Lead singer/songwriter for the band, Vaden Todd Lewis was recently coming off of a short-lived reunion of his platinum-selling 90s band Toadies, and after an unsuccessful album release and tour, the band once again broke up. Main members Taz Bentley and Vaden Todd Lewis were both residents of Dallas, and had met on tours, in which the Toadies and Reverend Horton Heat often played together. The two began jamming together, and eventually decided to start a band in 2002. They took their name from a sign on the side of a building in Dallas, with Lewis explaining "I Just like the connection of family and guilt associated together. It also kind of makes me think of brothers - like me and Taz doing it as a team". After bad experiences with record labels, they decided to keep the band low-key, making tracks available via the internet, but soon received interest from local record labels.