By Amelia Parrott<\/p>\n
In the minds of many \u201990s girls, the three brothers from Tulsa, Oklahoma known as\u00a0Hanson\u00a0will forever be frozen in time as the fresh-faced teens captured in countless Smash Hits magazine posters \u2013 as synonymous with the decade as inflatable couches and butterfy clips. But in reality Zac, Taylor and Isaac Hanson have grown. They\u2019ve got wives, kids and even their own beer, the aptly named Mmmhops. They\u2019ve just released their sixth studio album and are coming back to Australian for a massive run of dates this August.\u00a0Amelia Parrott\u00a0caught up with eldest brother and guitarist,\u00a0Isaac Hanson\u00a0to talk about the band\u2019s new record,Anthem, and the meaning behind that song.<\/em><\/p>\n I suppose I should start off by wishing you a happy belated Hanson Day. 17 years since\u00a0Middle of Nowhere<\/em>\u00a0must feel pretty wild?<\/strong> You\u2019ll be out here on tour in August and you\u2019ve released your new album,Anthem<\/em>, to coincide with the tour announcement. How does it feel now Australian fans have finally got their hands on, and ears around, this album?<\/strong> On\u00a0Anthem<\/em>\u00a0you produced yourselves again this time around. How do you find that process now having made so many LPs with someone else in the producer seat?<\/strong> However, we did have a little bit of a false start. We began this album process with a song called \u2018Tonight\u2019, which is actually the last song on the album and we recorded that song but we barely made it through. There was a lot of post-tour angst of sorts. We had been on the tour a lot in the previous year before that. I think everyone was a lot more worn out than we had given credit to and band tensions ran high and we found ourselves having to take a creative hiatus. We finished that song in March of 2012 but we didn\u2019t start recording any more music or writing any more music together until late September. There was a very long period, basically six months, of hiatus between us really creating music together. It took all of us by surprise in some ways but at the same time there was stuff that had been brewing for a while and we just needed to give each other a bit of space.<\/p>\n I suppose creating this record top to bottom, as you say, gave you a bit of extra freedom to take that hiatus and clear the air before you got back in the studio.\u00a0<\/strong> The record took on an intensity, an aggressiveness and frankly a yearning to fix the, shall we say, broken parts and turn them into something productive. So I think that there are a lot of songs on the record that kind of do that and talk about those things. Even the song \u2018Get the Girl Back\u2019, which is a romantic song, it talks about fixing a problem. It\u2019s about fixing a challenge. There are a lot of themes on this record that are about that. But of course, anyone who\u2019s followed Hanson very much would know that\u2019s not an unusual theme.<\/p>\n It is a very varied record. You do have that rock influence, as you say, but there is also a really strong old school RnB influence on tracks like \u2018Get the Girl Back\u2019 and \u2018I\u2019ve Got Soul\u2019 in particular, what\u2019s brought that out so strongly this time?<\/strong>
\nIt feels good. I don\u2019t know exactly what I expected do be doing 17 years fromMiddle of Nowhere<\/em>\u00a0but I definitely expected to be doing music, I just didn\u2019t know in what form and in what place, where I would be exactly, but the goal was always to be continuing to do music and to make new records and all those kinds of things and here we are 17 years later. It is a blessing that we could have only hoped for.<\/p>\n
\nWe\u2019re very excited to finally be bringing a consecutive set of tours down to Australia. It had been multiple years between our previous tour,\u00a0Shout It Out<\/em>, and the tour before that, I think it was about five years or so. Now having only a two-year space between Australian tours, it is really exciting and a lot of fun. The Australian fans are amazing and despite the fact that we are many, many miles of ocean away from one another, the fans know every single word to every single song and scream at the top of their lungs and it\u2019s just been such a great thing to still be able to maintain and have that connection with people around the world.<\/p>\n
\nSince the very beginning we\u2019ve always been pretty hands on as a band. Everything we\u2019ve done was either a song that we\u2019d wrote with someone or a song that we\u2019d wrote ourselves so it\u2019s a natural extension for us to take the control freak method and just make a record from top to bottom. The first record we did that way, completely from top to bottom, was the last record,\u00a0Shout It Out<\/em>, right before this one. We didn\u2019t originally intend to [self-produce again] but it just made sense and we liked the process so much on\u00a0Shout It Out<\/em>\u00a0that we just decided we weren\u2019t going to second guess ourselves, we were just going to go straight back into the studio and make a new album.<\/p>\n
\nIf we had have had somebody else involved it would have felt even more complicated honestly because we would have had such a major false start. But I do think that whole process really turned into a much more aggressive record than we\u2019ve ever made before. You start out this record with a song called \u2018Fired Up\u2019, which honestly takes a lot of cues from early AC\/DC records. It\u2019s a very aggressive, very rock oriented song. You know, the lyrics, \u201cWe\u2019re not turning around this time \/ Let\u2019s get fired up,<\/em>\u201d it\u2019s a rally cry of sorts. I think that is indicative in a lot of ways of some of the things that have changed on this record.<\/p>\n
\nI think that\u2019s something that we feel really comfortable doing as a band and have felt even more so over the past few years. It\u2019s always been a huge part of our DNA as a band but we found ourselves on the last album,\u00a0Shout It Out<\/em>\u00a0and again on this album, really leaning on some of those musical tendencies just partially because it feels so natural. We just really like playing those things. It\u2019s something that we can\u2019t get away from and it goes all the way back to songs like \u2018MMMBop\u2019 and songs like \u2018Where\u2019s the Love\u2019, they have a lot of similar musical DNA to songs like \u2018Get the Girl Back\u2019. Of course, our voices are a lot lower now than they were back then [laughes] but there are a lot of similarities.<\/p>\n