Do you consider Twen to be a DIY band?
Jane: We’ve set up our own label. I would love to meet the person that could do absolutely every single part of it on their own, but that’s the limitation of DIY. You do have to work with other people; it’s not completely solitary, but I think more community-based or relationship-based. That’s how we like to think about it.
We were booking our shows up until 18 months ago. We have our friend Chris, who Ian went to school with, who is our booking agent. It’s a relationship we have, we even dog-sit for him. Then we just started with a person to help us with the more tech side of Meta and the disgusting inner workings of all of that. He’s based in Canada, and he’s going to come to our show when we play there. It’s very person-to-person based.
Ian: We’ve never been bankrolled by anybody else, so we have done everything ourselves. That means all of the creative aspects, all of the merchandising, all of the financing, the booking, all of the production, the engineering.
For this new record, we did a small PR campaign with somebody who did it on the cheap for us. She has a job at a label but was freelancing for us. Same thing with digital marketing. We’ve been a band for almost 10 years and this is the first time where we’ve ever had a marketing budget.
I’m really thankful our first record was put out on a small-to-mid-sized indie label because it shows you all the inefficiencies of even small bureaucracies and the ways in which organizations spend money that you wouldn’t spend as an individual. Knowing what parts of that budget and that record advance got spent where was a very educational thing. It’s allowed us to make smart decisions with how we spend the little bit of money we do have. I tend to think that we’re pretty fucking efficient compared to most other bands on labels.
The algorithm worked for me; I discovered you when the “Godlike” video was served up to me on YouTube this past summer. That song is such a great way to be introduced to your music. I didn’t realize the record had come out until about three weeks ago.
Ian: It came out November 4th. Year-end “wraps” are such a thing now because of Spotify. I don’t know that it was a good time to release the album because people were already deciding what their year-end lists were. “But you haven’t even heard our record yet, so how could you know what’s in your top ten?”
Jane: I don’t even care. We decide everything by when it’s convenient for us.
Ian: November 4 was an election day; it was a Tuesday. We got several comments from people who said, “I remember when release days were on Tuesday.” That tends to be how we do things. We’re not doing it the way you’re supposed to be doing it.
Jane: People are still discovering our last release, One Stop Shop, which came out in 2022. We’re not caught in the hope of “it needs to do so well in the first week of release.”
Ian: Our ethos tends to be: if it’s good, it’ll reach people in its own time. You don’t really have to worry about doing X amount of singles staggered four or five weeks apart.
I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but there’s a quote I remember by a journalist: “There’s a kid every single day discovering the Beatles for the first time, and for that kid, the Beatles is a brand new band.” The idea of timing reviews and best-of lists around a release date is arbitrary. If it’s new to us, then it’s new.
Jane: Spot on. We hear that so much. It matters more to us whether it is sustainable and convenient for us to make the thing so that we still have our enthusiasm and we’re not burnt out. Waiting for the first record to release when it was “the right time” felt so stale; it felt like it came out too late.
Ian: You get all these middlemen. Lawyers will kick a contract back and forth for six months, while their fees go up, splitting hairs over the legalese. You get managers who think you should do six singles before the record comes out because they have their strategy. By the time the record comes out, it may not feel right.
Jane: No one knows shit anyway because there’s so many outliers that prove the rule wrong. That’s why with “Godlike,” we actually consulted an astrologer for what date it should be released.
Ian: The astrologer said August 12th after she compared both of our charts. She was like, “August 12th is the date to communicate for you guys.” And we did it, and it’s been the fastest-growing single that we’ve ever had, a quarter million hits on YouTube now, and we didn’t put any money into it. It was all organic. The astrologer was fucking right.
What does the phrase “fate euphoric” mean to you? Is it intentional that the album opens with a song that has “fate euphoric” in the lyrics and then closes with a song called “Fate Euphoric”?
Jane: I’m glad you noticed. With everything we do, it’s intentional, though it does feel like it just happens on its own. Similarly to how people say a book or a record is writing itself, I’m just half-present mind and half autonomous.
That phrase, “fate euphoric,” comes from this word-salady, melody-driven place. That phrase, “fate euphoric,” showed up in one song, and then it showed up in another song.
Ian: Jane was just singing along to a loop I had going, and the phrase kind of downloaded for her.
Jane: That’s not an intuitive phrase. We even had some misspellings already, like “Euphoria,” because there’s a very popular show named that. We thought about if it was too close to another word, but we liked using a term that wasn’t so pedestrIan.
Ian: In terms of the first and last song, it was like films where you have an overture at the beginning and a closing sequence …
Jane: … that brings you right back to the beginning. That was the concept of the record itself, a wheel.
You mentioned that you had TCM (Turner Classic Movies) on during the writing and recording process. Are there any songs on the album inspired by movies or TV shows?
Jane: There’s this 1971 film called The Boyfriend with Twiggy. It’s set in the 1920s and has these big stage production, chorus girl scenes. It felt like a music video. We used that as an inspiration for the “Allnighter” music video, with the moon shape and that ‘20s feel. We couldn’t replicate the production of that movie, but the video was inspired by it for sure.
When you start writing a new album, is it built from the ground up?
Jane: No, that never really happens for us because there’s always something we left on the table with the last one. There’s a guitar riff or a vocal melody or lyrical concept that’s really cool but we ran out of time or it wasn’t hitting.
Ian: Both of the last two records have had records that preceded them that we scrapped, more or less, and we’d end up wiping it and saying, “Let’s start again.”
Jane: That was the case for “Godlike.” The chorus was actually an outro to another song that I actually hate now. The melody was very repetitive, so we scrapped the song.
Ian: So that outro became its own song. Then the bassline from that song became the bassline for “Starmaker.” We’re always harvesting organs.
Ian: About half of Fate Euphoric had instrumental parts that go back two or three years. “Tapdance in Limbo,” “Keep Your Company,” and “Godlike” are all two or three years old. “Tumbleweed,” “Prelude to Waterloo,” “Allnighter,” “The Center,” and “Fate Euphoric” are brand new. They only took five or six months from start to finish.
Did making the record feel like a struggle, or did the music just fall out of you?
Jane: The writing process is my favorite part; I wish I could be doing that all the time though I love touring and making all the visuals. But the actual recording was a bit painful. We were in many different locations and using our drummer, Forrest Raup, who is in Brooklyn. We’re not in Brooklyn all the time so it was remote, lots of files going back and forth, and just getting the right sound. Ian was taking the brunt of everything. I’d say it was some of the least painful writing, it felt really easy to come up with new things.
Ian: When we get bitchy with each other, it’s not about the music; it’s about patience. One of us wants to get it done and the other needs more time to develop a riff. I start to lose my mind because you’ll be making a demo and just throwing shit down on tape for fun, and then you go back to re-record it and you can’t figure out how you got that original guitar tone. I can’t find the line between what was a demo and what should be the final record. Demos often become the final record. You’re working in the same session for a year as it evolves and grows and it becomes hard to see the forest from the trees.
Jane’s first vocal in the demo will always have this really special something. If she writes something and immediately puts it to tape, it comes out immaculate. If you go back a month later to do the final take, it sounds contrived. There’s a beautiful saying from the NigerIan author Chinua Achebe, a saying among kids that the “first voice” always makes it to God. That makes me think of you, Jane.
Do you ever think of your songs as siblings? For example, “Keep Your Company” feels like it inhabits the same world as “Godlike.”
Ian: I’m glad you noticed that. That’s how I think of songs like the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” and “Paperback Writer.” I don’t know if they were an A-side and B-side on a single, but I know what you mean.
Jane: I tend to think of “Ha Ha Home,” from our last record, and “Godlike” as siblings, even though they’re quite different. There’s also “Tapdance in Limbo” and “One Stop Shop.”
For these past two records, I’ve viewed the track list as a pie graph: you have a funk element, an up-tempo rock element, a groovy loop-based element, and a ballad. I think about how much of each type I’m willing to put on an album so that the listener doesn’t get too much of one thing.
From: https://bigtakeover.com/interviews/interview-twen
