An eerie, wobbly tremelo-laden guitar figure that just screams "psychedelic" sets up a song whose first line is "Why didn't you tell us that you were taking Prozac for an experiment?" A bratty punk anthem about wanting to cut school and stay home smoking pot climaxes with the plaintive cry, "Why did I become a teacher?" A tender, poignant ballad of sisterly solidarity ("You can call me anytime...I understand") turns out to be sung from the point of view of Linda Tripp. These are some of the passionately blunt statements and sardonic twists you'll find in She Mob songs.

Formed in the late 1990's, the band is actually a reunion of sorts, centered around three women (Sue Hutchinson, Diane Wallis and Lisa McElroy) who have been friends and have dabbled in music on and off for nearly two decades. (Fourth member Alan Korn, veteran of countless San Francisco bands, has known the other three for almost as long.) Smart, funny women in their mid-to-late thirties don't often start up indie-rock bands for a lark, but a few listens to She Mob's stunningly diverse, clever and hummable debut album, Cancel The Wedding, may make you believe that more of them should.

Forging a clangy but melodic sound out of their own mostly self-taught multi-instrumental skills (apart from Lisa, who sticks to her drums, everyone trades off on guitar or bass) and calling up odd echoes of lost pop classics from ‘60s girl singers to obscure early Rough Trade bands, She Mob remind me most of the mournful yet raucous and humorous music of the Cannanes or Scrawl, sometimes flying into Frightwig-like abandon, other times revisiting the wide-eyed sincerity of the Marine Girls, or occasionally evoking the early Raincoats when Diane adds her scratchy, haunting violin to the mix.

The key to what makes them more than just another hip garage band, though, is their stellar songwriting, the product of three strong writers whose individual styles are inseparable from their personalities. Sue is the extrovert, mining an inner core of rage and silliness with a frustrated actress's arsenal of voices from sarcastically sweet croon to aggressively deranged yell and back. Her songs range equally widely, from surreal stories or mind-warping wordplay to topical vignettes or the heartbreakingly bitter opening line of "Fog": "You don't know me and you don't care." In contrast, Diane's songs tend to be plainspoken and emotionally direct, full of cutting honesty and vulnerability. Meanwhile, Lisa is a master of the deadpan barb whose newest songs (including the aforementioned Linda Tripp ballad, "I Am You") suggest that she may well be the real post-punk Dorothy Parker that Lois Maffeo never quite became.

It just happens to be Diane Wallis's birthday when I get together with She Mob to do an interview. The night before, the band played Oakland's Stork Club dressed as the Powerpuff Girls (with Alan as monkey villain Mojo Jojo) and a framed portrait of said cartoon heroines wins the prize for top present of the evening. As might be expected from a group of longtime friends, a steady stream of banter and bickering flows back and forth, and more than once they seize control and interview each other themselves, rendering my presence a bit superfluous. All journalists should have it so easy. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you She Mob.

J NEO MARVIN: We have to start with your name and the story behind it. You've explained before that it comes from a Sixties B movie.

LISA McELROY: We swiped it from a flyer from the Roxie, before we had even seen the movie. I still have the flyer, actually. It's about five crazed women who escape from prison and capture a male gigolo and perform unspeakable acts on him. "That's just like our band!"

DIANE WALLIS: Didn't they wear, like, conical bras in the movie?

SUE HUTCHINSON: One does. She pokes him with her bra and says, "Mah tits are as hard as mah heart!"

LISA: And then she lunges upon him and he goes "AAAAAAGGGHH!" and when she pulls back there are these two holes in his chest.

SUE: But they were so fake!

LISA: Yeah, they'd been, like, drawn on with magic marker.

NEO: Let's talk about some of these new songs. [We'd just finished listening to some rough mixes of songs-in-progress slated for the second album, Turn To Chocolate]

ALAN KORN: Every song we've recorded so far is a true story.

SUE: Except for "New Lie". [Sample lyric: "Here's a new lie that I made up right now!"] And none of them are love songs. There are a few breakup songs, but we don't have any straight love songs, do we?

LISA: No, it's too challenging.

ALAN: Why would we?

SUE: Very good question. "There is no love in this world anymore!"

NEO: So "Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy"...that's a mouthful.

LISA: Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy is this really awful syndrome where women...mostly women...give their kids medicine they don't need, or they constantly take them to the doctor and the kids have to have all this unnecessary surgery and different prescriptions written out for them because the women want the attention for being the "health provider". And sometimes people can do this for years and no one catches on. Some of the women get famous for having such sick kids and get foundations started up for themselves and they get to meet, like, Hillary Clinton and become famous for "taking care" of their kids. It's a very rare thing, but every year 20-20 will run a story on it.

DIANE: But that song's also interesting because Lisa had written the words and had an idea of the sound she wanted and described it to Alan and he came up with the music.

ALAN: The concept was "Metallica"!

SUE: And Alan had never heard Metallica! He didn't know what they sounded like! (Laughter)

LISA: Metallica by proxy! But I wanted to do it because I used to be a heavy metal DJ when I was growing up in Concord. And I thought "Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy" sounded like a really bad heavy metal concept and it would be really funny to write this hard-driving song about it.

NEO: "Appropriate Way" is one of my personal favorites. "I don't know how to act the appropriate way"...it's the story of my life.

ALAN: It's a universal theme.

SUE: That's what it's all about. (Dramatic voice) "Come a little closer now, let me scare you away!" We kind of have an intro, a little conversation between me and Lisa that changes every time.

LISA: Sometimes I just grunt. "I'm drumming now! Don't ask me questions!"

SUE: But, uh, I can't really say much more about that. Let's just put it this way, the situation has been resolved and I'm currently acting the appropriate way, end of story.

LISA: Diane, what's "So Sleepy" about?

DIANE: I think it's partly about my friend with MS and partly about my dad [who recently died], just about people who have to spend a lot of time in bed.

LISA: Isn't "When You Go Away" about him too?

SUE: That's one of the ones that a lot of people might listen to and think it was a love song when actually it's about your father going away to a nursing home.

DIANE: Well, it was about him getting Alzheimer's..."when you lose your mind"...you watch somebody go through all that and sometimes they're not...there.

ALAN: Like "Mrs. Idey". [An eerie song from Cancel The Wedding about an old woman wandering off and getting lost: "Mrs. Idey, where are you going?"]

DIANE: Right. Mrs. Idey had Alzheimer's too, and my dad remembered that story when he first started getting it, which made it really spooky. I remember him telling me about her when we were sitting in his yard one day, how she would go wandering and he'd have to help the neighbors find her.

LISA: We definitely focus on strange mental states or illnesses in our songs.

DIANE: Or death.

LISA: Or bad relationships, or bad drugs...like Prozac.

SUE: Then there's "Lite Roc".

LISA: That's about the great comeback of Toni Braxton. We're all rootin' for her.

NEO: Now explain "Melvin" to me. I've never figured that song out.

LISA: My husband's mom lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, and their neighbor, Melvin, is autistic. He's in his twenties now; he's pretty functional actually, but he really likes machinery and clocks, and he loves the sound of trains. When he hears a train he gets so happy, and he loves to go to hockey games and watch the clock on the scoreboard change. And so that song is about his grandfather becoming ill. It was Melvin's first time dealing with losing a family member he was very close to, and so that's why he's calling him on the phone to see if he's OK. It turns out that Melvin got a tape from his mom, and he loves the song about himself, so that's cool.

NEO: So we have weird mental states, deaths in the family...

SUE: And unrequited longing, in "Soulmate"! There was this friend of mine from another state, who fell in love with this guy from a band, and he kind of led her to believe that they were "soulmates". Because he said that he'd been to a psychic who told him that he was going to meet his soulmate but that he would be involved with another woman and he wouldn't be able to be with her for a couple of years. He said that to her while they were lying in bed and looking into each other’s eyes for two hours straight without talking.

ALAN: Or blinking! (General hysterics)

SUE: So he didn't come right out and say "wait for me", but she thinks he led her to believe that. Then she went to a psychic who said the same thing to her: "You will meet your soulmate but you will have to wait!"

LISA: These psychics had both gone to the same psychic class! So I, being a very big skeptic, wrote this song about these psychics messing with this woman's head.

NEO: More songs...what's the story behind "Pretty"?

DIANE: I think I just sat down and wrote that before a rehearsal one day because I felt I hadn't been contributing songs, which is usually when I force myself to write. It's not really about anything except maybe a little bit about me feeling uncomfortable with aging...just the pressure to be pretty. I think we should ask Alan more questions. How does it feel to play in a band...

SUE: With so much estrogen?

ALAN: You know, I actually like being in a band with people who've known each other for 15-20 years. It seems like they'd last longer than bands who just kind of get together and jam... Basically I said, I'll be the bass player, you know. I don't wanna be involved in the songwriting; I've done all that. And when you did those four-track demos, I listened to them and said "hey, this is great, I wanna be in this band." This is also one of the only bands I've been in where we all had the same musical reference; we've all liked the same bands over the years.

NEO: Such as?

SUE: NO! Let's not do that. Every band in every interview...

DIANE: No, you don't have to include everything, but what do you think formed you?

ALAN: We're four ex-DJ's who formed a band. We like everything.

SUE: What about the Archies?

DIANE: OK, I can get behind the Archies.

SUE: They had women and men in the band! Oooooh...

ALAN: And a distinct pop sensibility!

LISA (disdainfully): But they only played tambourine and keyboard.

NEO: Tambourines are more difficult to play than they seem, though.

LISA: I know. They are. We're very enamoured with the Brian Jonestown Massacre's tambourine player.

ALAN: Actually, speaking of influences, it was my fan letter to the Marine Girls that Diane and I bonded over.

DIANE: Oh yeah, me and Alan were big Marine Girls fans. I think you let me read the response from them.

ALAN: It was a big WOMAD poster that they wrote on the back of. They were talking about world music. I had actually sent them the John Storm Roberts Africa Dances compilation on one side of a tape and the Shaggs on the other, and they were really insulted by the Shaggs!

DIANE: Oh no!

ALAN: But they said it politely in that English way.

LISA: I remember the first day I ever met Diane. I had a radio show right after hers, and she was really nice; she came up to me right away and said (imitating her in a high voice) "Hi, my name's Diane, and this is a really good record and you'd probably like it!" and it was Weekend! And I was from the suburbs, from the heavy metal capital of the world, but we pretty much liked all the same bands right away.

SUE: I have a really big regret that I didn't get to see the Slits when they played in San Francisco. I did see the Raincoats though.

DIANE: I missed that. But I saw the Hangovers and I met Gina Birch.

ALAN: I guess, when you ask me how I feel about being a "guy" in this band...like, I remember seeing the Delta Five in Amsterdam...

SUE (excited): You saw Delta Five? We love Delta Five.

DIANE: Delta Five rule.

ALAN: So I mean, this whole thing about "women in rock", it goes back to the late 70's, when punk had already happened and suddenly there were all these...just...brilliant bands with women in them...

LISA: Well, that's when we were coming of age, during this time when all these women just formed bands and didn't care if they were "good". They just got together and got all their emotions out.

SUE: Frightwig!

NEO: But more and more people are rediscovering that period now. You see things like the Raincoats reissues a few years back, and there's a new ESG compilation and the box set of Kleenex/Liliput will be out soon...and I see young bands like the Subtonix who totally draw inspiration from all that music. It still reaches people after all these years.

SUE: Can I tell you why I'm in She Mob?

NEO: Please do.

SUE: Because it's a really good way for me to process my emotions. And it's a socially acceptable way to scream out loud.

DIANE: I think hearing Guided By Voices in 1995 made me want to start playing music again. The thing that inspired me was having music that sounded like something me and my friends would play. That's what I relate to, which is probably why we like the Raincoats, and the Slits, and the Delta Five...

LISA: Or Pavement, when they first started.

DIANE: Yeah! More approachable. ************************************************************************