19 years later, the “Mmmbop” singer on the importance of creating an
art object in the digital age, the return of soul music, and
establishing a sustainable career
by Morgan McNaught
September 27, 2011
Hanson’s
first single, “MmmBop,” was released over 19 years ago, but these
wunderkinds have shown no signs of slowing down. The three-time Grammy
Award winners have created their own record label, released one of the
most successful independent records to date, and if anything, have only
gotten hipper with time. A free 2010 show at New York’s South Street
Seaport in which they curiously shared the bill with rapper Drake caused
a riot when twice the number of expected fans showed up.
The brothers kicked off this years’ Musical Ride Tour Sept. 4 in
Seattle and will venture to 40 U.S. cities—including Chicago for
shows tonight and Wednesday—letting
audience members vote which album the group will play in its entirety.
By making their shows a never-duplicated experience, Hanson gives fans
the opportunity to look back and participate in the benchmarks of their
illustrious career.
Zac Hanson sat down with
The A.V. Club to talk about
importance of creating an art object in the digital age, the return of
soul music, and establishing a sustainable career.
The A.V. Club: On your latest record, Shout It Out, you worked with The Funk Brothers’ Bob Babbitt, who a lot of people might know from Standing In The Shadows Of Motown. What was that like?
Zac Hanson: Bob is amazing. I don’t know what I expected, but
he’s just a huge personality with amazing stories of playing with people
like Stevie Wonder when he was a kid.
But Bob’s also just got this feel. It’s undeniable for me; he’s been
playing for so long on so many great records. I think one of the things
that was interesting about Bob is sometimes when he’d be playing the
part, you kind of would hear it and you’d be thinking, “Oh, he’s a
little too far behind beat,” and then you’d listen back to it, and it
would just feel so great. It’s just from years and years and years and
years of playing.
AVC: Your new tour had to be crazy to prepare for.
ZH: It is definitely a crazy thing to prepare for, and it
makes for a much harder job each night. But it’s a challenge, it’s
something that sort of excites us.
The concept basically formed out of the fact that we had something
called “five of five,” at least that’s what we called it, where in
London we had just done five concerts, and each night we had just
performed one album—and the next album and the next album and the next
album. [It sort of] formed out of the fact that we wanted a cool way to
launch the new album,
Shout It Out . So we had done that once in New York last year, and then in London when we launched the release of
Shout It Out there.
And so when we finished that, we were preparing for a U.S. tour knowing
that we wanted to do one. And we just said, “How do we sort of take
this kind of a [concept] of playing albums,” because we spent all this
time to prepare for that one-off event, “and turn it into a tour and
sort of let people experience that more?”
The other thing was we always liked the idea of just letting the fans
feel more invested in what we’re doing and sort of unique experiences.
It just seemed like a cool combination of things that excite people to
vote for their favorite album, their favorite record, and give us a
challenge each night.
The show is a little more than that, you know; we’re playing songs
that aren’t on the record that wins, sort of, but the show is primarily
whatever record wins.
AVC: You’ve been really interactive with fans lately. How did that come about?
ZH: We were about to release
Shout It Out , and we
actually said, “How do we just make something a really immersive
experience for this record?” We knew it would be super limited, but it
was something that we felt like would be exciting for everyone to know
it existed, to be a part of seeing it be creative. We made a record
player, we made custom headphones, we made LPs, we made an owner’s
manual of how to listen to the record, what to do while listening to
each song. We gave demos and sort of rush recordings as part of it on a
USB key, and, gosh, what else was in there? There was the screen-printed
poster. And it was part of this whole package of just trying to create
this kind of experience where you sit down and you wrap yourself in the
record, and how it was made, and reading the lyrics, and looking at
pictures, and there’s a photo book as a part of it, there was a
45-minute documentary about making the record. And we just were trying
to give that kind of immersive experience that’s sort of lost in the
digital age of sort of “download it to my iPod and just put it on
shuffle.”
AVC: It’s harder and harder to get people to actually buy
something. So by creating this experience for someone and kind of
letting them in and giving them a piece of yourself and your art, your
process is really lovely.
ZH: The thing with us that we always try and do is, I guess in
the digital world, where things are changing, and more and more you’re
put in the spotlight 100 percent of the time, and they want to know when
you’re going to the bathroom and what you had to drink, it’s sort of
like, how do you take that kind of an idea and then really put the focus
more on the art and on the reason people want to know when you’re going
to the bathroom and what you ate and, you know...
AVC: Totally.
ZH: Because that’s the key. It’s fine, obviously, that we have
Twitter accounts and Facebook and whatever, and I literally do post up
some random thing that I thought or ate. But it’s more like in general,
how do you focus things more on the art? Like, the last thing we did for
our fan club was when we recorded the EP this last year, every day we
wrote a song and recorded it, and we streamed it live, the writing
process and the recording process, to our fan club members. And it was
just like we’re going to let you watch us make records and let you sort
of come inside the process and see it recorded live—it’s happening, you
know, right now, and seeing this all around the world, experiencing that
together with us. It’s just sort of those kind of things are, I think,
stuff that brings the attention back to the reason you have fans, you
know. It’s our music. It’s not that we were really funny guys or that we
were good looking or—it’s the music. And so we have to put the focus
there.
AVC: How do you guys stay balanced, and what grounds you while working together and being on tour?
ZH: I think we grew up with a good family that never let us
get our heads too big, and being brothers, you tend to be pretty
authentic and real with each other about sort of true behavior. Being a
couple dweebs, you know—we, I think, all ended up with a feeling of
respect for what we get to do, a love for making music, and an
understanding that, you know, it could go away in a matter of a day or a
week or a year, that you could not be that band that was lucky enough
to actually make it a career. And we could have to go and find a real
job instead of the awesomest job of sort of expressing your outlook on
life and, hopefully, changing people’s lives. And so, when you think of
it, you just have a little more respect, and hopefully it comes out in
the way you behave around people and represent your band and your music,
you know. It’s so easy to end up being one of those bands that’s drunk
all the time and fighting and sort of having the cliché rock star
persona because there’s so many facilitators when you’re put in a
position of success, so many people who want to sit next to you and just
sort of grab a piece of what you’re doing.
We just are lucky enough, I guess, that we just see that for what it
is; it’s like it is just people who want a piece of that, and you’ve got
to figure out what’s real in the world, and sort of know beforehand
who’s real and who’s not as much as you can.
AVC: Yeah, I’m sure that there are probably a lot of painful lessons.
ZH: The biggest thing I think is just early on, we just knew
that sort of that adage of no one’s going to care about what you do more
than you do. No one else is going to have to live with it.
A manager or a producer or a label, you know, they go and they sign
somebody else. They go and they work with another band, if it comes to
that. But you are—unless I go change my name—I’m always Zac Hanson, a
member of Hanson. And you’ve got to, whether it’s decisions to not make
dolls, decisions to, like, not make lunch boxes, you know, just sort of
do the things that you would feel proud of later in life, you know, then
that’s just—that’s just what we tried to do.
AVC: Do you feel like you’ve made it? Or what would happen for you to feel like you’ve had everything that you’ve wanted?
ZH: Well, I think there’s no question we’ve made it, you know.
If you play the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall and stand on stage in
front of 50 or 60 or 90,000 thousand people, you know, and don’t say
“we’ve made it” at some level inside you, then I don’t know what you
would say.
I think the thing we’ve always wanted to do is sort of make music
that would affect people the way it affected us when we were kids, you
know, sort of changing their lives and sort of just inspiring people,
and just being the kind of things you’ll sing and remember your whole
life and carry with you. But, you know, we always wanted to sort of do
that for the next generation, the next group of musicians who are kids
right now.
That’s the element of “we’ve made it,” I think, that can never fully
be realized. It’s sort of your ambition to sort of—gosh, it sounds sort
of overdone or dramatic, but just sort of the greatness of, “Can we be
artists that can live up to creating a legacy that’s worth remembering,
that is inspiring, that is the music that people will, you know, cover
in 20 years or whatever?”
You know, that’s what you never really know, because like many great
visual artists, probably the true extent of your impact will not be had
till you’re dead.
AVC: Kind of like a cutting-off-your-ear kind of a day.
ZH: Obviously we all have our individual drives and styles and
all that within what we do, but I think we just try and set high goals
for ourselves and just not settle and not have the sort of complacency
that comes with “we’ve made it, we’ve done it.” Like, there’s knowing
that you’ve reached a level that so few people ever experience, but then
you have to wake up the next morning and go, “I still have to work just
as hard or harder to be in this position.” Like, now I’m even more in
the spotlight, now it’s time to bring the A-game, you know, but now it’s
time to do more in order to sustain this, in order to grow this, in
order to, you know, use just potential success for, I don’t know,
whatever it is that my music is meant to do.
AVC: What are you really excited about going forward?
ZH: It’s hard not to be thinking about this tour, just because
it’s so fresh on our minds right now. We’re three shows in, you know,
we’ve got about 40 left almost. It’s been really amazing, the first
three shows, different albums each night.
AVC: What is that like for you guys to be playing some of that old stuff? What kind of feelings is that bringing back for you?
ZH: It’s been amazing to me to see how well the music plays
together. In a normal concert scenario, we’ve always played selections
from older records; you know, you’re playing a little bit from
Middle Of Nowhere and a little bit from
This Time Around
and things like that. But to sit down and play 12 songs from 15 years
ago next to a smattering of the newer stuff, it’s surprising how well it
plays together.
For better or worse, when you start looking back, you definitely see
your patterns and sort of start to see the fingerprint of Hanson and go,
“Okay, I guess this is what people think of these,” sort of these
harmonies, the sort of pop choruses that, you know, it’s sort of
undeniable that it still feels like the same band in an arc, obviously,
that one record sounds a little more organic, and one record sounds a
little more R&B, and one record sounds a little more rock, and
whatever. But there’s definitely, you know, just a style that the
fingerprint goes through it all. And, I don’t know, like you said, it
just sounds surprisingly good together; it’s surprisingly more like one
show than I would have thought.
AVC: When you guys are in Chicago, you’re going to be doing Underneath for your talk here. What are you guys going to be focusing on for that?
ZH: Well, you know, what that is is it’s an event only for our
fan club members. And so it’s a free event if you’re a fan club member.
And, you know, we’re just going to talk about everything, and we’re
going to take questions, you know. I mean, mainly telling the stories
that a lot of people know because of the documentary that was made about
that record. But, you know, hopefully being able to enlighten people on
sort of more of the in-depth feelings you’re having. Because a song can
only tell so much, you know.
With the focus of this tour being on albums, it’s another way to just
talk about the career, look back to go forward, sort of. With this
studio album, [it’s felt] like a really great time to do that, to be
looking at your past and going, “Wow, we’ve done a lot together,
we’ve”—you know, with most of our fans, you know, we—“we’ve been making
music, we’ve been going to concerts with them for 15 years almost,” you
know?
AVC: That’s major.
ZH: For us, it’s huge. And so it just seemed like a good time to do that, you know.
Next year is the 20-year anniversary of us being a band. You know, people didn’t know the band for about five years, but—
AVC: Are you guys going to be doing anything special then for your 20-year?
ZH: We haven’t settled on anything, but we know that we gotta do something. I mean, 20 years is a big deal.
AVC: Hopefully you will have 20 more years to come. That’s a major milestone.
ZH: Yeah. [It feels] kind of silly when I say it out loud, you
know? But, I mean, we did our first performance when I was 6 years old,
and that was sort of when we started doing professional paying gigs
and, so anyway... Hopefully we’ve got more than 20 more years, you know,
assuming that we all don’t lose the fire, you know. I mean, in 20 more
years, I’ll only be 46, so according to The Rolling Stones’ standards,
I’ve got another 40 years.
AVC: What are you going to do?
ZH: I’m quitting this band before 40 more years.
AVC: You might change your mind.
ZH: I was just teasing.
AVC: Do you like Adele?
ZH: I think we all have a ton of respect for Adele. I think she’s great. It’s just great to see somebody singing with taste.
AVC: She’s kind of got that new soul thing going on as well.
ZH: She’s actually singing with soul. There have been R&B
singers for years, you know, but it’s like it’s just been a long time
since there’s been people just singing without this sort of vocal
acrobatics.
AVC: I grew up listening to Motown, so getting to hear this like clean, lovely, soul, pop music is so nice. I’m glad it’s back.
ZH: Yeah. I think it’s great. Her and people like, you know,
the late Amy Winehouse were sort of—just sort of the simplicity is so
important for people to understand that great records and great songs
usually sort of distilled and distilled and distilled and distilled, and
I think that record in particular is a great example of—there’s just so
few parts and it’s just sort of [the song] and the conviction of the
singer that is making it a hit.
AVC: Anything else that you wanted to touch on that we didn’t?
ZH: I think you know when the Chicago shows are.
AVC: I do. And you have two, which is crazy.
ZH: We love Chicago.
AVC: My friend saw you guys six months ago at the Bad Apple. Do you guys hang out in Chicago a lot?
ZH: We like Chicago a lot. We definitely are there a couple
times a year. Sometimes it’s for fun, a lot of times it’s for work, but
it’s been a great city for us. We have lots of friends who have come out
of Chicago, and so it’s a good place.
AVC: Do you have favorite places that you go here?
ZH: We do actually have favorite places, but I prefer not to say them. They might get repeated.
Most of these international stars hailed from far-flung places, but one square bears the names of two local boys who made good back when vinyl was still king of the recording formats: Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour.
