"We want to thank Cursive for everything tonight," Jess Williamson says from the small stage set up in the backyard of The Sidewinder in Austin. "We're all really big fans of them, and I'm sure all of the other bands are too!"

There were only a few dozen people in the crowd listening to the young Texan singer and her band on that damp November night — a crowd so sparse that a possum ran clear across the floor just seconds before the show started without anyone even blinking an eye —but Tim Kasher couldn't help but smile at the heartfelt appreciation thrown in his direction.

"She was great, wasn't she?" Kasher said the next day of Williamson and her powerful indie band. "That's the kind of stuff that I'm into now. I'm definitely going to look her up."

But while Kasher may believe that Williamson and some of the other guitar-based upstart artists around Austin are a piece of the future of music, many of the bands in Bat City that weekend for the inaugural Sound on Sound Festival likely wouldn't be there without Kasher, bassist Matt Maginn, guitarist Ted Stevens and the rest of the Cursive crew. Along with artists like Descendents, Big Boi, and Thursday, Cursive was one of the bands at the Renaissance Faire-turned-festival grounds whose influence could be felt far beyond their set. Of course, the guys behind now-classic albums like The Ugly Organ and Domestica don't hear their own genre-bending sound in every complex indie and alternative act of today.

"We have friends that we're friends with who are only like four years behind us, and they say they're influenced by us," Maginn says, sitting in the tent set up between a wooden bar area and mock medieval castle left over from Sherwood Forest's usual activities. "It's hard for me to pick out. I think there are some people who lyrically have taken leads from Tim..."

"I think it's hard for me to discern what might be a direct influence from what we're doing just because we're in the middle of it," Kasher adds. "I can listen to someone like Spoon and then another band and hear how they sound like Spoon, but I can't sort it out for us."

"Or I think when we hear it, we think it's the influence that we took it from," Maginn responds. "I think 'These guys have really cool influences' instead of thinking that we're the influence."

"Instead of 'Oh, this band's ripping off Cursive,' I hear 'Oh, this band's ripping off Fugazi,' which is what we do," Kasher says jokingly.