you are reclaiming pop for your own purposes or reacting to it’s current state, sort of throwing up on its shoes at a party?

CW: It’s part of it. We’ll play something and think it’s too clean and predictable sometimes. Certainly you want to make interesting music and it seems like being interesting is reactionary, sure, and we’re huge fans of indie music. But also, when stuff lacks any sweat and grittiness it also gets frustrating.

MYE: Castrated.

CW: Yeah. Our goal was to make indie music that had some baaaaalllls. It’s kind of a rock thing to say, but, our music has balls and it’s also sensitive.

MYE: Sensitive balls. [laughing]

CW: It has balls! I have balls and I’m sensitive, so what the fuck!? [turning to Puppy] Puppy, don’t you have balls?

PUPPY MILLS: Sometimes.

CW: Sometimes he has balls, so…see! Between the two of us we’re two sensitive guys with balls.

MYE: [laughing] In terms of the band name, there’s the George Hamilton movie Zorro, The Gay Blade, that it’s rumored the band was named after. Did you know he was also in a movie called All The Fine Young Cannibals?

CW: [laughing] No! I did not!

MYE: I saw that and thought, “Wow. Two bands from one guy with a great tan.”

CW: We weren’t even named after the movie! We don’t really know the origin but we were told from the original Gay Blades that wasn’t where it came from. We were told three options and had to guess which is true. One is a Lou Reed song called “Vicious”. He says “You expect me to swallow razor blades. You must think I’m some kinda Gay Blade”. The next origin was there were gangs in Harlem in the ‘50s and they were contesting to be the most powerful. One of them was called The Gay Blades. That’s another one. The third origin of the band name…[asking Puppy] What was the third one? I…Yeah, I don’t know…We are not the original Gay Blades. The original Gay Blades passed away in a van accident Dec. 15th, 17th? 2005. We’d made a deal with them that if anything ever happened to the other band that the other band would take up their banner. We were in a band called Hello Lovely at the time and were just spinning our wheels and were looking for a name change, and they were a very new band. They died actually on their first tour, so it worked great.

MYE: But it wasn’t like you also got to steal their success?

CW: They didn’t have much success. It would’ve been much better if they did. Or, like, apartments. We could’ve used that.

MYE: I heard a cover today you did of “Plastic Jesus”, the song Paul Newman sings in Cool Hand Luke. It’s weird, I saw that film a few days before he died after not having seen any of his movies in quite some time.

CW: Paul Newman is one of my idols. I’ve always loved movies. It’s hard as an American not to love movies and feel like it’s a part of the experience. Sometimes even more so than music to some people. They thrive on the cinema as part of the experience. Music is such an international thing whereas most movies that average people see are Hollywood movies which survived after World War II. Cool Hand Luke is by far my favorite movie. It was a direct influence on our song “Bob Dylan’s 115th Nightmare”. There’s the one line where Luke looks up at the sky and it’s raining and he says,” Love me, hate me, anything, just let me know. Are you listening, Old man?” So I just loved that movie and always loved that song “Plastic Jesus” so when he died I just picked up a banjo and recorded it on a one mic thing and blasted it out for some people. I hope he would’ve appreciated [it].

MYE: Right on, man. [We’re interrupted by incredibly loud and garbled subway conductor voice] God! It’s like they find the most retarded, dyslexic people to read the subway announcements! You can’t understand a fuckin’ word they say!

CW: [laughing] Seriously. People can’t figure out what to do? Open the door, get on, door closes.

MYE: Anyway, speaking of cinema or music, if you could be jealous of one person in history, who would it be? You can’t pick Donna Summer, Prince or Gary Glitter.

CW: [laughing] I’m gonna go to Puppy on this one because it’s something he could answer very easily without having to distract himself from his iPHONE. In the History of the World?

MYE: Yes, the whole wide world.

CW: [asks Puppy]

PM: Lee Harvey Oswald.

MYE: [laughing]

CW: That’s Puppy, Lee Harvey Oswald. Me…I guess I’m jealous of…I don’t know, man.

MYE: People will be jealous of you guys someday, right?

CW: If they’re not already! I don’t know…I guess Tyrannosaurus Rex.

MYE: The band or the dinosaur?

CW: No, no, the dinosaur. If you ask any kid what their favorite dinosaur is, they pick Tyrannosaurus Rex. That’s the first dinosaur you learn.

MYE: I think I cried when I saw it in the National History Museum when I was a kid.

CW: Oh yeah, ‘cuz you’re such a pussy?

MYE: Yeah, but I was also overjoyed. My vagina opened up and …

CW: [laughing]

MYE: …gushed tears of joy.

CW: You can listen to some Gay Blades. I think it’s a perfect fit for you, sir.

MYE: Speaking of gayness, in terms of your name… There’s the rakish and theatrical side. It reminds me of Errol Flynn. But I was thinking of the Nirvana lyric where Kurt Cobain sings “Everyone is gay”, a little bit. What do you guys think of that?

CW: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we both claim to be about 60% gay, which means it’s a combined total of 120%. So our band is more than 100% gay.

MYE: What show are you guys going to see tonight?

CW: We’re going to see our friend’s band Boy/Girl at Mercury Lounge. They’re amazing. They are the reason we’re a band. When we were getting our shit together they were like, “Well, why don’t we just get in the van?” They are a two-piece like us. Boy from Boy/Girl booked two or three tours for us. We just kept doing it. Boy/Girl are our guardian angels.

MYE: On the writing side of things, do you start small and then build up in the studio, or what?

CW: We tell stories, man. Sometimes the melody comes first. I’m writing for the next record now. Puppy Mills has a piano in his apartment so I’m writing on the piano but for the most part it’s just me and a guitar. Sometimes we’ll jump in a studio and start makin’ noise until we make sense of stuff, but…It’s usually just me in the beginning and then we work together to write lyrics and arrange the songs. Then we take a bunch of chicken bones and rocks from the creek and spill holy water on ‘em and have a book that interprets the designs and that’s how we know which are good. We write a lot of songs and they’re not all winners, but the ones on the album are all winners because we use the chicken bones.

MYE: How was the show with Scott Weiland you just did?

CW: It was interesting. It was interesting to play for lots of 38 year-olds from Long Island who didn’t care about new music. We sold some records and made some fans. The last time we played Irving Plaza we opened up for some bands from Long Island called Envy On The Coast and The Sleeping.

MYE: Yeah, I love The Sleeping.

CW: Those bands have pretty young fans, but this crowd was much older. It was a lot of fun to play a sold-out crowd. I had to do a little freestyle about tribal tattoos. People were just chanting “S-T-P!” for the first two bands. So I did a freestyle about tribal tattoos. [Singing] “If you’ve got a tribal tattoo put your hands up, put your hands up!” A couple of guys did, and I was like,” That’s not a good thing, guys.”

MYE: [cracking up] Your song “Why Can’t I Grow A Beard”, I used to like it, but then I saw a freakin’ video of you two online shaving and now I feel lied to!

CW: When I first wrote that song I could not grow a beard…but then I grew one, so…

MYE: Was it a chemical or hormonal change for you?

CW: Maybe I put something out into the cosmos like in The Secret. You’re supposed to visualize what you want the most, like in an episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. [laughing] I wrote the song and all of a sudden, [high pitched beard growing noise] “Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing!” Now I look good.

MYE: Now you guys finally rock, man.

CW: Finally. It makes us look indie.

MYE: Yeah, man. Iron and Wine.

CW: It gives us credibility.

MYE: I tried to tell my girlfriend that and she wasn’t buyin’ it. “Take it off!”

CW: No! No, no, no. Never let her tell you what to do. ‘Cuz she’ll like it. I mean, you’ve gotta keep it groomed, but…

MYE: Yeah, that’s the compromise.

CW: Did you go with the goatee? Goatee is the worst thing.

MYE: Naw, no soul patch. Nothing along those lines.

CW: [laughing] A soul patch is not bad, actually.

MYE: I sold my soul patch. Ouch.