Evan realized he was made for greater things than being mistaken for Jaron when he first heard Elvis Costello's "Alison." He recalled, "I didn't necessarily want to be him. I just wanted to be the guy who wrote that song and sang it with so much emotion." Jaron was handy with the harmonies, though, and after the duo received Discmans for their bar mitzvah, they decided to try out this music thing for real.

"If you were to go back and listen to our first songs, you could identify that we didn't suck," said Jaron. Their name did, though: Durable Phig Leaf. DPL made their debut at an Atlanta club before a crowd of 40 that included Mrs. Lowenstein's mah-jongg club. We think she dug the irony of her sons' opening the show with the salutation "Hello, Atlanta!" regardless.

The brothers soon had a residency at a Decatur, Ga., cafe, and decided to break into show business on their own. The budding entrepreneurs recorded one of their shows live to DAT and released it in 1994 as the LP Live at KaLo's Coffee House. By the next year they expanded into the Evan and Jaron Band, and in 1996 independently released Not From Concentrate.

That June, Jimmy Buffett saw them play a showcase and passed the tip to legendary Island label boss Chris Blackwell. Meeting with the man behind U2 and Grace Jones, Evan and Jaron were impressed with his understanding of their Orthodox Jewish lifestyle. "[He] sat down and told us about how he grew up Jewish and his family founded the first synagogue in Jamaica," remembers Jaron.

They signed with Island, making sure the contract said they didn't have to perform on Friday nights, in observance of the Sabbath. In 1998, the label released We've Never Heard of You Either, a title donated by their tennis-playing friends Luke and Murphy Jensen. Evan described it as "a classic pop record that sounded like those albums in the era of the '70s West Coast singer/songwriters."

When the group and album got lost in the great Island merger shuffle of 1998, Evan and Jaron decided to head straight for the source. They went west to Los Angeles and mingled with the songwriting community there, picking up pals like keyboardist John Medeski and Heartbreaker Benmont Tench, and bonded with Mick Fleetwood over fruit roll-ups in Cuba.

In March 1999, the brothers signed with Columbia Records, home to heroes like Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, and hit the studio with renewed vigor and a bulging Rolodex. Medeski, Tench, and Fleetwood all appear on their self-titled fourth album, a conscious attempt to start over. With "Crazy for This Girl" hitting VH1 and Dawson's Creek, they're certain to be saying "Hello [Insert your town name here]!" soon.