Q&A: Joan enters a new wave of sound in singles “Heart, Body, Mind, Soul” and “Eyes”
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY RACHEL LANE ☆
Credit: Rachel Lane
Joan has always been about evolution. From their early EPs such as Portra, to their more recent album Superglue, the duo consisting of longtime friends Steven Rutherford and Alan Benjamin Thomas, continues to expand their sound and explore new creative territories. Their latest singles, "Heart, Body, Mind, Soul" and "Eyes," showcase a deeper, more introspective side of their artistry and push their sound in new, fresh ways.
On top of releasing new music, joan has been touring all over this year, opening for The Maine in Australia and MisterWives in the USA this past fall. Life on the road is nothing new for joan, but touring these days brings a new perspective. Now fathers to young children, Stephen and Alan are learning to balance their roles as musicians and family men. It’s a dynamic that adds weight to every decision they make.
We sat down with joan during their Portland, Oregon stop on their latest tour with MisterWives, where we chatted about their lives on and off stage. They share stories from the road, reflect on their evolving faith and artistry, and reveal how their Arkansas roots continue to shape their journey. Read on to hear more!
Credit: Rachel Lane
LUNA: Y’all are on tour with MisterWives. How’s that going?
STEVEN: It's been good. I think we're like, eight shows in now. In some ways it feels like we've been on the road for five months, and in some ways it feels like we just started. The shows have been awesome.
LUNA: What's your favorite city to play in?
ALAN: Honestly, Sacramento two nights ago was awesome. We haven't played there before. Great turnout. Lots of energy. Australia was sick. It was our first time there and every city was great. To me, crowd energy makes the city good or not. If the crowd is awesome, it could be Wichita, Kansas, it doesn't matter.
STEVEN: Santa Ana is always really good, because it’s right outside of LA, but there's no stuffy industry vibe that can consume a show sometimes. So it's always awesome. Salt Lake City is always great.
LUNA: How do you guys stay healthy on the road? Do you have any routines or boundaries that you stick to?
ALAN: On international tours it's easy to work out because we're normally planted. When we tour Asia we have like three days in between shows. So we can go run in the gym or swim or whatever. We both run. Stephen runs way more than I do. I'm a lazy piece of shit, but I do run some. When you're supporting and you're in a van, it's like, nearly impossible. We stay till the end to meet people at the merch table, which is our time to connect, right? We're lucky to get to bed before 1:00am. Then the next morning, we usually have to leave by like, eight to make the drive. I'm not getting only five hours of sleep, and then working out, it's just not gonna happen.
STEVEN: Van tours are really tough on the health side. You're driving in the middle of nowhere most of the time, and there's literally no other option than Taco Bell or Wendy's. I have, like, Liquid IV that I drink every day, and vitamin C and zinc and all that stuff.
LUNA: You guys both have new babies. How’s that going? What's the dynamic of having a new child, and then hitting the road?
ALAN: Having babies and doing this job is very strange. We both have three year-old girls and we both have little boys under one. Before, when it was just us and our wives, just two adults, you just deal with it. It sucks, but you deal with it. Now with kids, especially at that age, they just don't get the concept. Ellie, my daughter, earlier I was FaceTiming her - thank God for FaceTime - and she's starting to kind of get stuff, but the concept of time is not quite there yet. Also, for example, my son is sick today, out of nowhere. It's hard on my wife, Lola, to deal with a sick baby, and then pay attention to a three year old. Luckily, we live in the place where our parents still are and we have support. That helps, but it still sucks. I guess another deeper answer would be, it makes everything we do now have more weight to it. We're not just gonna take every tour. Like a lot of managers at our level would be like, “Take everything you can that makes sense,” it's just now it has to make sense for our families. If it doesn't, then we're not gonna do it.
LUNA: Being based out of Little Rock, what is the music scene like over there?
STEVEN: There’s music, but it's like country and metal. Those bands aren't even coming up, really.
LUNA: Do you guys have advice or encouragement for younger musicians who may live in those towns that don't really have that prime music scene?
STEVEN: That was like, the thing for us our first year, it was an ongoing question of “Do we need to go somewhere? Do we need to go to LA? Do we need to go to Nashville or wherever to make this work?” Because of the internet, our managers are out of London, our booking agent is out of LA, our label is out of New York, and we can't live in all those places. We just never found a need to go. If you have the internet, you can upload your music wherever. So to us, it was much more beneficial overall to just stay where we were. We’re hoping it can show people that you don't have to live in those places if you don’t want to; you can make it work.
LUNA: Alan, you have this moment in live shows, while playing “I loved you first,” where you step to the front of the stage, say “Do y'all mind if I praise God for a second?” and then absolutely shred the guitar. I’d love to know how you incorporate your faith into your career and music.
ALAN: Superglue, specifically, throughout the album there was a narrative of both of us very openly asking each other questions we've always had that, growing up in the Bible Belt, can be hard to ask and not be ostracized as a doubter or whatever. We both grew up going to church pretty regularly. I was an intern for a student ministry and we both went to a Bible college. We fit the bill of being Christian. I never really gave myself space to think about it until my 30s. Superglue is where we started to confront those questions we had. We were both going through it personally, and we were talking about it almost every day. We decided to explore it in a pop album, which is interesting, because that is not usually the place you go to do that stuff. At the end of the album, when we wrote the song “Superglue,” I think we both found within our daughters specifically, so much meaning. I still have a lot of questions, and I still am seeking, in a lot of ways, different things, but Ellie coming into this earth and watching my wife become a mother and me become a dad, and also watching Stephen and his wife become parents, it answered some of those questions. If it didn't resolve them completely, it showed me a deeper meaning than what I'd felt yet.
LUNA: Let's talk about your new music. You released “Heart, Body, Mind, Soul” a few months ago. Tell me a bit about how this song came about.
STEVEN: Last year we were in Thailand, and you can get really cheap massages there, so we end up doing that at the same time, in the same room…
ALAN: We were holding hands the whole time.
STEVEN: …and a lot of the signs just walking down the street, there are literally hundreds of Thai massage places with signs that say “Body, Mind, Soul.” It initially was something I just jotted down as a title or something. Alan had a melody idea for the song and we thought “What if we just chanted the chorus?” And that phrase just stuck with us. From there we thought we would make it an obsessive love song. The chant we feel conveys that and then lyrically we took it a step further in the bridge saying basically “I'll give you my kidney. I'll jump into a fire.” It goes from like, you can have where I normally sit on the couch, to I’ll give you a body part if you need. So that was the idea, it was how can we take this as far as possible without being too much.
LUNA: You have another recently-released single, “Eyes.” Tell me about this track.
ALAN: It's one of my favorite songs we've ever written. I love a good ballad. We stan ballads. The concept of “Eyes” being a deeper love song came about pretty quickly. I don't remember when we got the verse first, but usually we'll get the verse and chorus pretty quick. Then we let it sit for a second and come back to it later. We knew we wanted it to be like vintage keys piano. That's kind of been our M.O. from day one. We love those sounds.
STEVEN: Something about the song feels like there is a feeling of sadness to it. It almost feels melancholy, but the lyrics are obviously not that. We've been living in that world a lot, where it feels good, but there's like something coming. Almost like “It can't be this good forever.” We've been living there for a while, and it's feeling nice.
ALAN: Sonically, all of the new songs we're writing have a tinge of melancholy to them, and we’re not fighting it. Previously we've had a moment with blatant happy love songs, which we love, but I think both of us subconsciously feel that its a little played out and that it's time to evolve. We'll probably write another one of those, but for now, this batch of songs are leaning more melancholy.
LUNA: Records to me hold a very specific time period in my life. Do you guys feel like, as you move from Supergle to these new releases, that you’re moving into a new phase?
STEVEN: I think we move pretty fast. We've never really done the same thing twice, even with rollout stuff. With Portra, we just wrote songs and then we made those songs fit into an EP. Then we were like, “Okay, well, let's actually sit down and write an EP now.” And then we were like “Well, we can't just do another EP. Let's do two EPs and literally write them in real time.” And then we were like, “Well, I guess it's time to write an actual album now and do the proper album thing.” Now this time, we're more open-handed with it, we think we know for the most part what the album will look like, if that's what it is, but we don't have it done yet. We want people to be in on the process, while we're writing in real time.
ALAN: Our tastes range further than just sound. I love bands that stick to one thing, but I don't think we could do that. I don't think we could be like, indie pop Joan that you heard on Portra. There's gonna be elements of that, of course, it's like our DNA. But if we want to write a song that is completely different we're gonna write that song. We want to follow those instincts as we go, and right now, the instincts are pointing toward this new sound.
LUNA: Along that same line, if Superglue was a girl that you were dating, how would you break up with her?
ALAN: I would say “Listen here darling. It's been fun. We've laughed, we've cried, we've yelled,
and we cried some more. But this bed's not big enough for the both of us because I've gotten really fat and I am just taking up a lot of space now.” Then I would kick her out. I love that album so much, but I don't hold any of our songs that dear. Superglue will always mean a lot to me, we hit a new threshold in our writing and it feels like a building block for the next thing. You need those relationships to learn and grow and move on to the next.
STEVEN: We both believe it was the album that we were made to write. What's sick about that is now it feels like a launching pad. Now it feels like we are on a different level, which is a cool feeling. So all that to say, I would say, “Baby, you'll always have a special place in my heart, but I'm so much better than you now, and I've grown, and you're stagnant. So get off your ass and get a job.”
LUNA: Last question, I’ve always been a fan of your style. Where do you pull fashion inspiration from?
STEVEN: Brad Pitt from the ‘90s and the early 2000s is a great place to look. Pretty much everything we wear is thrifted.
ALAN: We go through phases, for sure. Right now, we're both into big pants, smaller shirts. Sometimes medium pants, bigger shirts. Here's what I found, and I'm no fashionista; If the pants and the shoes are dope, it's not that the top doesn't matter, but it enhances the top more than I think people realize. It's all about the silhouette, baby.
