How was your day?
I spent the entire day drinking Milwaukee’s Best Ice and watching an Italian gangster movie.

How would you characterize the band’s music?
I actually had a conversation with an old friend of mine over New Year’s and, uh, he used to play drums in a punk rock band in high school and I asked him when was the last time he played drums and he said the other night his band had a gig and I said, “Oh, you’re in a band. What kind of music do you play?” and he’s like, “You know, we kinda sound like the Pixies,” and I was like, “Oh, great, I went to college and started a band that kinda sounds like the Pixies too.” But I don’t know. I guess we don’t — we do and we don’t. We do to the extent that every college rock band sounds like them and we don’t to the extent that we try to undermine our pop appeal as much as possible.

Do any of the band members study music?
Yeah, I’m a strictly conservatory major and Matt Asti is a double degree in jazz bass and psychology.

How did you come up with the name Spy vs. Spy?
Matt came up with it. It’s one of the old Mad Magazine comics. We actually weren’t the first people to come up with it. We looked on the Internet and there’s a ska band out of Florida called Spy vs. Spy and there’s a John Zorn album called Spy vs. Spy.

How did the band form? How do you all know each other?
Lindsay used to play drums in another three-piece Pixies cover band and Matt and Lindsay are going out and me and Matt used to be in a band—a rockabilly band. It was widely known as just the Rockabilly Band and also Holy Cross Liquors. We were a rowdy bunch.

Where on campus do you play?
161 Elm. Matt’s house. It used to be the house of the people who were in Lindsay’s old band. That’s where we sort of got our start. They used to have a lot of rock shows. We played at the ’Sco. Our last show was actually at the ’Sco, opening for a band called Karate, which was like a bad Police rip off and that was actually last semester. That was the last time we performed publicly, but last year we did a lot of house parties.

Do you have any shows coming up?
Uh, as soon as someone in the band throws a house party.

Do you guys dream of becoming rock stars someday?
I like to think of myself as already being a rock star. I don’t know about the other guys; they eat a lot of salads, spend a lot of time reading Harper’s magazine.

What are your plans for this semester?
We don’t have any performances planned, but we’re actually going to work with Greg Gheorghiu on a recording project for his TIMARA major and so we have a four song EP out now and probably not expand that to seven songs, which is our repertoire, but maybe come out with another three song EP and not have any full length albums.

Do you write all your own songs?
Yeah, we have two covers that I think we’ve only performed once. We got them down and then we did them once and then we never came back to them. We did a Neil Young song, which I couldn’t tell you because I don’t listen to Neil Young and we did one of the Kinks’ songs. I’m trying to remember which one we did — “You Really Got me,” that was the one we did. No, no, no, it was “All Day and All the Night,” you know from the Now and Laters commercials.