What do you do when you’re an energetic R&B/funk group really looking to make a name for yourself in these modern times? Why, you go tour with punk rockers, of course.

While it may seem like an odd pairing, a few years ago the Bad Rabbits did just that. The core group (which consists of Fredua Boakye on vocals, Salim Akram and Santiago Araujo on guitar, Graham Masser on bass, and Sheel Davé on drums) have been carefully honing on their own upbeat brand of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis-inspired funk for years, and in order to prove themselves as both a must-see live act and a musical force to be reckoned with, the band wound up joining the Vans Warped Tour, the annual tour of non-stop punk and rock acts. Not only did the Rabbits hold their own, they also wound up earning the kudos of the other performers on tour, multiple rockers calling them out in interviews as the hands-down best act at the event.

Now, after the release of a highly-regarded EP, the band is finally putting out their long-in-the-works debut full-length American Love out to stores and touring it across the nation, starting with Karmaloop’s Verge Campus Tour sponsored by Neff Headwear and powered by eMuze, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Steve Aoki. To celebrate these events, Sheel Davé sat down with PopMatters’ 20 Questions, and reveals how he’s a proud first generation American, holds Glassjaw and Michael Jackson in equal regard, and how he broke one of his band member’s ankles…

Twisted in tangled sheets our narrator awakes. The calm before the storm of “The City in a Hundred Ways” was able to prolong this inevitable moment for awhile, but now that it has finally comes it seems eons ago that he was able to live without this level of suffering. “The City in a Hundred Ways” was the dream; this is the daymare. Losing a lover is an experience that many people face, but while the ubiquity of the break-up albums in popular culture prove that it’s easy to speak about this in the abstract, few, if any, ever get at the fact that the pain is rarely just cerebral. The word “goodbye” can cut with the sharpness of a swordsman’s blade and punch with the thrust of the calloused fists of a boxer. With “Things I Want to Tell You”, the core of Together We’re Stranger, Tim Bowness and Steven Wilson depict losing love as chronic pain. There are no spiteful jabs at ex-flames, sad-sack pleas for attention, or cries of anger at God, wondering why it is life must invariably come to times like this.

No, “Things I Want to Tell You” is all about realization. At first, it seems that the narrator still feels the ghost of his beloved:

Roll me over on my right side,
Roll me over slow.

Roll me over on my right side,
My left side hurts me so.

As Brand New put it in its song “Jesus Christ”, “But with nobody in your bed /The night’s hard to get through”. To use Bowness’ words, “Things I Want to Tell You” is a portrait of “death-bed isolation”. These lines are not, however, indicative of a failure to let go, which is made evident by Bowness’ wonderful vocal delivery. For the majority of the track, he sings as if he is only able to barely get out the words between swells of full-body aches; his words come slowly and drawn out. Every syllable rings loudly with his hurt. This is a picture of someone well aware of his utter isolation; he’s not calling out for his former lover, he’s calling out for anyone. This becomes especially clear when he repeats: “I’m what you left behind / I’m fading from your mind.” These are the words of a man struggling, but they also are statements of fact, which by their nature are hard to embrace, especially in a situation where every fiber of a person wants to hold on. Repeating these facts over and over again, for our narrator, is just one step in being able to hopefully move away. It’s a delicate balancing act, for these lyrics are themselves means by which he is made further solitary: “I’m fading from your mind” is a sentence that draws out the distance between the two people even further. Yet its repetition is necessary; no noble lie could ever mask this.

Mendelsohn: Today we find ourselves in a familiar position, Klinger. It’s just you, me, and another Bruce Springsteen record. Are you prepared for yet another go around? Gird your loins. This one is going to be fun.

On the record player today is Nebraska, Springsteen’s sparse, mostly acoustic effort from 1982, that finds the bleakness Springsteen had hinted at in Darkness on the Edge of Town now completely engulfing his entire world. I don’t know if there is any other way to put this so I will just say it as unequivocally as I can: I love this record. I love the sparse melody. I love the bleak tales and violence. And I love the fact that it’s just Bruce, his guitar, and a narrative and the power with which he wields his song craft.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel a little conflicted about this seeing as I’ve always been the one that could only muster a grudging respect for an artist I never felt I could connect with, especially when it came to the Springsteen that seemed to trade in mostly soaring melodramas about teen escapism and the danger of the streets. The funny thing is, if I hadn’t spent so much time digging through Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, pulling those records apart and understanding what it was about Springsteen’s music that I didn’t particularly like, I would have never been able to see how different Nebraska was from the rest of his repertoire. So there’s that. It’s now in print. I love Bruce Springsteen. Well, just Nebraska. I’m going to remain ambivalent about the rest of his catalog.

As much as we praise and enjoy virtuosity in any single musical skill, be it writing lyrics that resonate with millions or shredding an electric guitar to bits, we really like it when someone is a double or triple threat. Eyes hesitated to blink as Beyoncé dished out gritty live vocals, popping choreography, and a general sense of drop-dead fierceness during the Super Bowl halftime show. P!nk already showed us she could sing live and twirl upside-down on silks on the Grammys a few year back, so for the 2012 AMAs she performed a shoulder-balancing, body-throwing dance routine fit for So You Think You Can Dance... while singing live, of course.

UK-born Florrie Arnold has her own intriguing set of aces up her stylish sleeves. She’s a drummer, singer-songwriter, guitarist… and she models for fragrances and jeans. Furthermore, her songs, all co-writes across three independently released EPs, straddle a beguiling mix of pop and anti-pop that manages to be catchy but strange.

Sadly, I do not have 20/20 vision. That has literally nothing to do with this discussion of Justin Timberlake’s recently released album The 20/20 Experience, but I just wanted to get it out there.

In all seriousness, I don’t see a lot of myself in JT (in fact, I don’t see very much at all out of my bum right eye, but that’s another story). I am, though, fascinated by him. As a number of reviews of The 20/20 Experience have pointed out, the 2002 single “Cry Me a River” was the song that propelled Timberlake out of the B-league and into the “next Michael Jackson” position that he currently occupies. Although there were a few other singles from the… “cleverly” titled Justified, none of them had the musical and cultural impact of that one, the video for which moved him carefully and deliberately out of the space occupied by Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and the boy bands, one of which he obviously used to be a part of. Over the past decade, building on the sonic template of “Cry Me a River”, Timberlake has gained even more fame, critical success, and cultural omnipresence. Amazingly, he has accomplished this despite releasing only one album between 2002 and 2013.