Get to know hometown favorites Jukebox The Ghost before their headlining show tonight at 930 Club — tickets available HERE! Full interview after the jump.

ATG: How did Jukebox the Ghost come to be? You guys are known now as a Philly/NYC band but around these parts you’re considered to be a DC band because of your beginnings at GW.

Jukebox started when Ben and myself were living next to each other in Mitchell Hall at GW freshman year and began playing the songs he had been writing up until that point.  We eventually found Tommy through a flyer he had posted on campus and began playing shows almost immediately thereafter.  As for being labeled a Philly/NYC band versus a DC band, we have always felt like a DC band at heart, since it is where we got our start.  We have a lot of pride in the small DC clubs were started at and the great local bands and friends we played with during those years.  That part of our “identity” seems like it will never fade and there is a certain “hometown” energy we receive only when playing in the DC area.  However, since we are each actually from Kentucky, Virginia, and Massachusetts, and have now lived together in DC, Philly, and NYC, the whole idea of JTG having a home somehow seems like a bit of a stretch. We live in a van!

ATG: Has DC played any special role in how you formed and developed as a band? Did the music scene here impact you guys at all? When you came together it must have been at the tail-end of the whole DC DIY movement with Q And Not U and other bands like that.

DC absolutely played a special role in how we developed as a band.  We didn’t realize it at first, but I think a lot of the indie rock and post-punk coming out of DC in the years before we arrived directly influenced a lot of the bands we were playing with at the time and bands like Q And Not U, The Dismemberment Plan, and Fugazi, were very popular among our college friends and the musicians we met and admired.  We came into town and started playing without much knowledge of the DC scene or its sound, but by the time we graduated in 2007 we had seen Q And Not U’s final show, both Dismemberment Plan reunion shows at Black Cat, and would play Fort Reno just a year later.   Along with our friends in bands like Exit Clov and Le Loup, we absorbed a lot of the “DC sound” in the form of a slightly jagged/angular/dance-beat-heavy quality we wanted to express in our songs.

ATG: How does it feel to headline 930 Club after having played other clubs in the District before? Got anything special prepared for the show?

It is both a little scary and very exciting.  We are definitely looking forward to being onstage and knowing it will look and sound great.  As is our tradition, we plan to pull off a few shameless surprises.

ATG: What were your stomping grounds back when you lived in DC? Any crazy/special/unknown places we should know about?

When we escaped from Foggy Bottom we typically ventured into Adam’s Morgan (“Pizza Mart” was our Jumbo Slice of choice), Dupont Circle (The Big Hunt for drinks, before it got too crowded), U Street (9:30 Club, Velvet Lounge, DC 9, Black-Cat-Black-Cat and sometimes a tiny dive bar I can’t recall the name of), Georgetown (for fancy meals and historical reenactment employment (looking at you, Tommy Siegel!), and that place with all the grass and monuments and stuff is kinda pretty too.

ATG: You’ve reached some major milestones in the past couple years, including a spot on the Letterman show and tours with a range of indie and marquee bands. Got any big plans for 2012 onward?

We do have some big plans for 2012. We are going to release another record and tour all of the time, duh.

ATG: Speaking of touring, any good stories from being on the road?

We have been flashed onstage by Barenaked Ladies and have watched a DVD of a questionable nature with Guster.

ATG: If you could be a Muppet, which one would you be, AND WHY?

I am one. (Animal).

~Jesse Kristin, drummer for Jukebox the Ghost