In this conversation, Variance’s Ethan Ijumba interviews the musical duo joan, following the release of their latest single and video "eyes," available now via Photo FinishRecords. They delve into the inspiration behind their previous single 'heartbodymindsoul,' their songwriting process, and how they balance different musical influences. joan shares insights on their evolving sound, the importance of experimentation in their music, and their approach to creating remixes. They also touch on the narratives surrounding their music and their desire to break free from genre constraints while remaining true to their artistic identity. The duo expresses excitement for their upcoming music and the creative directions they are exploring.

Ethan Ijumba:
So with both of you hailing from Little Rock, Arkansas, you guys are known for your signature, brilliant nostalgia infused with pop with your heartfelt lyrics. Since your debut EP, Portra, you guys have gained huge recognition and have received 150 million global streams. You guys are not only just Alan and Steven, but together you are joan. Your recent single, ‘heartbodymindsoul’ details just giving everything and more to your significant other. So if you want to just detail it down, what exactly was the inspiration behind the track and where did it stem from writing-wise that you guys came up with this? 

joan (Steven):
Yeah, what's kind of a funny thing that like that it sparked when we were in Asia and we actually ended up getting massages one day. We ended up getting a couple's massage, but that's neither here nor there by accident. A lot of the tags there and advertisements say body, mind, soul. I don't exactly know why, but when we're traveling, I see a lot of stuff like that and try to jot down just for later, just in case it sparks any inspiration while we write. That's exactly it, it was just let's flip this to be a love song where it's like literally giving yourself everything about yourself to somebody, just being overly obsessive almost and just kind of right from that perspective.

EI:
And in the bridge of the song, you detail a lot of acts of service and just sentiments about how favorite spot on the couch, favorite side of the bed, every wall in the house, every hair on my head. You just pretty much go right into it about a lot more poetic aspects where it comes from your writing. What exactly influenced you guys when incorporating that in your songs? Because you don't see that too often. We're trying to find that incredibly poetic yet very simplistic pieces of just lyrics that are still found in there. 

joan (Steven):
That's a great question, for that one specifically, there's just there's something so beautiful about giving up things that seem really simple, but become kind of the daily routine of your life and like kind of something you become protective of. So even just the thought of giving your side of the couch up, it's a start, and then where you go? Then it just progresses more and more where it's literally I'd get bit by a spider or I'd run into a fire. It was thinking about it that way where it's the most simple to the most extreme thing where you kind of get to the point where you're just willing to give that away, there was something really beautiful about that to me. 

EI:
To further speak on that, you guys have been doing this since 2017. Having that relationship when it comes down to writing exactly, how do you exactly go about it? Is it normally one of you starts with the melody? Or is it one of you who starts with the lyrics? How do you guys exactly find a way to come together when creating music? And how do you find that balance in that working relationship between the two of you guys?

joan (Alan):
Yeah, fortunately we’re really strong in different things. We both have kind of all of it down to an extent, but I'm definitely more melody production guy. Steven is moreso heavy on lyric and narrative and he thinks about concepts all the time and writes them down on this huge list. I have a billion voice memos with starts and melodies and all that, So usually we start with some sort of melody thats just a rough idea. It’s usually pretty bare bones and then Steven will hear it and just immediately his brain just starts cooking. If I remember correctly on ‘heartbodymindsoul,’ specifically, he had that concept already with that whole story. But we had found, we wanted to have the intro, to have this high vocal choppy vocal. We've been really inspired by some kind of housey drum and bass, just some electronic stuff, like Fred again.. and just finding so much inspiration in that sound. A good friend of ours Rudy, he's played on tour with us. He has a project called Rudy and that's his bread and butter. So we'd been living in that world a little bit, just listening a lot to it. So the track started with that inspiration first. We tried to create an intro and we couldn't really figure it out…and we ended up finding a loop that a friend of ours made and his name is Demo Tapes. It was the perfect little one-bar, two-bar loop, and then like that opened up the whole world for us, we dove into the song and then immediately kind of started coming out. So, this song, song start was kind of with the track, kind of with the concept all at once. 

EI:
To further speak on that you guys find different genres, different variations, different things about how you go about your music. One thing that you guys tend to do and I love this from you guys but you always have different remixes, acoustics, and just sped-up versions now as we've seen more, because we're in the age of TikTok, you have to have a sped-up version. But when it comes down to creating these different variations of your music, is there anything you enjoy most making in terms of a certain sound that you maybe either find ease in doing?

joan (Steven):
That's a really good question. We’ve never been asked that before. I don't know if there's a thing that we enjoy, or I at least enjoy most about it. One thing that I love about doing it is it kind of just proves that a good song is a good song. If it's a good song, that's a great marker to prove that it's a good song. I think about “Partly Cloudy” personally because that was just a really big milestone for us as far as just production and our creative process. It just opened up a lot in our brains about what we can do,what songs are to us, and just taking that completely as far as thinking about production and everything just thinking about it completely different than what we did the original songs with. It just opened up a cool door for us to think at the same time it could go down several avenues and still work.

joan (Alan):
I think the one common theme we try to find even if it's more electronic, let's say bent one way or the other, we like adding some sort of real element. Like ‘heartbodymindsoul’ is this drum loopy and I don't want to say copy-paste, but the bridge on it is Coldplay-esque electric guitar, soaring comes in in the background and we try to stack vocals in the same way we would if it was like a more rock-oriented song. So there's an acoustic guitar in it, at the end of the day, we're going to end up playing these songs live. We don't always think about that in production. I don’t go, this is going to be a really good live part, but I do like to keep some sort of organic element and just tie it all. Kind of left-of-center things, but acoustic organic instruments are always gonna bring somebody in with us because they're gonna be like, I've heard that sound before. So we try to incorporate that as much as we can. 

EI:
Now, when it comes to being on the same wavelength of what you wanna try to do new things, is there either of you, specifically speaking, do you feel that one might be more experimental than the other when it comes down to trying something new or do you kind of sometimes feel like let's be a little conservative with this? Try to maintain what we do to our grassroots and what we normally go about. Or is either of you trying something new To prevent from either feeling stale or flat. 

joan (Alan):
It's not necessarily always a conscious discussion, well, maybe it is. I was about to say, it's not like, hey, we've already done this, let's not do that again. The whole new batch of songs we're working on right now is an exercise in newness. It also depends on the song, like we just finished a new song and literally got the master in today. It’s probably reminiscent of older joan in some ways. Whereas ‘heartbodymindsoul’ is not. There's a common thread of my voice on it, and his voice on it, our sensibilities are the common thread over it. We haven't done a pop drum and bass song, so that's new. But then this next song is not so new for us. We've experimented with some sounds within it, but you would hear it today and be like, that's undeniably you guys (joan). It has a joan stamp on it, but there are still experimental elements in it. We did some guitar stuff we've never done before, and we did some filters on some key stuff that we've never done before. So we're just trying to raise the bar on our songwriting and the production every single time. Hopefully, in five years, we look back, and even if the public doesn't agree, we feel like we just kept upping our game personally as writers and producers.

EI:

You're gonna be your own biggest critics, nonetheless, at the end.

joan (Steven):
100% yeah. 

EI:
Now when it comes down to the new music that you've got coming out, that's soon to happen and soon to be well received of course because you guys have already made great music. What exactly would you use to describe it in terms of adjectives? What can listeners expect to hear if you don't have to give just the track title or the genre itself? How would you describe it in terms of just adjectives specifically?

joan (Steven):
This next song in particular, I think it's a great exercise sonically to me, it feels dark and sad in a way for a lot of it. But the lyrics are very much a love song, and it's very sweet. If I can brag on it a little bit, it's a beautiful song, melodically and lyrically, but sonically it feels dark and almost like something sad is on the horizon, if that makes sense…So, we're trying to kind of portray that a little bit in the songs. 

joan (Alan):
We've gotten really good at writing happy songs. We can bang out a ballad for sure, but what's funny is I never I before joan I was like I would never have said I was good at writing upbeat pop songs like that, like we're super positive and like I'm in love with my best friend you know.

EI:
What was your specialty then at that point in time?

joan (Alan):
Probably, back then I was decent at writing pop songs but I wasn't thinking in terms of wanting to make someone smile. I was like, how do we say this cooler? It was almost more in my head on more abstract, more poetic, now we kind of hit the gamut in terms of all sides of the spectrum in terms of mood and lyrics. Kind of like sad to happy to neutral in between to kind of angry. Our song “Love Me Better” is this narrative of being pissed off. So, it's interesting to now be in the spot where like, I think we kind both feel okay having done the happy thing. Some of our biggest songs, “so good,” which has done really well in Asia, that's a really happy song. It's cool, I'm glad we have that song, but it doesn't necessarily represent musically where we're heading. Back to another question you asked about conscious decision-making on changing things. That was probably for this batch. We were kind of like, you know what, let's not be afraid to explore the melancholy, even if it just sounds melancholy, but the lyric is more hopeful. And that's not gonna be every song, but a lot of the new batch of songs have darker chord structures. We're so tied to writing pop catchy music that like, I don't know that we would ever do anything crazy outside of the box, but it's just more melancholy when it comes to musically. 

EI:
Do you ever feel that there's a narrative about you guys, whether it's given to you or you give yourselves, that you definitely want to change? For example, there was a point in time when everyone thought Drake was the sad rapper, and then sad rap became its own thing. Post Malone at one point was a country mixed with pop and hip-hop, then he's like, no, I'm just an artist. You can't put me in any kind of box. Do you ever feel like there's a certain narrative or image that you guys are either trying to uphold or change from anything? 

joan (Steven):
Yes, that's a great question. I would say our whole career we've been running from people telling us what we sound like since the beginning or like what we are kind of since the beginning. I think that's cool and there good intentions for it, but we take everything song by song and just like what's in front of us. That's what we feel like we need to chase after. And even with like EPs that we've released, it's it's you know, with Portra, it was like, hey, you guys are the 80s guys. And we're like, you should listen to the music we're working on next, it's so not that. By the time that's kind of the nature of how music releasing and stuff goes to is just like, by the time we're releasing stuff, we're not necessarily in the place that we were as when we wrote the music either. 

EI:
It's like changing locations by the time you say I was here, I'm already completely differen spot. 

joan (Steven):
Totally. Yeah. So in a way, it kind of feels like we're constantly having to be that past person that we were when we wrote that music and now we're just releasing it and sharing it. And at the same time, we're moving forward and trying to evolve ourselves. So it's this rubber band just pulling one way or the other. I think there's a lot of cool parts to that because I think that associates us with people that like a certain type of music, and there's a lot of opportunity for us to be associated with different types of music. So I don't know if there's good and bad to it. 

joan (Alan):
To answer your question specifically. Yes. We get told a lot that we do the eighties/nineties thing really well. And I, there's no shame in that. We admittedly loved those decades, and that's what we grew up on. There are times in the studio on a song that I'm like, let's reference this snare from this a 90s pop banger, or let’s lean toward that a little bit, but it might just be the snare, it might just be like a guitar tone. It might, you know, like song to song. So for the first little bit, I was a little in my head if someone compared us to, let's say, The 1975. Love that band, big fans, all that. When I started diving into the essence of what they were saying, it was that we used chorusing guitar on our song. And I'm like, “hey, if you would said this reminds you of Prince,” I would have been like, heck yeah. Because The 1975 didn't invent chorusing guitar. That's usually a younger mentality of like, that's their reference point, and they maybe don't know about Prince or about the seventies when chorusing was really heavy on guitar. So, it's never offensive sometimes I'm just like, okay, your reference point is newer than what we're actually aiming for. The only other thing I'd say is like, I think sometimes we get pigeonholed in the indie pop thing. I don't even really know what that means because genres can be so wide sweeping. 

EI:
It's very broad now, to be honest.

joan (Alan):
I never balk at like someone calling us a pop band. Through and through, we are trying to make whatever our version of that is just great meaningful pop music. So I hope what we're known for in the end. I guess in the end, I hope we're known for just sounding like joan, but that's the main goal. 

EI:
So what exactly can we expect from you specifically? What exactly can listeners be aware of and be on the wait for? What can people start marking on their calendars that they can see from joan? 

joan (Steven):
It's tough because there's not really an answer to that but it's also cool that we're kind of in that spot. We've started releasing music knowing that we've got a lot of songs that feel like an album, but we're being open-handed with it right now and just seeing what it shows itself to be, that batch of music. So right now we're releasing music that we're really excited about and we're releasing songs that feel really good, stand out, and fresh for us. Next year at some point there will be and I don't know when it is, but we're loving that it's not like nine months ahead that we know exactly what it is. We did that with our last album and we don't like doing the same thing twice. We're kind of just being more open with it and seeing what happens…It's just been really good year of pressing reset a little bit, not a hard reset, but a soft reset on everything. I think next year is going to be a really good one for us. 

EI:
You guys haven't been in one specific lane. You guys have taken other routes and different avenues and different paths and different walks about what you're going through in your career through music, so major power to you.

joan (Alan):
Yeah, and that’s no shade to any artist that does that, that's so boring to me. For us, our brains are so attuned to what's next? What's the next joan thing? How do we pivot? How do we keep growing? How do we evolve? And there's going to be stuff that we do that is quintessential us just because it's our DNA and in the music. But I just, think we'll get bored with ourselves if we just keep doing the same thing over and over again. So hopefully this next year will prove otherwise. 

EI:
Appreciate you guys, thank you for your time. Definitely going to check out your stuff and listen to more and more.