In my previous article, "Meet The Evil Do-Gooders," my friends and I meet this band at an open mic event at the Fox and Goose (you can read that article by clicking the Storyline tab to the right). The following week, I catch up with The Evil Do-Gooders at an Open Mic event at Luna's Cafe. Turns out that these guys are just as quirky in real life as they are in their songs.

Tell me a little about the Evil Do-Gooders

Ruben: We formed about three months ago at a party. I had written some songs for two months and they were all my first songs. I played a song for a group of people and his [Ryan's] sister was in there, and he was there. He liked my song that was two chords, which is extremely simple. He played, and I just free-styled. And then some girl is like, hey, you guys are so good together. How long have you guys been playing? And I was like, We have not played, ever. And I was like, Hey maybe we should play together. The rest is history, I guess.

Ryan: What's interesting about the night we met is there was a big brawl in front of the street of the party we were at. Gunshots were fired, cops came, and I had to deal with all of them. And basically me and Ruben have never hung out without playing music together.

There's some musical chemistry, then?

Ruben: Its just easy to make music, and you know what? I think anybody, if they could have that, if they knew how easy it was for us to make music together they would want that. We're trying not to be boring, because we just hate all that boring s**t out there. We're done with it.

Ryan: Basically, here's a quote for you. It's a privilege to make music and we're just happy that we get to do it for people. We're lucky that people enjoy it. We're happy to make it everyday, and we're happy to make more.

Tell me about that one song...the cat song, was it? It was a funny song you had.

Ruben: The song is called Bag of Bones, its the first song I wrote. It's only two chords, and it's just written in simplest form...They found [the dog] in the trash. My uncle works for the dump and he found her in a box...He took her to my aunt's house...And so now we've got this dog, Chiquita, with like, missing teeth but she's a very smart dog so she's got to be a lot older. So I just started playing one day, and I started playing literally about what was going on. She was in front of me, and as soon as I start playing my guitar, she ran away. And I was like, Please dog, don't run away from me. And as I'm playing that, my brother laughed, and the song was born.

So do you (Ruben) write all the songs?

Ruben: We write all the songs together, actually.

Don't you guys fight when you're writing songs together?

Ruben: We know what's right.

Ryan: We do argue, it's like any relationship—a duo.

Ruben: It's tough. Being a duo was a lot harder than I thought, because I just got out of a relationship. I'm like, man, this is bulls**t! I have to spend time in this s**t. It's really like a relationship, a basic human relationship. You have to work together and compromise. Which is something that it comes down to. You can't be stubborn.

Ryan: I've played music for about eight years now, so I know a lot about what I'm doing, and Ruben has only been playing for a while. So basically he'll make something, I'll clean it up and we work on it together.

Ryan and Ruben have a show tonight at the Capitol Garage, at 9 p.m. They'll be playing with Purple Girl and the Musical Chairs. The show is only 3 bucks, 21 and over.