Check Aly & AJ‘s beautiful photoshoot for Paper Magazine and interview they gave.
California seems like a great topic to start on, considering the album’s direction. Did that influence unfold naturally or was it intentional from the beginning?
AJ: A combination of both. We wanted to make a record capturing the feeling you get when it’s a perfect, beautiful day in California and you’re driving down PCH, or you’re even going down the street to pump your gas. There’s this energy here that feels so specific and we wanted to capture that with the music, and to make this record feel like a West Coast record, so that it shows our upbringing. We are California kids — we were born and raised here, so we wanted to fingerprint that.
Where did you grow up in California?
Aly: The Valley and then Laurel Canyon.
AJ: We were born in Torrance. We’ve migrated all over the place.How much of this album happened during lockdown and how much was done before?
AJ: A lot of the songwriting was done in 2019, actually. There are a couple songs that are 4-5 years old like “Pretty Places” and “Slow Dancing,” but those are the oldest. The record really took off in 2019, so a lot of it was actually done, although in 2020 we decided to revisit everything. We wanted to make sure the lyrics were up to par, to dust off the old cobwebs. The pandemic hit and I was filming a show, so we had to take a moment to make sure we had a solid album before starting production. We did write one song in particular during quarantine, which was “Stomach,” which we wrote on Zoom with a good friend of ours who was in Arizona at the time.Aly: We were grateful that we had written a majority of the music in person with people, because it would have been hard to have created an entire album over Zoom. The fact that we had the majority of our work already blueprinted really helped us, and then it was just a matter of getting a group that felt safe all cutting in one room. Ben, our drummer, was a part of that group. We did the majority of the vocals at our producer’s place, Saturn Sound, so it was a mixture of those two studios.
The music really captures this energy of re-entering the world — of getting back out.
Aly: It is strange — we changed some lyrics, for instance “Slow Dancing.” That one really changed, but that was also written four and a half years ago, I want to say. We unearthed it for this record because we started playing it for our producer and he loved the chorus. He wanted to make it a quarantine love song — not too much on the nose, where people are like, “That’s all I can think about when I listen to it,” but we did change a few lyrics to specifically feel like they were relevant for the times. Everything else was pretty much there, just some tweaks, but it does feel like a very timely record with the state of the world.Do you remember when you came up with the lyric that would become the album title?
AJ: We decided that was the album name in June of 2020, so very much in the middle of the pandemic we decided this is the album we want to come out with in 2021. We hoped we would all be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and now we are, which is great. That lyric was written in 2019, in December, funny enough, because that was part of a batch of songs that Aly started with Jorge Elbrecht in Denver. They’d started this culmination of a few songs that started the record — “Don’t Need Nothing,” “Paradise,” a song called “Get Over Here” — those are all tracks that started the process.
Aly: We ended up not putting “Get Over Here” on the record, but I think it will come out later this year as a deluxe track. “Don’t Need Nothing” was the second song I wrote with Jorge ever, and AJ got into some sessions with him when we made another trip to Denver to write more.
AJ: I remember listening to the demos of those first three songs while I was shooting a show, just in the hair and makeup trailer, and Aly was like, “This is what I’ve started with Jorge” and I was like, “This is awesome. This is definitely the start of a record,” and “Don’t Need Nothing” had that original lyric in it. That song has always been something that speaks to us in a way.
Aly: It’s also my favorite to play. It feels really good live, we don’t really fuck it up ever in rehearsal. Other songs, over time, you have to work out a little bit more with your band and it’s always interesting to see which songs those are — those slowly reveal themselves in rehearsal.
AJ: You even saw them today — “Lucky to Get Him,” “Listen!!!” — we haven’t played them in [a while] and they were rusty. Sometimes songs come back and it’s like, “Wow we never left the stage,” and other times they need more help.
