Band takes a new shot

It was just meant to be the soundtrack for a car commercial.

The 2010 Lincoln MKS, in fact.

It wasn’t even his first choice for a cover of a Peter Schilling song.

“My favorite song of his was ‘The Different Story.’ If given a choice, I would have picked that one,” Shiny Toy Guns keyboardist Jeremy Dawson said. “It all started with Lincoln Mercury asking for a 30-second commercial for the Lincoln MKS, the teenage not-quite-a-sports-car. We were like, ‘OK, the car looked cool, we’re not going to get torn apart for doing a commercial, and will you let us do whatever we want’?”

Mercury executives flashed the green light, and STG serenaded MKS with 30 seconds of an update of Peter Schilling’s 1983 new wave hit “Major Tom,” itself an answer to David Bowie’s 1969 classic “Space Oddity.”

“They said, ‘This is really cool. Would you mind doing the entire song?’” Dawson said. “So we recorded it, reprogrammed it, and it just took off. It wasn’t supposed to do anything, but a 30-second car commercial became one of our biggest singles.”

It seems appropriate, then, that these days the Los Angeles- and Oklahoma-based poppy electronic/dance band appears to be wrestling with a sort of weightlessness — much like the character in “Major Tom.”

Dawson and guitarist Chad Petree, who both grew up in Oklahoma, formed the band in 2001. Shiny Toy Guns nurtured a following in California through the band’s MySpace page. Their debut record, “We Are Pilots,” ended up being rereleased and rerecorded twice, the last time in 2006 as they graduated to major label Universal. It earned a Grammy nomination, but they ran into a sort of sophomore jinx last year with “Season of Poison.”

Though the singles charted on the modern rock lists, there was a band shake-up with Sisely Treasure replacing Carah Faye Charnow on vocals. And now it sounds as if Shiny Toy Guns wants to ricochet back to its roots.

“Chad had an epiphany one day, woke up and thought, ‘Whoa, where the hell are we?’ We moseyed on back into the chairs of the ship we used to fly and started writing again,” Dawson said. “We’re going in the same direction, but not exactly on the same road. We have a faster, bigger car now.”

The band would like its next album to sound more like a sophisticated and evolved version of “We Are Pilots.”

Part of the problem with young bands like Shiny Toy Guns is their success can work against them early on, Dawson said.

“When you make a record and tour for three years and the deadline to make another one is six months, the last thing you want to do is to make what you’ve been playing for three years,” Dawson said. “But it’s important to remember before you guys start hating yourself that you remember who you are and stay focused on that. That’s why there’s a sophomore slump . . . What we’re going to do is come around the corner with a record that is what Shiny Toy Guns is meant to sound like — as if we took a big, long time between records.”

And it might just come to that. The band is writing new songs, and the label wants new material, but it’s tough to say how fast the muse will work this time, Dawson said.

“It depends on what comes out of us in the next month and a half,” he said. “I know the label would love to see something fast as hell. The last conversation I had with anyone at the label was they would like to release an EP or a single with a B-side with a remix or two by mid- to late August . . . But I would enjoy stopping and disappearing and then reemerging in January or February out of the darkness into a whole new sound and get everyone excited again. But how are we going to live between July and January?”

The band’s progress so far?

“We have a couple of really good ones and three or four good ideas,” he said. “We need at least two more [songs].”

In the meantime, you can catch the band live while it’s on break from regular touring as Shiny Toy Guns headlines the second annual “Pacsun Pipeline to a Cure” benefit for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Saturday at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach.

It will probably mark the first time the band has played “Major Tom” in Southern California.

Shiny Toy Guns is excited to do the benefit.

“A good friend of ours is close to the [foundation],” Dawson said. “We don’t have time to do a lot of the benefit shows that come our way, but when this came up, we jumped right into it.”

So far, it looks like this year’s fundraiser will either match or surpass last year’s in attendance and money raised, said Kim Daskas, who serves on the Pipeline committee.

So what other surprises can Shiny Toy Guns fans expect? Dawson referred to “slimming it down more while writing and creating.” Could that portend more lineup changes?

“Who knows?” he said. “But it’s more of an ‘Oh yes’ than an ‘Oh no.’”

On the other hand, he may just be kidding.

“Me and Chad, we’re just sort of sitting around pondering life and music and new stuff and old stuff and where do we go. We’re having a mid-band crisis,” he said.

If You Go

WHAT: The Pipeline to a Cure benefit for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

WHERE: Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort & Spa, 21500 Pacific Coast Hwy., Huntington Beach

WHEN: Silent auction 6 to 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. and the program begins with live auction, dinner and a variety of entertainment capped off with the Shiny Toy Guns concert.

COST: $350; $5,000 for a table of 10