Warpaint has become a favourite of in-the-know Hollywood hipsters, but it turns out that the Los Angeles–based quartet has a strong connection to Hollywood North. The band's original drummer, Shannyn Sossamon, is a film and television actor best known for her roles in the features A Knight's Tale and One Missed Call and the vampire series Moonlight. In 2004, she was in town to film the low-budget horror flick Devour, and her bandmates—singer-guitarist Emily Kokal, vocalist-bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg (Sossamon's sister), and singer-guitarist-keyboardist Theresa Wayman—joined her for a few months.

“We lived in Deep Cove,” Kokal says, reached on her cellphone at a hamburger joint in the L.A. neighbourhood of Eagle Rock. “We wrote a lot of songs there, and Theresa actually had a baby in Vancouver, in a little hut in the back of someone's house. So her son is actually Canadian.”

One of the tunes Warpaint came up with while living on the North Shore is “Billie Holiday”, which it recorded for Exquisite Corpse, an EP it released independently in February. An atmospheric number constructed around a folky guitar arpeggio, the song spells out the name of the titular jazz icon a number of times, but Kokal says there's no real significance to that. The letters just happened to fit with a melody she'd already written, and she was looking at a poster of Lady Day when inspiration struck.

The bulk of the song's lyrics, though, are borrowed from “My Guy”, a Smokey Robinson–penned tune that Motown chanteuse Mary Wells took to the top of the charts in 1964. “We were staying in this fully furnished house, and these people had a song book in the basement, by the Billie Holiday poster,” Kokal explains. “Theresa opened the song book and that was the first song she found, and she just made up a melody with those words.”

Warpaint hasn't actually made any legal arrangement to incorporate the lines from “My Guy” into its own song, but Kokal figures it will happen eventually, or at least she hopes it will. “I'm sure that Smokey would be cool,” she says. “It's more the corporate fuckers that wouldn't be.”

Hopefully things will get sorted out sooner rather than later, since respected indie label Manimal Vinyl has slated a rerelease of Exquisite Corpse for Tuesday (October 13). The disc has a slightly ramshackle, lo-fi charm, with the band exploring moody postrock on “Stars” and manoeuvring through lost-in-a-forest goth-pop on “Krimson”.

Kokal says that, although she's proud of Warpaint's first release, it's obvious to her that the group has improved a lot since it was recorded, thanks in part to the skills of current drummer Josh Klinghoffer.

“There's a tightness to it, and maybe a little more of a depth,” she says of the four-piece's evolving sound. “When I hear the EP, I'm always surprised at how young it sounds—in a good way. I like that kind of style, but I definitely feel like that was kind of like high school, and we're now at college taking philosophy classes or something.”

Here's hoping the band can avoid taking a crash course in copyright law.

Warpaint opens for School of Seven Bells at the Biltmore Cabaret on Friday (October 9).