The room is quiet. Then livens as the sounds of reveling guitars, amid a robust horn and keyboard accompaniment, come into the room. The melodies put the listeners into a dance-pack party trance. The music comes only from The Whiskey Caper.

The Whiskey Caper is a new band, only made official earlier this year.

The music is led by vocalist and guitarist Marshall Anderson. Anderson has been a prevalent member of the Carbondale music scene for years, having spent time with local folk duo The Voyagers. Anderson was inspired by the funk genre during a visit to New Orleans, specifically with the band Gravy Flavored Kisses.

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In addition to Anderson, the band features Kegan Doty on drums, Chris Brown [a graduate student in public administration from Marion] on bass/ vocals, Bethany Henning on keys/ vocals, Robb Smith on saxophone and Austen Slone on guitar.

The Daily Egyptian sat down with members of The Whiskey Caper before their gig at 10 p.m. Friday at PK’s in downtown Carbondale.

How did you decide to make the music that you do with this band? 

Anderson: It started because The Voyagers had a bunch of gigs booked and then Janis did one or two of them and was like ‘I don’t have a sound system. Do you want to cover the rest?’ and I was like ‘Okay,’ but I need people to back me up because I’d been hired as a solo act and so we wanted something more substantial. So I did two hours of solo stuff and then an hour of band stuff.

How would you describe your music? 

Anderson: I’ve been saying funky blues-rock, but I don’t know, even the people who hear us are like, ‘What?’

Brown: We do some funk, we do some blues, we do some rock. We kind of have some alternative country in a way.

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Anderson: We cover some John Gorka, who is a part of the modern folk movement, but we don’t do it like John Gorka.

Do you play mostly cover songs or originals? 

Anderson: We’ve been doing mostly covers recently. We have a couple of originals, but we’re starting to work on more. A lot of the covers we do are mostly my cousin’s songs. He just released a new album and he’s amazing – Alex Radus. Kegan and I just got to play with him in Lisbon, New Hampshire at my brother’s wedding, and it was pretty eye opening.

Brown: The sax player, Robb, and I are working up stuff right now. I’d say that the stuff we’d like to focus more on writing is like blues-funk.

Anderson: Speaking for myself, I’ve just been super busy because I do my own solo stuff and then I play guitar in a bunch of bands, so I’ve been writing songs for my solo stuff but I don’t think they’d make a lot of sense with The Whiskey Caper. They’re sort of sad, bastard folky and we want to be more of a party band. It’s fun when people are happy and dance.

Brown: And not cry in their beer.

What are your aspirations for the future? 

Anderson: We’d like to get out there more. If anyone would like to hire us, we’d love to do it. I’d say we’re one of the best dance bands in Carbondale right now. I haven’t heard much that would be better to dance to, and that was one of the goals when we started. When I saw that band in New Orleans, I thought, ‘No one is doing this where I live,’ and people like it when they’re drunk. I’d like to do Hangar and stuff, and we’d like to play in St. Louis, but it’s a six-piece band, so it can be hard to organize.

What are your thoughts on your upcoming show at PK’s? 

Brown: PK’s is always fun. Everyone is always just having a good time. We get more PK’s gigs than anywhere and it’s always a good time.

Anderson: It goes over really well at PK’s. There we can be as loud as we’d normally be and still have the volume of most bands you see at PK’s.

Brown: As long as we get dancers up, I think that’s how we measure how good of a show we had.

Anderson: The beautiful part about PK’s is that when it starts, there are dancers up and then there are dancers down…because they don’t all make it through the night.

The Whiskey Caper plans to record demos in the near future. They can be found on Facebook.com/ thewhiskeycaper.