Well, I guess I have to ask… where does the name Tomahawks For Targets come from?
Ross Harley: There’s an old Lalo Schifrin piece called “For Targets.” We put the word Tomahawks in front of it because we hoped that a butch name would stop people from getting all up in our faces.
Your album seems to have some tracks on it that are fairly complex in their structure. Who would you say has influenced your sound the most?
James Haselhurst: We’re influenced by a lot of very different things—when we’re writing and recording we’ll suggest ideas that come from very different places and attempt to bolt them together. We’ve all been individually influenced by some progressive music—I think Zappa and King Crimson are ones we agree on—but most of the time we’re actually drawing more reference from fairly mainstream stuff and certainly from a lot of pop music.
I think most of the complexity comes about from having a few different ideas or themes we want to include and that we’d rather find a way for them to all coexist in a pop song framework rather than thin them out. That way there’s a lot happening in our music at any given point. We certainly don’t actively try to complicate what we do though.