VELVET REVOLVER guitarist Dave Kushner has assembled a new project that resembles a set-up akin to GORILLAZ – an "animated" rock band called PUSHERJONES, featuring The Simpsons' creative director Dave Warren, singer Frankie Perez (CAMP FREDDY, SCARS ON BROADWAY), bassist Scott Shriner (WEEZER) and drummer Joey Castillo (QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE).

Jason Price of Icon Vs. Icon recently caught up with Kushner to discuss PusherJones. In the interview the two discuss the origin of the project, what fans can expect from the virtual band, the options for potential live performances and more. An excerpt from the interview follows:

Q: PusherJones combines visual and musical elements. What can you tell us about the project and how it came about?

A: "It all started a few years ago. There is a guy named Don Bernstein, who buys all of the memorabilia for The Hard Rock Cafe. Any of the guitars, instruments or outfits you see hanging in there, he is behind it. He had all of these really great stories and we became really good friends because he would buy stuff from Velvet Revolver. We became great friends and when he would come to LA, he would stay at my house. At one point, he said, 'Oh, you have to meet these two friends of mine. They work on The Simpsons'. We went out to see Chad Smith’s (RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS, CHICKENFOOT) band at this place called The Baked Potato. I met Ralph Sosa and Dave Warren, who is now my partner on this project. Again, we got along really great. We were swapping stories and hanging out. At some point I said something like, 'Oh yeah, I would really like to do something like the Gorillaz because you could pick and choose your band'. I was in VR at the time. Obviously, growing up in Hollywood, I had a lot of favorite musicians. As a musician, you always look for an opportunity to work with different people and not have a big commitment. People shy away sometimes by saying, 'Well, I can’t really tour now or I can’t do this or that …' because everyone is busy and has so many things going on. We just started developing and from that experience with The Simpsons, I really got into developing story ideas and the story behind each character. We just kinda kept going with it and it became this idea for a TV show. We were always kinda working on one phase of it as we went along, whether it was drawing the characters, writing songs for it, recording music for it, getting different guys to play on it or writing different stories for the character backgrounds. It was a great experience because there were all of these moving parts and you could always jump to different things if you got stuck on one. We just kept going with it and going with it and then one of the old managers from VR sent me an e-mail a month ago asking if we had any songs for The Avengers soundtrack. I sent him our song, 'Count Me Out' and they apparently liked it enough to use it on the soundtrack. That kinda kick-started everything! We were kinda at the point where were we going to start trying to debut this thing anyway as a show or whatever. There are just so many heads to it, we can kinda go in a lot of different directions."

Read the full interview at this location.