Theresa Hannam
Vocalist for the Nightcaps
EVENT: The Nightcaps play the Showbox with the Dudley Manlove Quartet on Fri April 20.

How do you feel about the new record? "I feel like it's a good record. We started off more loungey, and then kind of evolved into more of a rockin' '60s pop band. This record is more soulful and roadhouselike, I guess. It's a little harder and more fun to sing. I like singing the loungey stuff, too, but to be on stage trying to engage people, it's just more interesting and fun to be kind of rockin' out."

It's easier now to engage people then?

"It's just different. About a year after we started, the whole Cocktail Nation thing started getting huge, and, of course we had this name which pretty much said it all, and people were going, 'I can't come to your show because I don't have a nice suit to wear.' I mean, we weren't trying to be pretentious. We've always tried to be about the music. There was a point, too, where we had some songs that were kind of swinging, but they weren't written to be swing songs, and then that whole thing got really popular--and it got to be a drag because people would try to swing dance to a song we had written, and it would be more of a 4/4 pop song à la Nancy Sinatra, and everybody would be trying to swing dance."

So you're plagued with being the forerunner for every musical movement over the last decade. "No! That's totally what it sounds like, but it's not what I mean it to come across like. It just kind of happened on a level of coincidence."

Do you have any crazy tour memories? "One time we finagled a really cheap room at a motel, and I had this really bloody dream about somebody being murdered. And when I woke up, the sheet had come across the mattress to reveal--and this sounds like bullshit, but it's totally true--there was all this old, dried blood on the mattress just beneath where I had been sleeping. So I woke everybody up and we got out of there."

How much blood was there?

"Like, two feet by a foot and a half."

Damn.