"I would never do it without you. There's no way because the best part is that it's fun, you know, like we have our fights and we have our struggles but it's like being with my sister. ... I would never do it alone, it would be boring," says Kym Register, right, 25, as she looks over at bandmate and best friend Catherine Edgerton, 24, during a practice in Edgerton's Durham home.

The young women have been friends since they met as 16-year-olds in Durham and have been playing music together just as long. They laugh as they agree on what drew them to play music with each other in the first place, a common love for Janis Joplin. "We just started playing music together out of fun but never really seriously at all," Edgerton says. They played parking lots from the back of her car with a variety of instruments ranging from a saw to the guitar. "It's just fun to be a spectacle sometimes," Register adds.

Their band, Midtown Dickens, officially started two years ago by accident when a friend asked them to open a show for them. "Two days later we wrote all these songs. ... We didn't have a mission to start a band, it just kind of happened," Register says. When asked to define the band's style, the list grows as large as the number of instruments they each play. Register replies, "It's like best friend jam. That sounds like Care Bears would be dancing behind us or something, but that's how we started with the different instruments, like whatever we had lying around we wanted to have fun with ... if we have something, we just play it and we'll just have fun making music about cigars and babies and other random stuff."

To learn more about the band or listen to the music visit www.myspace.com/midtowndickens.