Our special guests on today's episode of Where Are They Now? are Chris Brown and Kate Fenner.

They're all that's left of one of the great alternative R&B groups in Canada - the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir. Stripped down from a seven-piece to a duo, Chris writes the songs and Kate sings them. They open for Weeping Tile at the Sidetrack Cafe tomorrow night.

The band never "officially" broke up, but as Brown explains on the phone from his new home in Brooklyn, New York, the decision to move the Bourbons to the Big Apple proved to be the band's undoing.

"It was when things started rolling down here that it really disintegrated. People just weren't up for the prospect of spending that much time away from home.

"We really had a wonderful run, but it was just time to change."

"It wasn't like we had any broad plan to come to New York and 'make it.' Once the band busted up, it was just all about continuing a musical life."

Brown, now 29, was the driving force behind BTC. While his fondness for bizarre hats seems to have gone, he still loves the Hammond organ and still has a tendency to think too much. The duo's new album, Other People's Heavens, is framed in a simple, ambient groove setting - a contrast to the Bourbons' sometimes overworked exuberance - but with a lyrical sophistication quite unlike what you'd hear in pop music on the radio.

"What's really important to me is that I'm very involved with language," Brown explains.

"It's a great fight in my life to sort of reclaim it from all these horrid rhetorical positions. When you have to tell someone you love them with the same words that Bill Clinton is using to say we should bomb Iraq, it gets pretty sticky.

"But the last thing in the world I want to be considered is an intellectual. I want to resonate with poetry the same feeling you get from a bass drum.

"When I can hit on a metaphor or concept that way, I feel that same sort of release I get from a really wonderful groove.

"I think a lot of music escapes that."

The bohemian underground New York scene seems to suit the new "Bourbon Tabernacle Duo."

While Brown admits he misses the wide open spaces of Canada, he says the New York move was positive.

"It's bohemian in that there's entertainment and expression 24 hours a day, but to manifest that you've got to work your butt off. And I think that's one of the things that New York helps you do. It helps you decide.

"In Toronto, I could be three or four different things.

"Here, I can only do one thing and I'm lucky even for that. It really forces you to decide who you are."