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Emerging

JBL Emerging Headliner: Alt pop duo joan on melancholy music & their most ‘joan’ song ever

Arkansas-based alt pop duo, joan, are known for crafting expansive pop music and have spent the past few years steadily releasing new music, touring and building an incredibly passionate fanbase of joanlyfans. From their debut EP portra, to their debut album, superglue, the band has amassed over 150 million global streams to date, boasting over one million monthly listeners across streaming platforms. With each release, joan continues to push the boundaries of their sound, building on their unique ability to create heartfelt, infectious pop music. In this Emerging Headliner interview powered by JBL, joan (Alan Benjamin Thomas and Steven Rutherford) reflect on how they met, their unusual band name, and reveal why their latest releases are the most ‘joan’ songs so far.

How did you meet and when did you form a musical duo?

SR: We both were in separate bands, and we're in Little Rock Arkansas. There's not a huge music scene here. We ended up playing a bunch of shows together, so we met that way. We went to the same college, but at different times, and knew of each other. I knew that we both were doing music, and I was coming out of school and wanted to do music full time. 

Alan had been doing music full time already, so we got together to try to write for film and TV doing sync stuff. That first day, we wrote what ended up being our first single, take me on, and it was like literal magic. We had been looking for that spark, and it hadn't quite got there with other bands. We were just like, ‘I think this is the band we need to be’. It's been full time joan since then.

AT: We first started writing in late 2016, and then in January or February of 2017 we soft released a song on SoundCloud, and that got us some early attention. This was when SoundCloud was a little bit more of an A&R ground for discovery, which maybe it still is, but back then it felt definitely more so. We got our team together after that, and that was the catalyst.

I didn't want people to associate our soft boy pop music with heavy guitars.

joan is an interesting band name. Why joan, and why the lower case spelling?

SR: Well, the lowercase J is because we do everything lowercase, mainly because I text in lowercase. Then whenever me and Alan met and started texting, we both realised that we both do that. It’s pure laziness, but it felt like a cool thing. 

It felt like an extension of us, that we're just texting our buds, and it felt like the personality for the songs we were making. Alan didn't love it at first, but it lent itself to a really cool ‘90s design. What was your reservation with it, Alan?

AT: The feminine name was very reminiscent of harder core bands in America, like Norma Jean and bands like that. I didn't want people to associate our soft boy pop music with heavy guitars, but then he showed me a design he made and it was just joan, lowercase. 

I was like, ‘This looks like the Jared Leto Seventeen magazine cover from 1995 or whatever’, and I was like, ‘That makes total sense’. Then it just clicked.

It's hard to contain our brains on where we can take stuff. The spectrum is pretty wide.

You don’t see many people named Joan these days either…

AT: It's a pretty old name. We're trying to win the SEO war on Google too. There’s Joan Jett and the newest Golden Bachelor was called Joan. We're fighting an uphill battle, but we'll get there!

Where does all the joan music happen?

SR: We both have houses, and since joan started, we've been working out of our bedroom studios, basically. So we decided, instead of a bedroom studio in our house, why not buy another house and make a bedroom studio? So as joan, we got a house for studio-specific stuff. It's nice to have because we both have kids, and trying to record a vocal with kids screaming in the back is impossible. It’s not a conducive acoustic environment [laughs].

It’s a darker vibe; It’s still catching you like an earworm.

Your recent single, heartbodymindsoul is the first track from your new era of music. Did you purposefully decide to make something that sounded very different?

AT: Yeah, we did. We do have a grand vision for this next batch of songs. Neither of us are synesthetic and see colours, but if you had to force a colour on this, we see this whole next batch as being darker – not darker content or lyrically dark, necessarily – but like eyes, heartbodymindsoul is a pop song, and it's about, ‘You can have every part of my being – that's how devoted I am to you’. 

We decided to go a little more melancholy with chords and production elements, but it’s still infectious. It’s still catching you like an earworm. You still want to listen to it 1,000 times. It’s a darker vibe, and overall that is one theme of the new stuff.

We're always really excited about whatever is the freshest thing, what gets us really excited and makes our hair stand up on our arms, and heartbodymindsoul was that. So we were like, ‘Why don't we just give everybody a big left turn?’ What they probably are expecting from joan is not heartbodymindsoul

We were doing that as a first offering for the next thing too. I don't mean this in a braggadocious way, but it's hard to contain our brains on where we can take stuff. The spectrum is pretty wide for us. So we're like, ‘Why don't we just play with it and not get too locked in on a sound?’

You said that your new single, eyes, is the most joan song ever. How so?

SR: Production elements-wise, the drums, the vocals and the keys are all run through a very specific reverb that makes it feel the ‘80s – we went vintage on a lot of the sound choices. We tend to gravitate toward vintage sounds. There's an era between the mid ‘70s to mid ‘90s where synths were at their peak. 

Every synth felt like they were figuring out a new tech, whereas now it feels like we have every sound and every possibility, and I have no idea where they could possibly take it next. I'll eat my words, I'm sure. It's an exciting time, and we gravitate toward that era of sounds because there's a warmth and a nostalgia to it. We try to inject that, and this song has that, even down to the song structure. 

We love songs that tell a story from top to bottom and that have a narrative. There's an epic ending to it, and it tells a story. There's a little bit of cheekiness in there too whenever we say that ‘It's the most joan song ever’, because a lot of people, for better or for worse, depending on when they jumped on the joan train, love our ballads. So it was a little bit cheeky, just being like, ‘Okay, this is more of a ballad, and it has sax in it. What else could you want?’

We're trying to win the SEO war on Google. There’s Joan Jett and the newest Golden Bachelor was called Joan. We're fighting an uphill battle!

You write and produce all your own music in the studio you built in Little Rock, where you're using an AKG P220 Mic, K240 MKII headphones and a pair of JBL 305P MKII powered studio monitors. How do these fit in with your workflow and create that signature joan sound?

AT: The JBLs are a smaller-form nearfield monitor, and they provide us with an amazing, listening environment that we can test things out on. We'll even go, ‘Hey, let me try this on the way home in the car and make sure that it's translating in the same way’. The beauty of the JBLs is they give a different smaller form EQ, so I can test it out and go, ‘Okay, this is what it sounds like on these smaller form studio monitors’. 

And they're pretty flat too, which is nice, because the flatter the response, the better sound we're going to have and it's going to translate everywhere. We've been really happy with them. My dad has a little studio at his house, and he's got a bigger set of JBLs, and they were the first monitors that came with some sort of room correction. I just remember that was the first legit pair of monitors that I was in front of that weren't little computer monitors. 

I was like, ‘Oh, this is what good ones sound like,’ and, ‘this is what music is supposed to sound like’. So I've had a cool relationship with JBL my whole life, even starting when I was younger and learning how to produce songs, period. We're big JBL fans.

SR: Also the AKG mic is very cool. In the last year, we have extended our mic locker. We used to have a mic or two because we were doing most things in bedroom studios. We didn't have the space to do a full drum kit. So what's cool about this AKG mic is it can be a vocal mic, we can use it as a room mic, or we can use it to get mono overhead.

AT: Exactly. Just the other day, I used it as a near room mic, so 15 feet away, just getting the room sound, and it's super clear. It feels awesome. It's a great texture to have, especially for drums in terms of the amount of clarity you have from it. 

Also we’ve got the AKG headphones and they're semi open, and what's nice about them is we can be playing and in the session, and over here working on synth world, and you're able to hear it so that it feels like you're in both worlds at the same time. Just having the semi open thing is really nice – to feel like you're still in the room a little bit, and be able to properly hear things, is great. If you mix on these, there's a vast difference in quality in terms of what you are actually hearing.

We decided to go a little more melancholy with chords and production elements, but you still want to listen to it 1,000 times.

Do you have any future music plans? Is another joan album on the way…?

SR: Yes to both! We’ve got this new era of music. We're working on it, and it will be an album. We have a vision for it, and we're tightening up that vision and getting more and more songs in the pile. We did the proper album thing on the last album – we did the whole campaign around it and we had a blast doing that. 

It felt really cool to check that off our list to be like, ‘We did the normal album campaign thing’, but for this one, for some reason, we wanted people to be as involved as we were creating the album. heartbodymindsoul was the first song we finished for the album, because we knew that we wanted that one to be first. It was the same with eyes – we knew we wanted that one to be second.

AT: Yeah, we've done the normal album thing, and this time we wanted to bring people along and finish music that we were really stoked about and that we also knew would be part of the project. Literally this week, we've been back in the studio working on what the album will be. 

There are no announcements as far as dates or anything, but we will have a lot of new music coming out next year. We'll be touring next year. Whatever the project is, we'll be releasing it next year. So next year will be a big year for us. We're very excited already about what's to come…