An Interview with Dara Korra'ti of Crime and the Forces of Evil

Hey, readers! I'm Dara, a.k.a Solarbird the Lightbringer of Crime and the Forces of Evil, and the Dark Side of the Glass people have thrown me a bunch of interview questions. It's almost like an interview, and also totally different! So let's go:

1) Tell our readers a bit about yourself (ie. Where are you from? Significant life experiences that led to where you are now? Occupation(s)? Talents? Anything else you can think of...)

• From: Well, honestly, I don't know. Mars has been suggested, but I think we all know better than that, unless you mean the Sparks Nevada: Marshall on Mars Mars, in which case it still seems pretty unlikely. Maybe I'm a Jupiter Spy and don't even know it. If so: goddamn I'm good.
• Life: What it says on the tin. Superhero turned supervillain when the world turned around on me. Our supervillains won, and now we have the police state and the surveillance state and the endless war state and all that, and all that's now "good" somehow, and since most humans follow power - it's what you do - then opposing it makes you a traitor. "You speak treason!" "Fluently."
• Occupations: Supervillain, musician. Software developer and genetics researcher, but see also: supervillain. This thing is turning into a resume. I should make a resume generator. Or destroyer. "Life experiences: orbital heat rays ARE LIFE EXPERIENCES." Is that how this works?
• Talents: Really good at the heat ray thing; I can kill you with my brain; technical writing; glass sculpture that invites you to touch it but hurts you if you do; finding really terrible movies and passing them on to Drs. Forrester and Erhardt; triggering really hilarious IBM Urgent Service Bulletins; graphic design; bodhran; irish bouzouki; bass guitar; mandolin; flute; flutemaking; putting resumes through shredders.

2) How long have you been performing, and how did Crime and the Forces of Evil come to be?

I was sorta-kinda in a band called... no, that's not right, I was in a sorta-kinda band, that's right, called Three Good Measures, in the early 2000s. It was mostly a Great Big Sea cover band, but we dropped a few tracks on the net, the best absolutely being a cover of Billy Bragg's "You Woke Up My Neighbourhood." 

But getting serious about it is actually Alexander James Adams's fault. We met in 2006 and hit it off, and I was a at a show of his a few years later and during the meet-and-greet after, kind of out of nowhere, he spun round to me and said, "Dara, you have got to be doing this." My reaction, of course, was "You are so high." But, well, now here we are.

3) How many CDs have you released thus far?

TGM actually kind of had an EP (Duck!) but it wasn't released so that doesn't count, and that wasn't in any way my band - I was just the flautist. So... 

Crime and the Forces of Evil's first EP was a short set called Sketchy Characters, done pretty much as a demo and to have something for an event. I also put out a solo effort, Live from Mars, solely because I played The Mars Bar in Seattle and realised this meant I could have a live EP that was legitimately from Mars. Just, you know, not that Mars. 

Then we got our act together and put out a studio full-length, Dick Tracy Must Die, in 2011. We built our own studio for that, and I taught myself engineering. If you're into that sort of DIY, you can check out the series of columns I wrote on it here.
After that, we did a song-of-the-month project that turned into Cracksman Betty. Since then, a couple of singles, like "Kaiju Meat," and now the new album, Bone Walker.

4) What style(s) of music do you perform?

I called the Dick Tracy material "rage-driven acoustic elfmetal." And that's how I think of my original material, for the most part. The idea is: elves heard metal, thought THIS IS AWESOME WE CAN DO THIS and started doing it, with instruments on-hand. Hence Fake Drumkits made of hand drums, grinding Irish bouzoukis, and so on. This new album has a bit of that on it - particularly "Something's Coming" and "Anarchy Now!" - but it's mostly neoCeltic.

5) How fast has your fame (or infamy) spread since you started performing?

Well, we're here, that's a start. ^_^

6) Any other comments, insight, words of wisdom, etc.?

Everything becomes a racket, eventually. Everything.

7) Final question. How do you feel? :)

I FEEL LIKE PARTYING WITH SOME KLINGONS. WHO'S WITH ME?