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 the band 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.”