I called Vinnie Kircher (singer/songwriter of garage-y jangle-smiths Jaill) at his home in Milwaukee and managed to not only interrupt his dinner, but his nightly dose of reality TV. Thankfully, the previous night's Last Comic Standing had me prepped with a cringe-worthy opening joke, and he let me off the hook pretty easily.

TRB: I actually do have a joke to start out the official portion of the interview. Did Sub Pop forget that they already signed another band called Jale?

VK: (Laughs) They definitely were well aware that it would be a fun joke. I actually wasn't aware at the time when they signed us. Then, they suggested that we maybe change our name away from Jail with one "L" because it had been taken by a German band. We came to realize that it was a conversation that they had already had with another band (Jale). We had been playing together for eight years before that and had contemplated changing the name entirely thinking that might not matter, but when it came down to it...I felt better about saying to my friends that we added an "L" because there was another band, rather than explaining a new band name entirely.

When Creedence Clearwater Revival wrote "Traveling Band", its members probably never imagined -- except, perhaps, in a fit of 70's sci-fi fancy -- that the tune would be come a mantra for a squeaky-voiced certified chemistry teacher and his electronic companion. But Adam "Atom" Goren has come to epitomize the rock musician's nomadic lifestyle, playing basements, punk clubs and balconies with just a guitar and his Package, a Yamaha QY700 sequencer that provides him with more possible noises than even this prolific artist could ever use. 

Atom first encountered the Package six years ago, when the actual traveling band in which he played, Fracture, called it quits. "A friend of mine played guitar and wrote music with a sequencer, and I thought it was really neat," he says. "I thought it was a cool way to write songs without having to be in a band." Soon, this punk-rock kid was making giddy pop with a machine, and eventually his dabblings with the Package evolved into a full-fledged project. While some accuse Atom of staging pretentious performance art or indulging in gimmickry, he maintains Atom and His Package stems merely from his boredom and need for a musical outlet.

"It's not like I intended this to be a band by any means, not like, 'Oh, I'm going to start this wacky one-person punk-synth band,'" Atom clarifies. But soon, Atom came to enjoy being his own boss.