Fans plant seeds for new Pauses CD

Theme songs may soon be on the agenda for The Pauses.

The Orlando trio sought donations to record its debut album on Kickstarter, the website that lets artists appeal to the public to help fund projects.

The Pauses' clever video featured stick-puppets promising a heroic recording session if its funding goal was met - and a tale of woe involving fire, forest animals and a pawn shop.

Donors who pledged $200 or more were promised a "personalized, sitcom-style theme song." Three backers did just that.

The songs are forthcoming, the band promises.

"They're not very pushy," guitarist Jason Kupfer says of the band's most generous benefactors.

"We know them and we're talking to them," singer-bassist Tierney Tough assures.

"The idea is to do an '80s-style, 'Full House'-kind of theme incorporating keywords pertaining to their lives," Kupfer says.

"In a matter of seconds," Tough adds. "Jason is a composer and writes music for commercials."

"I've done some cheesy work before," Kupfer acknowledges. "We could have done a whole album of theme songs if we'd gotten enough donations."

They didn't, but Kupfer, Tough and drummer Nathan Chase did raise enough to record "A Cautionary Tale" with producer J. Robbins (Jawbox, Burning Airlines) at his studio in Maryland.

The nine songs share nothing in common with the "Full House" theme, although some are nearly as catchy. The band's style, which incorporates sometimes soothing and sometimes jarring electronics into pop song structures, allows for a great deal of diversity, within as well as between the songs, which is as listenable as it is hard to describe.

"We have no idea what we sound like," Tough says with a laugh.

"We just recently did two music videos and one of the things we were having difficulty with is we were hoping to pick a song that gave an impression of the album, but they're all different," Kupfer says.

"Jason and I have great chemistry," Tough says. She writes songs with a "basic simple structure, and then I can give it to him and he can flesh it out into this orchestral masterpiece, for lack of a better word."

"One of the things that makes the album sound so diverse is that all the songs are definitely a mixture and blend of Tierney's and my sensibilities," Kupfer says.

Besides drumming, Chase adds structure to the songwriting process, Tough says, because "sometimes we don't want to do things the normal way and the songs get too strange."