"Our whole trip is to kind of mix it up -- swing tunes, ska, and some more experimental pop," says Daddies guitarist Jason Moss. "And the new album is going to be even more eclectic. There's a song called 'God Is a Spider' on which I play almost a metal kind of feel. But we've still got the horns and keyboards. Of course, the album will still be based around swing tunes, including a Western swing number and a boogie-woogie kind of thing."

To cover various styles onstage, Moss alternates between an Epiphone Broadway hollowbody (played through a '59 Fender Bassman) and an Epiphone Les Paul (through a Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier head driving a Marshall 4x12 cabinet. "For licks and solos that really have to stick out," he says, "I use an Ibanez Tube Screamer." An A/B box lets him toggle back and forth between rock and jazz tones.

Occasionally the rock and swing colors melt into each other, so the Daddies have to be careful to avoid making a big mess of the mixture. "If you simply put a heavy metal guitar over a swing beat," says Perry, "it sounds hokey. You have to make it aggressive, but not obvious. With swing, you definitely want to have that chomp-chomp-chomp chord thing going. When you have distortion on your guitar, it kind of screws that up because the sound gets too muddy. You also have to pick the spots where you play. We have a few songs where the whole band stops, the guitar pops out for a second, and then the guitar drops back into the mix again. That's the whole vibe of swing -- you cut holes in the band arrangement for the guitar to cut through."