There aren’t many boy bands from the ’90s that can say they’ve had the same kind of staying power as Hanson. In fact it’s hard to find one that has experienced the same success post boy band craze as these three brothers. They continually put out quality records to one of the most devoted fan bases in the world, a true testament to their songwriting skill and musical ability. After their “MmmBop” days, the brothers took about a four year hiatus, left their major label record deal, created their own indie record label 3CG Records and released their first independent record Underneath. The album went on to reach Number 1 on the Billboard Independent Music Charts, making it one of the most successful self-released albums of all time. Their 2007 follow-up release The Walk marked a new era for the band. They introduced their humanitarian side to the world and embarked on barefoot, one-mile walks across the nation and donated thousands of dollars to help fight AIDS in Africa, donate shoes, build schools and clean up drinking water.
Hanson’s fifth studio album, Shout It Out, drops today, and in honor of their upcoming tour they chose OurStage to help them find opening acts for 36 tour stops across the country in the “Shout It Out with HANSON” Competition. We caught up with oldest member and guitarist Isaac Hanson, while the band was at home in Tulsa, OK, to talk about their five night stand in New York City, their Blue Brothers-inspired music video, their new album and plans for their upcoming tour. Check it out!
OS: You guys recently finished a five-night stand in New York City where you played each of your albums in their entirety. Other than perhaps your latest album, which was your favorite album to play?
IH: Umm wow. They all had some really fun moments and there were some songs that we normally don’t play. [long pause] I think I’m gonna go with Middle Of Nowhere, the first record. The reason for that is because it was a lot of fun to go back and listen to the record with a fine tooth comb and make sure that we were covering, as best as we could, the arrangements of the songs without having a multiple track playing with us. That’s always how it is with records, you’re always kind of trying to split the difference between what you can do in the studio and what you can pull off with five people on stage. So that was a lot of fun.
OS: Can you still relate to songs you’ve written over a decade ago?
IH: Oh absolutely. No question about it. I think for us the goal was always to write songs that were not about our current situation, but were broader than that. Even as young kids that was our goal. We always wanted to make music that we felt would last as best as we could with our context at the time. If you listen to that record or the performance of it that night, or the acoustic version that we did for the tenth anniversary of that album I think that the music could easily have been from a recent record of ours as far as the songs and the emotions go. So I think it definitely holds up.
OS: Since your time of breaking records in the late ’90s and breaking away from Island Def Jam in 2003, you’ve been really involved in humanitarian efforts in Africa. What prompted you guys to get involved and write the 2007 album The Walk?
IH: I would say, as a person, it’s important to live a life that is not only about working hard and pursuing your own dreams, but ultimately trying to take care of other people. We had been involved in causes in Africa for a long time, but had not really had an opportunity to visit the continent. In 2006 we ended up having a chance meeting with some people here in Tulsa who have now become great friends who were starting a medical company. The conversation started off that we’d help out with a possible movie idea, but soon turned into a trip and we decided to go with them [to Africa] in July of 2006 in the middle of making the album The Walk. The record kind of evolved from there and took on a slightly different mission.
I think we kind of new going into it in some form or another the record had those kind of themes and was a more anthemic type of album. But there are a lot of different side to every record. It was that experience and it was the trip we took that year that ultimately inspired us to take up the mantle and start taking about it and start talking about the idea of helping people out in more tangible ways. It turned into us meeting the people at Tom’s Shoes and taking their people on tour with us. We had a breakfast meeting with Blake Mycoskie who started the company and we said “Here’s the idea, we have an album called The Walk, we’ve been wanting to connect with our fans on a more direct level, we don’t want to just say ‘Hey donate money at the merchandise table!’—it just doesn’t feel right. We’d like to do something like a one-mile barefoot walk in each city encouraging people to help out and, for example buy shoes, as a tangible example of what it is you can do to help someone else out.” Blake kind of looked at us like, “Wow”—you could tell he was thinking, “This is kind of insane that they’re throwing this out there. You guys are really gonna do this? You guys are really gonna walk a mile, barefoot, through ever city on your tour?” And we were like, “Yes!”
So we did that 50 times and helped them reach their goal of 50,000 shoes delivered to South Africa in November of 2007. Getting people to buy shoes is great, and it’s important, but what we want to do is remind people that actions speak louder than words, and in some cases actions speak louder than money. Ultimately people’s awareness and people’s engagement and the process of assisting others is an important thing and so we said, “Alright, after these first 50 walks, we’ll now give a dollar for every person who walks with us.” So for the next 100 walks we gave a dollar for every person who walked. I think we’re at something around 16,000 people who’ve walked since then.
OS: You’ve done hundreds of barefoot “walks” across the globe. Is there one that particularly sticks out in your mind?
IH: Wow. There are a lot of different moments in walks, it’s not so much the walks themselves. Although there have been a few which have been really large. There was one in Chicago that was really huge, I think there were 1,000 people there both nights that we played. So it was a lot of folks crammed down really narrow sidewalks [laughs]. Our whole thing was, we’re just going to do this outside of our venue, whoever shows up early, come walk with us. We were obviously doing some form of outreach, but for us it was obviously more about encouraging the most immediately accessible group of people to be a part of this whole thing. We also encouraged everyone to start doing their own walks and said that we would give a dollar for every person who walks with them as well. We’ve done about 140 walks, and, you’ll have to forgive me I am not on top of every single number right this second, but anyway there’s been about the same amount of walks as we have done. So approximately 280 walks have been done over the course of the last year and half.
OS: Will you be continuing them on your next tour?
IH: We’re talking right now about what the best way is to continue it. We really want to continue it because we think it would be irresponsible in some form or another for us to not to. It would be like we were just following some kind of fad if we didn’t. So we’re coming up with ways that we can reinvograte the mission. A new phase of The Walk campaign. But I think walks will definitely be a part of that.
OS: Your last album seemed to be directly inspired by your experience in Africa and the growing awareness of the changing state of the world, is Shout It Out a continuation of this or a departure from it?
IH: Well, I think because of the emphasis of “Great Divide” and because of the walks and because of the decisions we made on a personal level and as a band I think that the The Walk embodies that even more. The entire record The Walk is not a bleeding heart anthem to people in poverty, but there are always songs that are relatable to that. It’s funny because on most of our records there are themes of struggles and trying to find myself, trying to figure it all out.
I think on this latest record Shout It Out there are moments when it continues this theme, but in large part it is a much more upbeat record. The Walk was a rootsier more gospel sounding record, it definitely had moments that are similar to Shout It Out, songs like “Running Man,” “Something Going Round,” “Tearing It Down” and “Been There Before” to name a few. Amongst other things, there’s very little acoustic guitar and there’s not a lot of power chords. It is a very rhythmic, upbeat record. I think we felt like our album Underneath and The Walk had a lot of introspective qualities and we felt like it was time to mean something with your music in a different way. We also kind of feel like you don’t have to have a bleeding heart to do good in the world. So for us, like asking about continuing the walks, we want to continue that stuff, but we also want to say you can do that without having to write some crazy heavy song about it. You can do it in your life and celebrate life and celebrate the optimism and the opportunity that you have to better the lives of other people around you, not just purely in Africa but all over, right in your hometown.
OS: Where did you come up with the idea of recreating the Blues Brothers scene and inviting all your fans to join in and dance for your “Thinking ‘Bout Somethin’” music video? Were you guys big Blues Brothers fans when you were kids?
IH: It wasn’t actually that hard [laughs], from the point of view of coming up with the idea. We ARE, not were, really big fans of the Blues Brothers and have been for a really long time. We’ve talked about that movie since we introduced ourselves to everybody. Since the ’0s we’ve been talking about that movie and how big of an inspiration it was for us. And we were talking about the release of this latest record, and the singles and what not, and somehow or another the idea came up, oh wouldn’t it be cool to do something like the Blues Brothers did. I think maybe the idea came from Taylor, he played the clip on YouTube and then played our song with it. He was like “Oh my gosh guys look at this!” And we were like, “Oh my gosh it totally works!”
After we figured out that it totally worked, it was only a matter of execution. We ended up building a music store in our office in order to recreate the scene. We were looking at this old area of shops in Tulsa, and realized there was that mural on the side of a building (on Greenwood Avenue) that looks really similar to the one on the side of Ray’s Music Exchange building (in the movie). So we did a little research and did some post production stuff on it and sure enough, it looks like the movie. It’s not exact, but we didn’t feel like we needed to go exact. So we announced it to everybody and said, “Here’s the deal we’re doing a music video and we need a group of people dancing in the streets.Come to Tulsa on this day,” and about 300-500 people showed up.
OS: Over the years your fan interaction has always been great, whether it be podcasts, going on walks before shows, inviting them to participate in your music videos or the community built around Hanson.net. What are your plans to further fan engagement with the release of your new album?
IH: Well we’re kind of working on that right now. We had this voting thing on the last round of touring where people could vote on what the encore song would be. I think because we rehearsed all the music on the last five records I think that we’ll try to do some stuff like that. You know get people involved and get their opinions and try to make these shows as unique and individual as possible.
Check out the “Shout It Out with HANSON” competition for your chance to open for the band, and in the meantime go out and pick up their new album Shout It Out!
