Here’s to You – Wonder/Wander

By starrymag | February 8, 2019

By: Jamie Steinberg

 

 

Q) How would you describe your sound?

 

Greg: I would describe it as ethereal, surreal sounding rock. Kind of dreamy and thought provoking, but still jam-able.

 

Mike: I would also say jam-able, for sure, and say that it’s an interesting combination of pop, rock and indie music woven together.

 

Charlie: We’re like a fusion of rock and electronic. The guitars can be pretty punchy at times which helps drive the music and the synth elements/electronic glitchy stuff gives it a more ethereal vibe and fills the space which helps to convey more emotion.

 

Stephan: If I were to describe it with a mood, it would be: energetic.

 

Q) Who are some of your musical influences?

 

Greg: Our musical influences are pretty much all over the place. Mine recently have been coming from a lot of progressive/mathy stuff, also just from straight pop records. It’s kind of a weird mix. Like, I love Dance Gavin Dance recently, but I also really love Now, Now.

 

Mike: We all have a huge and different range of musical influences that we personally draw from. Lately, for me, it’s been a lot of James Bay, Charlie Puth, and Matchbox Twenty.

 

Charlie: My musical influences have changed a lot over the years. Linkin Park, Sum 41, Blink-182 are all bands that made me want to join a band. Then, in my early days of HTY, I was listening to Fall Out Boy, Silverstein, The Fall Of Troy and a bunch of lesser known MySpace bands. Now I listen to a lot more electronic stuff, Zedd, Koan Sound, AU5, The Midnight.

 

Stephan: Lately, my musical influences have been Vulfpeck, Anderson .Paak, Joji, and MUTEMATH.

 

Q) Talk about the story behind your new song “Burning Alive”

 

Charlie: “Burning Alive” was about an experience I had when visiting a friend at college. I had just broken up with my first long-term girlfriend and entered into the single life of a college student and met a girl at a party. We wound up ditching our friends and party hopping all night meeting new people in an unfamiliar town. I felt so revitalized from all the emotional strain on me at the time that it gave me exactly what I needed to move on and be happy again. When Greg and I tracked out his demo a little further, I wrote the lyrics for the verse and chorus pretty effortlessly when I decided that’s the subject that we were going to write about.

 

Q) What do you think it is about the song that fans connect to?

 

Greg: I think they may be able to just feel the dreamy vibe of the song, while still having a driving rhythm to it. It’s very scenic, the song. Actually, I feel like our whole album is like that, scenic.

 

Mike: The lyrics of the song call out a lot of visuals. For me, that just makes it kind of easy to watch the story unfold in your head as the lyrics pass by. It’s a pretty positive song that speaks to one of those unexpected, yet crazy and fun experiences, where you just get lost in the moment. We all have stories like that that we can relate to.

 

Charlie: I think a lot of people can relate to the feeling of college romance. It’s like the feeling of been a young adult and finally being on your own, meeting people, doing stupid stuff. Anyone that has experiencing like that I feel can relate to the song in some way.

 

Stephan: I think songs like Burning Alive that have a pulsating rhythm and upbeat sound kind of taps into our animal/rhythmic instincts, which makes them even easier to connect to.

 

Q) How does the video for the track play into the message behind it?

 

Greg: The video is kind of just abstract images and scenes from the song brought to life.

 

Charlie: The video doesn’t follow any actual story arc, but it’s composed of beautiful scenery and pulls some of the imagery from the song. It’s very wholesome because there’s some dancing and kissing scenes of me and Sam, which I believe are very convincing and that’s probably because we’re dating and in love in real life.

 

Stephan: I think the music video more so connects with the overall work that is Wonder/Wander. From the artwork and the aesthetic, it all just matches up quite nicely.

 

Q) What is your song writing process? Do you need music before you can create lyrics?

 

Greg: This varies every time. Most of the time yes, but sometimes music and lyrics come at once.

 

Mike: Usually, we’ll start with an 8-bar loop or a chorus chord progression or something along those lines to get us started. Music has usually been what starts the songs creation, but along the line there have been moments where we come up with lyrics and alter the music just to fit those lyrics, so these two concepts can get a little bit tangled in a cool way.

 

Charlie: The approach changes slightly for each song, but generally someone will have an idea and it will get put into Ableton as an 8-bar loop, and then we all meet up and flesh it out into a demo from there. Normally lyrics will come after we have the music for the verse and chorus.

 

Stephan: My favorite aspect about our songwriting is that we are all very much involved. No one is left out and we all have so many ideas coming together that we end up getting some pretty awesome results.

 

Q) How much of hand do you have in the production of your music?

 

Greg: A huge hand. We all do. We all really fight to get things to sound just the way our vision is for the song.

 

Mike: We all bring something different to the table in this area. Charlie is a total pro when it comes to sound design, electronic music, etc. He plays a huge role in making our awesome synth sounds, samples, and whatnot. Greg and I studied audio recording techniques together in college and Steph is also extremely knowledgeable when it comes to recording. When we tie all of those things together, our writing process becomes super-efficient and helps us to get just about everything we want into our demos.

 

Charlie: We do most of the production work before we even hit the studio. We want to make sure we know everything we want before we go in. We realized that we’re just always happier with the overall end product when we’re hands on with every step of the creative process.

 

Stephan: Over the past ten years we still have never worked with any “big time” producers that have a huge hand in altering a bands’ sound – not that there’s anything wrong with that, but to this day we’re still producing our own music from the ground up.

 

Q) What can fans expect from a live Here’s To You performance?

 

Greg: Hopefully a lot of fun. Maybe a cover or two?

 

Mike: High energy, musicality, cool changes from the original recordings of our songs and definitely a couple of covers.

 

Stephan: Definitely a whole lot of positivity, crowd interaction and HIGH energy. We sweat our asses off on-stage and we hope our crowds sweat with us.

 

Charlie: We always try to involve the audience somehow, either through covers, really drastic dynamic shifts, chanting parts of songs that we’ll teach them. We just try to have a good time with everyone and create a synergistic relationship with the crowd.

 

Q) With your upcoming Wonder/Wander series, how did you decide to release it as three “phases?”

 

Greg: We think that the attention span of people in the digital age has completely changed, rightly so. It’s changed even within myself, I notice it. Information has such a shorter expiration date on it now. It’s very interesting. So, this way, we spread it out and have more focus on each part of the album.

 

Mike: We actually also recorded the album in phases. Along the same line of thought that Greg just stated, recording the album this way has helped us to really hone in and get really focused on each song, more so than if we had recorded 12 tracks at once. We hope that releasing the album this way achieves similar results with our listeners–an easier way to not miss any details or songs off of the album.

 

Stephan: It’s a great way to keep people interested and listening throughout 2019. If you don’t end up liking something off the first Phase, you’ll be sure to like something on the second or third. It’s a very interesting experiment, that’s for sure.

 

Charlie: We had some of the songs written already, some more complete than others, and also noticed other artists doing the release in parts idea. So since we were eager to put it out, we toyed with the idea, and got really excited when we realized that this was a better way for people to absorb music nowadays anyway.

 

Q) Each phase has four tracks. How did you decide which phase each track fell into?

 

Greg: This is a very good question! And it’s also something that we deliberated a lot with. We didn’t want too many similar sounding songs on each phase. So, we kind of split the phases so they would have even energy levels, if that makes sense? Like, the first phase has “Drive” and “Burning Alive,” which are super great and high energy. But it also has “Don’t Remember Me,” which is the saddest song we’ve ever written and it’s so delicate. The other phases kind of balance out like that? I guess that’s the key to this all, balance.

 

Mike: Like Greg said, balance is a key word in describing our thought process when it came to picking, which tracks belonged with each phase. There’s a fair amount of songs on the album that represent a coherent sound, similar to “Burning Alive.” There are also songs that stray away from the usual Here’s To You like “Don’t Remember Me,” which is essentially a piano ballad. We spaced out all of the songs that might be a little more unconventional for the sake of balancing the phases out nicely.

 

Q) Phase 1 drops on Feb. 15th. How do you plan to celebrate the release?

 

Greg: Promoting it as much as possible, ya know?

 

Mike: Are you suggesting that we have a party? A release show? Hmm.

 

Stephan: Definitely a party, definitely a huge social media push and definitely more announcements. [wink]

 

Charlie: Lots of listening and promoting to family! And maybe a glass of champagne. [laughs]

 

Q) What do you hope listeners take away as a message from Wonder/Wander as a whole?

 

Greg: I just want them to have a good album to listen to. Hopefully our music helps with them with something or makes them feel good. Whatever works for them.

 

Mike: All of our songs stem from all four of our own real-life experiences. At the end of the day, we’re four normal guys and there’s a really good chance that other people have experienced some of the things that we’ve went through and wrote about in this album. Sometimes it’s just good to hear, “Yeah man, I’ve been through that, too!”

 

Stephan: It’s a little cliché, but I think overall, we just hope everyone has a incredibly positive time listening to the album, ya know? I want this to be the album that people turn to when they need a dose of happiness in their lives.

 

Charlie: I hope that everyone can take away something unique from it. I hope that there’s a chorus or a phrase from a verse or bridge that will really pull the listener back to a fond memory or experience from their life and keep them coming back to the album.

 

Q) Where are some of your favorite places to perform and what makes those locations so significant to you?

 

Greg: Lots of local venues in New York and Long Island have good memories attached to them for me.

 

Mike: Yeah, there are a lot of venues in Long Island and NYC that have played big roles in all of our musical careers, inside and outside of Here’s To You whether it was playing or just attending another bands show. I would also love to go back to some of the places out of state that we’ve played on tours.

 

Stephan: Any outdoor stage/festival is awesome; I absolutely love playing shows outdoors.

 

Q) Who would you most like to collaborate with on a song in the future?

 

Greg: Carly Rae Jepsen.

 

Mike: Panic! At The Disco.

 

Stephan: Charlie Puth.

 

Charlie: Tough one, I’d say Zedd if I could only choose one.

 

Q) What album/band are you currently listening to and why do you dig them?

 

Greg: Been listening to Charlie Puth’s Voicenotes recently. Very, very, very, very, very, very good.

 

Mike: Thank you, Greg! Totally the same. Charlie Puth is so good and is probably one of the smartest musicians out there right now. He has a ridiculous range of musicality that’s so obvious in his music.

 

Stephan: I’ve been listening to an incredible album called Whack World by Tierra Whack. I slept on it in 2018, but the album has an entire 15-minute music video for the whole album that just got nominated for a Grammy!

 

Charlie: Endless Summer by The Midnight. It’s like this Synthwave band, which is becoming bigger these days. But I love the sound design and textures they add. Incredible producers and writers.

 

Q) You are a part of social media. Why is that such an important way for you to connect with your fans?

 

Greg: Feel like the answer is easy on this one. It’s pretty much what everyone turns to nowadays. So, why not?

 

Stephan: It’s weird because I can’t imagine someone trying to do anything successful these days without having a social media presence…is that sad? I can’t tell.

 

Charlie: It’s just something that almost everyone is on nowadays, so we try to keep our presence alive on those platforms so people who listen to our music know we appreciate their support. And we love hearing from them!

 

Q) What would you like to say to everyone who is a fan and supporter of you and your work?

 

Greg: Thank you so much. Thanks for sticking with us and I hope you enjoy Wonder/Wander’s release throughout the year.

 

Mike: Thanks so much for checking out this interview! Be sure to stay tuned for our multitude of releases this year!

 

Stephan: Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for even giving us the time of day in a sea of hundreds and thousands of different artists. We love you.

 

Charlie: If you’re a long-time fan, thank you so much for sticking around! I know we’ve been a little stagnant lately, but we truly appreciate the continued support. And if you’re hearing us for the first time I hope you stick around and you find something in our music that keeps you listening.