Cold War Kids were Reagan babies with missile fears and international blues. Cold War Kids started with jangly guitar, hand claps, and a Harmony amp in a storage room atop Mulberry Street restaurant in downtown Fullerton, CA. For the first practices, having instruments was not as important as heavy stomping and chanting. Clanging on heat pipes, thumping on plywood walls. Hollering into tape recorders. Slipping and swaying into alleyways and juke joints of yesteryear. Dreaming the American dust bowl and British maritime. On the restaurants roof the sound and feeling was cultivated and burned, built and hallowed out, painted and stripped to the primer. Cold War Kids make songs about human experience in orchards and hotel rooms, laundromats and churches, sea ports and school halls. Using songs of Dylan, Billie Holiday, and the Velvet Underground as a road map, they strive to manipulate, structure, and style their music with honesty.