JOHN, DJ: This is Soundcheck at 93.9, WNYC and online at wnyc.org. I’m John Schaefer. They’re back! In the late 1990s, the trio of Oklahoma brothers known as Hanson took the stages of, well, first state fairs and shopping malls but then major concert venues around the country by storm, with their upbeat answer to 90s grunge. They’ve been out of the spotlight for a few years, but the band Hanson is trying to prove that there is life after teen mania. They’ve released a new CD and DVD set on their own label called The Best of Hanson: Live & Electric and they’re making an unusual transition to indie artistdom. I’m pleased to welcome the three members to our studio, Isaac, Taylor, and Zac. Guys!

ISAAC: Hello.

JOHN: Thanks for coming in. So, you know, here you guys are, barely in your 20s and you’re already grizzled old veterans of the music industry! So, my understanding is that you’re out there now, Isaac, on college campuses and stuff, talking about…

ISAAC: Yeah, we’re touring—I’m 25 years old, Zac just turned 20, Taylor’s 22, so I mean, we’re peers to a lot of these college students and it’s a really cool opportunity for us because we’re able to talk to fans about the music industry in a very candid way, in a very peer-to-peer way, which I think is really an excellent opportunity not only for us, but for them too, cos our goal is to talk to fans, to music fans and college students are music fans, about the state of the music industry and what they can do as to help to deliver quality music to the mainstream.

JOHN: Here is an industry that, by reputation, kind of chews you up and spits you out. Zac, was that the message you’re giving people, is that your experience?

ZAC: No, that’s not the message we’re sending because every industry is hard. That’s the story that comes from probably the lazy musician: “Oh, I got chewed up and spit out, I’m so sad.” The story we’re talking about is really the music industry really is changing and the way that the traditional major labels have worked is not the same way that they worked even eight years ago when we got signed. We got signed to a label called Mercury kind of at the end of, I think, the life of really healthy music industry. And right after our first album, that company got swallowed up into—it was one of the largest music mergers ever…

JOHN: That’s how you ended up on Island/Def Jam.

ZAC: That’s how we ended up on Island/Def Jam, which is an interesting place for Hanson because it was run by the Def Jam staff, which is a rap label, I mean, that’s where they come from and it’s not a good home for Hanson. Really what it is, is the industry of music, the major companies are now working from a stockholders point of view. Not from a head of a company, but working based on quarterly billings, three month periods, and because of that they’ve shifted into a state where they’re not focused on careers of artists or building long-term brands that can sell out over and over for them, build catalogs… they’re more focused on, “I’ve got a three month period, I’ve got to have this much success, so I’m going to try to find bland music that fits in.” Essentially. “I’m going to try to find something that fits with what’s playing on the radio, not try to find something that’s…”

JOHN: Okay, Taylor, your brother is saying that it’s no longer the label’s business to make a long-term career for an artist. I guess, at the end of the day, it is the artist’s responsibility to do that anyway, isn’t it?

TAYLOR: I think now, more than ever, it is. Another thing—I mean, what’s interesting about what we’re doing now is you were saying there was a break and there has been a break but in between our first record and now, there was an album that came out in 2000 that was very successful. Didn’t sell as much as the first record but sold a million records. Since then, the last album we released, we’ve already really already had success as an indie. And so what we’re trying to bring to the table when talking to it is not just, “Hey!” we want to lecture people on what our opinion is. We’re owners and operators of our own indie label and have had success, have had a #1 independent record in today’s music business. We’ve also had the advantage of having had really massive success all over the world, currently as an indie and in the past on majors, so what we’re kind of bringing to the table is this sort of perspective of there’s always going to be art and commerce that are contradicting one another, but where the business is now, you’ve got a lot of, more of a removal of the major label side from the long-term thinking, and I think what’s happening is a lot of the new companies are sort of trying to fill the gap and are starting to grow and do some of the things that a lot of the old, great majors did.

JOHN: Okay, so you guys are not contending that it’s wrong for the music industry to try to make money?

ALL: No!

TAYLOR: In fact, the opposite of that. I think--

JOHN: They’re being short-sighted about how to make money?

TAYLOR: Well, it’s like if you had a company and all you cared about was money, okay, you would hire people…

JOHN: That’s why I’m in public radio!

TAYLOR: …you would hire the right people to develop your product, which is music, and you would think about the best way. And the only thing keeping the labels alive now is their catalog—great artists like Bob Dylan and all the ones that we don’t think about now. They’re paying the bills for the record companies now and so it’s funny, it’s actually the artistic answer is actually the thing that would be more lucrative, but it’s more painful and it’s more complicated to focus on craft and artist development. It’s an ironic thing, like, “Hey sleazebags, we can find a way for you to make more money!” But at the same time, the job is to start by doing the right thing first, which is hiring music people and finding great bands and developing a relationship with those bands.

ISAAC: And everybody is not sleazy and lucrative, there’s a lot of really good people, but the question is if the good people are in the power to do the jobs the way they should be able to. So, we’re just kind of saying, we hope that there could be a change in the tides. Cos the fans want it really, really bad too.

JOHN: Alright, now Isaac, now there was this four year break. What caused it and then how did you guys come out the other end of that break in this kind of Hanson version 2.0?

ISAAC: That is actually really funny; it is true. It’s kind of like we’ve kind of had to reinvent, in some ways, the approach we take to the music, which is that being an indie label, we’ve even more hands on than we had been in the first place. We were always accused of being too hands on in the early years. Everybody would go, “These guys!”

ZAC: “They’ve got too many opinions!”

ISAAC: “They’ve got too many opinions!” We gotta prove this and we gotta prove that. So, we were always very, very involved and it kind of takes it to the next level. The reason why it took so long was because you ha a situation Zac was explaining, the merger, which definitely challenged the artistic process, cos you just had people who inherently were coming from a different place, which there’s nothing wrong with that.

TAYLOR: Primarily business people. You’ve got the record companies where many bands have been in the situation, we’re only one example, where suddenly the merging is happening and artists are moving from different labels and then they’re putting in more business people cos the #1 goal is, “My God, we just spent several billion dollars. We gotta cut costs and try tp initially pay back our investment…”

ISAAC: Try to be more profitable,

TAYLOR: And meanwhile, grandma in Des Moines who is looking at her stock prices and seeing…

ISAAC: Want to hold onto Universal/Polygram’s stock.

TAYLOR: You want the stock prices to stay high. So, it’s a weird situation to be in… oh, sorry, finish the story…

ISAAC: Basically, we spent 2 ½ years trying to make this record, Underneath, which is the one that we released in 2004. It ended up being a #1 independent record, it’s done really well for us. So, therefore it took a long time to record the album but then we decided it had been so long that we needed to set it up, we needed to do it in a more extensive way than we had in the past. So we toured throughout most of 2003 acoustically, made an acoustic EP, promoted that acoustic EP, sold it exclusively through our website.

TAYLOR: Played at Carnegie Hall.

ISAAC: Played at Carnegie Hall to finish off that tour, and then in April of 2004 released Underneath and this year, October 11th we then released our second, bigger release which was Live & Electric, The Best of Hanson: Live & Electric.

JOHN: That one is plugged.

ISAAC: That one was plugged, the other one was unplugged.

JOHN: You guys are plugged here today and in fact, Isaac, the first song you guys are going to play for us is from that Underneath record, isn’t it?

ISAAC: It is from Underneath. The song is called “Strong Enough To Break” and the reason why that song has always been significant to us was actually there’s a scene in the documentary film that we’ve been screening at colleges in which we have a conversation with the head of A&R, which is artist & repertoire, and we talked to him about the state of the record and where we’re going and so on and we have some disagreements and whatnot and then we wrote this song, “Strong Enough To Break.” The song basically talks about, in somewhat metaphorical senses, just the state in which we were in of feeling the uphill battle, sinking and you’re floating away, and trying to push through, but you’re still strong enough to break down and pull yourself back up again.

JOHN: Alright, well I want to follow up with you about the documentary as well when you guys are done with the song, but let’s hear Hanson, that’s Ike on guitar, Taylor playing guitar, Zac doing some hand percussion here in the studio, all three of them of course singing. They’re performing tonight here in New York at the Nokia Theater. Details are on our website, the Soundcheck page, at wnyc.org, but here is, or are, is Hanson to perform live in our studio. The song is called “Strong Enough To Break” on Soundcheck here on 93.9 WNYC and live online at wnyc.org.

TAYLOR: We’re gonna throw a capo on and get ourselves in tune. This is a song called “Strong Enough To Break.”

STRONG ENOUGH TO BREAK

JOHN: This is Soundcheck. I’m John Shaeffer, and yes, this too is Hanson in the background, covering here a song by Radiohead. So guys, things certainly have changed a lot for you guys over the years. We’re speaking with Isaac, Taylor, and Zac Hanson from the group Hanson. How many of you are there when you’re performing tonight at the Nokia Theater, Isaac?

ISAAC: There are five.

ZAC: Three of us, and then obviously there’s no bass player in the band so we have a guy who plays bass and then we have a guy who does rhythm guitar with us. Fills in the blanks while Ike is burning a rug on the guitar.

ISAAC: Yeah, sometimes.

JOHN: Now are there more where you came from?

ISAAC: Oh, you mean in our family?

TAYLOR: Humans?

ZAC: There are more, in Oklahoma.

TAYLOR: It’s good to meet you. Welcome to our race.

ZAC: We’re actually from seven kids in our family. We are just the oldest three.

TAYLOR: It’s funny, it’s inevitable you have to bring up the family thing cos we are brothers, but you know, it’s weird cos we’ve been doing this for so long that we’re just sort of guys in a band, we’ve just been on the bus, been on the road for so many years.

JOHN: And this is one of the interesting things about the story, is when you guys burst upon the scene in, what was it, 97, it looked like if you were one of those manufactured boy bands, which Taylor goes back to what you were saying before—I think it was you—where you said you had too many opinions and the industry didn’t know what to do with you because in fact you did write your own stuff. But to say that you were a teen phenomenon, Zac, you weren’t a teenager yet, were you?

ZAC: I wasn’t even a teenager; we were legitimately a boy band. I was 11, Taylor was 14, Isaac was 16.

ISAAC: We say that jokingly, cos we were actually a band and we were actually boys.

ZAC: What’s crazy about that is we’d already been a band for five years. We’d already played--

TAYLOR: 800 shows.

ZAC: …released three records locally.

TAYLOR: We just knew from a very—again, the fact that we are brothers made it possible to start so young cos you obviously couldn’t form a band at the ages of 9 and call up your friends, it would be too much to form a band that young.

JOHN: There’s no (?) list for six year old drummers.

ISAAC: You weren’t looking at the classified ads going, “Hmm, 9 year old drummer wanted.”

TAYLOR: It is amazing, cos for us we just take pride and still take so much pride in everything we did at the very beginning. For instance, Zac is the youngest Grammy nominated songwriter. At the age of 11 he was nominated for a Grammy as a writer, and those are the kinds of things that people forget but that we, like with songs like “MMMBop” for instance, we take pride in everything we’ve done, at that age, even if people didn’t necessarily understand what we were.

ISAAC: Cos the thing about Grammy’s too, is Grammy’s are nominated by your peers, for the most part, industry people. So here we are, as young, adolescent and early teen years songwriters and musicians and yet you’re able to kind of reach the top of your game at such an early point and we kind of looked around and went, “Wow, this is crazy!” So, we feel really lucky.

JOHN: So, how did you get that far that fast? Did you grow up—are your parents musical? Did you go to lots of concerts?

ISAAC: They definitely were musical; our parents were the kind of people who were singing in the church choir and things like that, over the years, so certainly… and were in the plays and so on in high school and college and so on. Our mom was a vocal major when she went to I think was North Texas State.

TAYLOR: No question, it’s in the genes. But no one had ever done anything like this; I mean I guess you just can’t quite put your finger on it. There’s not really a particular cause. I think we all shared a connection with it and once we started singing we saw that people reacted to it so we’re like, “Okay, we’ll do more.”

ISAAC: We didn‘t go out… it’s kind of funny, cos I’ve asked my mom this a bunch of times, cos I look back on it and I have a certain perspective on it, but obviously her perspective is completely different.

JOHN: Over 25 years!

ISAAC: Well no, but when I was 11 years old I remember doing these gigs and I said to my mom, “What as that like?” And she said, “You know, it was just weird cos you guys had this focus that was very unusual.” She’s like, “I couldn’t help but follow our lead.” We’d say, “Mom, we want to make a record,” and she wouldd go, “Really?” “Yeah, we’ve got ten songs and we want to record these songs.” And she’d go, “Okay…”

ZAC: I very vividly remember being in a studio one night after a performance; up until midnight we were singing, just a cappella, going through every song we knew.

ISAAC: Cos we had a standing ovation at this one show, we just looked at each other and went, “We have a standing ovation! We gotta make records!”

JOHN: And then eventually Mercury Records finds you, signs you, you’re kids, I mean… you know, did you get a good deal?

ISAAC: We had a very good deal.

JOHN: Okay, so somebody was watching out for you?

ZAC: We had a lot of good people around us at that point, at the point that Mercury signed us.

TAYLOR: First of all, they turned us down three times…

ZAC: Yeah, I know, I was just going to say that. We had gone to 13 different labels and Mercury had turned us down three times and we finally just kept going back, kept going back, and finally the right person showed up at a concert and went, “Okay, I get it.” We were lucky, we had a real good music attorney, a guy who we’d come along and he decided to work with us even though he was retired, like, “Three kids? What? What? Okay! This is odd enough…”

JOHN: You’re almost literally babes in the woods. Isaac, not to change the subject but we’re running out of time here. You mentioned the documentary Strong Enough To Break before. Inevitably, people are gonna now start comparing Hanson to Wilco, Jeff Tweedy’s band, which went through a similar wrenching divorce from one label, moving to another, becoming indie rock heroes along the way.

ISAAC: And documenting it in the process.

JOHN: And documenting it their film I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. So, Strong Enough To Break, is that a fair comparison?

ISAAC: Strong Enough To Break is a film that we made. We didn’t set out to make a story about the difficult process between artists and record companies and it’s important to say we’re not out to say, “Stick it to the man, the man is bad.” What we’re out to ask the question is, “Is this the way the industry should work?” Because it seems like there is a certain—two much of a disconnect between the artist and the people helping the artiist promote their product. So, what our goal is with the film is to talk to fans about how they can get involved and how they can make a difference. In the case of somebody like Fiona Apple, for instance. The fans were a big part of helping her to have her voice heard so she could get her record released. She had a somewhat similar situation. Wilco took a slightly different road. We chose to go indie with our music and have been successful in that. I love the fact that we have been able to release this live record on the heels of this documentary that we’re taking to colleges cos it’s kind of able to connect all the dots while we’re out there talking to fans and saying, “You guys want quality? You guys want more consistency with your artists and we do too and we hope that this film gives you reason to believe that things can change and thing should change and get involved.”

ZAC: Just two things—one thing, the reason it’s important, this documentary’s important, is there’s Wilco and there’s Hanson who are two different bands completely going through the same thing. There are so many other bands who aren’t in a situation where they’ve had a film but are going through those same things.

TAYLOR: The fact that those things are happening across the board, basically what is it that’s happening? The film tells the story of what we were describing earlier, the four years. It describes working in a system with an inherited label that makes no sense, business people doing creative jobs, and ultimately it slows the process down. People don’t have any long-term vision. It’s band after band after band, there’s a list of them. And so it’s kind of like, well, we should try and not be quiet about it, we should just continue to talk and get the conversation going, cos ultimately as fans of music and members of the greater music business, we should all be talking about how we can…

ISAAC: …improve our business…

TAYLOR: …improve our business and how we can improve what music comes out of it.

JOHN: We’re speaking with Hanson, they’re performing tonight at the Nokia Theater, and for us here in the studio. You guys have another song to do for us?

ISAAC: Yeah, “Penny & Me” is the name of the song.

JOHN: Also from that 2004 independent release called Underneath, and once again, “Penny & Me” live performance. Isaac playing guitar, Taylor also playing guitar, Zac on percussion, all three of them singing. As I say they are playing tonight at the Nokia Theater as a part of their ongoing tour, and you can get details on the documentary and the music on our website, the Soundcheck page at wnyc.org.

PENNY & ME

JOHN: And that is Hanson, live in our WNYC studio. The song is called ”Penny & Me” the group Hanson reinventing itself as an indie band and guys we didn’t really have time to talk about your opening band contest, but as you mentioned there are lots of other bands struggling in the industry that is not always the most hospitable. They don’t have the resources to draw on that you did. The opening band contest is a great idea, I hope we’ll have a chance to have you back. We can talk about that and everything else. In the meantime, Isaac, Taylor, Zac, have fun tonight, thanks for joining us this afternoon. This is Soundcheck.