The Hipstamatic Blog

We caught up with Eric and Jesse of Tanlines in between SXSW shows. The New York duo was gearing up for the release of debut album Mixed Emotions (out today!), and sat down to discuss their journey, creative process, and making music that matters.

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You guys have a history of putting out great material, but Mixed Emotions is your first album. Talk about that journey, and how it’s been growing and collaborating.

Jesse: It’s like any relationship you have with another person. You get to know someone extremely well, and we have a common foundation of ideas—things we like that we agree on, and we have things we disagree on. It’s a creative partnership. We did a lot of songs for a couple years—remixes, songs on the Internet, et cetera, so we were like, we’re done with that, we’re going to sit down and write this album.

We took our time, we took over a year to do it. We learned an enormous amount about music, and ourselves, and we knew a lot already. I think this is the second phase of what we’re doing. We didn’t want to just release songs on the Internet anymore, we wanted to make a statement, and that’s what I think the album is. It’s like a next step from what we were doing before. I’m incredibly proud of it, and what else could I ask for? (Except for everyone to like it, and for it to change everyone’s lives. Just a small thing like that. But that’s out of my hands, so…)

What influences did you have when you were coming up with the album?

Jesse: This is extremely cliché, but we just wanted to focus on writing songs. The first period of our career was experimenting with sounds and releasing tracks, and we sort of developed a palette of sounds. Now for this we just drew from that palette, and we just wanted to write songs that might mean something to people. The best thing we did in the first two years was writing “Real Life”—that was the first song we wrote that we played for people and they knew the words, or they would ask for it. And I think a lot of people have that experience, where they see that, and they’re like, ‘oh—that’s the thing. That’s the thing that you want.’

So we were just like, all right. We just want to write songs. We wrote a lot of songs that didn’t make it onto the album, and the ones we kept going back to are the ones that are on the album.

What do you think of the Internet and music discovery today? How do you think of it as a tool?

Jesse: I mean, it’s great, obviously. The first thing we ever did as a band was a thing on the Internet. That’s how a lot of people work now, and if we hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have gone anywhere else. We did that for a while, then we stopped and wrote this album, and now we’re trying to do something past the Internet. I think that the Internet is like: check out this song, done; next song, done; next song, done. There’s still a place for music that sticks with you, you know? If you think about your favorite songs, you’ve been listening to those for twenty years, maybe, and you still listen to it. Your favorite movie you’ve maybe seen three, four, five, ten times. But I can’t make that happen—I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but that’s a thing that exists outside of the Internet. The Internet can be a launching pad for that, and that’s what I’m hoping happens with [Mixed Emotions].

At Hipstamatic, we’re all about telling stories through moments, and through photos. How do you think SXSW fits into your story, if it does? Do you think this is capturing a moment for you?

Jesse: What I think about a lot here is that the people I want to play for are the kids who live in Kansas. Bands don’t stop on their tour, and they’re on the internet listening to music all the time. They get to see Grimes four times, and Tanlines, or whoever it is—it must be paradise for them. And that’s what [SXSW] is good for, because we’ve never been to Kansas, and maybe we will soon, I’m not sure; there are places that are harder to get to. That’s what I try to stay focused on here.

How would you sum up where you are as a band at this moment?

Jesse: I don’t know. I feel like we’re a million miles away from where we started from, and that’s important to feel. Other than that…like I said, we worked extremely hard.

Eric: one word: excited.