Check Aly & AJ‘s beautiful photoshoot for Office Magazine and interview they gave.
California girls Aly & AJ are back after 14 years with their new album, “a touch of the beat gets you up on your feet gets you out and then into the sun,” produced by Yves Rothman. The title of the album is borrowed from a lyric on the album that encapsulates what this 12-track record is all about 一 joy, story telling, sisterhood, freedom, and summer time.
First and foremost, I have to ask because me and my friends blast this track every other day and I hear it at 80% of every function that I go to. Did you think that your single ‘potential breakup song’ would become such an iconic staple in the pop community?
AJ: I mean, who would’ve ever known, that’s the beauty of music, you never know. When you produce what you produce and you put it out and you’re not sure if it’s going to land or not, no one can predict ahead and no one can predict if something resonates with your fans or not. I mean, we know our fans well enough now that we kind of know how to serve them, which is great because that’s really the industry we’re in. We serve the fans, but also make sure it feels right to Aly and I.
Aly: I think we’ve learned that more and more over the years that we want to make music that we feel really proud of years down the road. I do look back at our old songs and I think there’s some that we would probably do very differently, but at the end of the day, you can hopefully walk away from this experience in the music industry and have no regrets. I do think that AJ and I are at least on the path to that.
What was it like being under the spotlight at such a young age? I mean, you two played a monumental role in our current generations’ childhoods and you’re still making waves today. Did this have any impact on you both at all? Whether it be good or bad?
Aly: I think it’s a mixture for AJ and I think that we’re lucky that we had each other, I think that was a massive plus for us as people and as siblings. Just as young children growing up in the business, the fact that we had someone else to lean on that was going through it as well, was very helpful. I think the things that can be, damaging about being in the industry at that young of an age, as you can have low self-esteem because you feel like you’re not perfect enough or like everyone’s watching you. Thankfully, we kept a pretty normal life. We weren’t in the spotlight 24/7 and I think that was our parents and us just choosing to not take part in things that exposed us, to everyone every single day of the week. I think that overall, we had a really positive experience, as young children, actors and musicians. I definitely think that the ups and downs of what we went through have brought us to where we are today. Especially with this new music, the songs that we’re writing now and the experiences that we’ve had over the last 15 years as a band, I think all of that has been necessary to meet us at this moment.
Yeah and this is your first full project in 14 years, could I ask you why you both took such a long break? Perhaps you needed a break from the spotlight? How did you both find your way back to music?
AJ: It’s one of those things where we started so young that I think it’s inevitable that at some point you have to figure out: who am I as an adult artist? What do I really want to put out next? What do I want people to hear from me in the next 10 years? Is it going to stand the test of time later? I mean, there are so many questions that as an artist, you can ask yourself and everything you put out never goes away. I mean, it’s a timestamp on your career and just who you are as an individual. So we were like, ‘let’s take this time to figure out who we are outside of Hollywood records.’ We had obviously just come off the success of two records that were really prominent pieces in our art and I’m really, really proud of those records. I also felt like Aly and I needed to find out who we were, heading into our twenties and we had left the label. During that time, Aly never really focused on acting and looking back on it, I wish we hadn’t taken 10 years to be honest, but I’m also like, ‘we can’t erase the past’ and I’m glad that we took those 10 years because we ended up developing our craft and we kind of did it privately. Now, here’s the music for the first time in 14 years that we can introduce to people and I feel really strongly about it. Whereas if we could really step in that 10 year gap, I don’t think I would be very happy with some of that music.
Aly: Yeah. I think a lot of it is music that you’re making in a moment where you’re having growing pains. I think that we see that in some artists and in others, we don’t, because they start at an older age where maybe they’ve had those growing pains already, not in the public and not under the spotlight of the industry. So I think for us, it had a lot of positives. I mean, if I could go back and do everything again, would I have taken as long of a break, probably not. I think that time just kind of got away from us and then next thing we knew, we realized we haven’t made a record in a really long time, even though we were still songwriting and collaborating with other people during that time, we just were kind of holding all of those songs and those ideas and those sketches of songs close to our heart. We just didn’t want to let them go. We didn’t want to release them to the world.
AJ: It kind of makes me feel good that we had that window of time to just work on music and it was between Aly and I, and it’s just stuff that people won’t hear and if it leaks it leaks. Some stuff has, and that’s fine, but it was our moment to figure out who we were as adult artists and we got to do that privately.
