“It was just something we were willing to fight for. It was a war. We had to win, because we were young guys and we were already being told that we had no career left. And we’re like, ‘Wait, what are you talking about? We’ve sold millions of records. We’ve got fans all over the world. Our career is over?’ … No, our career is beginning, and we’re going to fight for it. We don’t care if there’s a net underneath this tightrope. We’re going to walk it and we’re going to get across.’”
So states Isaac Hanson, the eldest Hanson brother, joined on Zoom by Taylor Hanson while on tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of Underneath, Hanson’s career-defining third studio album. Hanson achieved massive success in 1997 with their quadruple-platinum, Grammy-nominated debut, Middle of Nowhere, and its ubiquitous single, “MMMBop,” when they were just kids (youngest brother Zac was only 11 at the time). But when a label merger shifted the band from Mercury Records to the Island Def Jam Music Group (“That was not the label that signed us; that’s the fundamental, important thing,” Issac stresses), and their more classic rock-leaning follow-up This Time Around didn’t sell nearly as well, Hanson decided they “literally had no option to live with this label,” as Taylor recalls.
And so, after a three-year struggle (“Which was frankly two years too long,” says Issac) to record and release their critical third LP (a “prolonged process” chronicled in Hanson’s documentary, Strong Enough to Break), Hanson did something that was almost unheard-of at the time, especially for such a young artist. They walked away from their major-label deal, and they issued that album on their own label instead. The result was the formation of Hanson’s 3CG Records and the release of 2004’s Underneath and No. 2 single “Penny & Me” — and Hanson have been quietly overseeing an indie empire in their native Tulsa ever since.
“We could not find ourselves in a situation where we could not control our own destiny, where we couldn’t control when the music came out or not,” recalls Isaac. “It was just a visceral need on our part to say, ‘Listen, we don’t know what the future holds, but if we’re not able to communicate with our fans, and share music with our fans as we see fit in reasonable time intervals that we are comfortable with, we’re going to be in real trouble.’”
“It was a very important time, and becoming independent was a choice that was bold, absolutely. … Maybe history will say it was hubris on our part,” chuckles Taylor, who recalls that “everyone, everyone, everyone” thought Hanson’s decision to vacate their position “at the top of the biggest music company on Earth” was insane. (Keep in mind, this was three years before famously Radiohead left Capitol Records and self-released In Rainbows.) “Artists, friends, and still even artists now don’t fully grasp what it meant and what it means, unfortunately. But we really were starting anew. And think about how wild it was too, that this was just six years after breaking out with Middle of Nowhere and really achieving something that very few bands do.”
Taylor declines to “go into the weeds” of exactly how Hanson managed to legally extricate themselves when Island Def Jam “basically wouldn’t let us leave willingly,” as he doesn’t want to focus too much on 20-year-old “label turmoil” — although Issac credits to Hanson’s then-manager, Allen Kovac, “a notoriously feisty human,” for making that happen. Regardless, looking back, Isaac says going indie was a logical progression for the group, because Hanson, who grew up on “‘50s rock ‘n’ roll and the Jackson 5,” never really fit into what was going on in the TRL pop world at the time.
“I think we always felt, even at the height of our most successful and most popular stuff, that we were kind of the odd man out,” Isaac muses. “We were connecting with a similar age audience [that listened to teen-pop], but we had a lot more musical and actual friendships with bands a handful of years older than us — Blues Traveler or Johnny Lang or Third Eye Blind or whatever. Those were the ones that we connected more with on a personal level. So, I think we’d always felt in this weird spot, where we kind of had to determine our own destiny in some large capacity. And so, when it came to making this decision, we were in a battle where we felt like there was no other option except win. We just had to get this record out somehow.”
“When we made this album, we were saying something that to us seemed very, very obvious. It wasn’t actually like we went and made some art-rock bizarro album. I mean, we didn’t go like, ‘This is the real me!’ in that sense. We just stayed our course,” says Taylor. “What’s so cool about the tour we’re on now is it’s really framing what we were trying to say right at that moment, which is, ‘Hey, we’re a powerpop band. We’re a garage band.’ Underneath was very, very, very, very steeped in us loving that music… and that was probably part of why we had the confidence to wade through being doubted, because we were listening to and loving all the bands that influenced us — loving Travis and Coldplay’s first record, David Gray, Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Damien Rice, and then discovering Matthew Sweet and all the powerpop stuff and early Raspberries and Big Star. We were loving music, and loving being in this band that had already sort of strangely conquered the world as a band — most bands don’t ever get to do what we’d already done. And it just seemed insane, insane that anyone wouldn’t expect that the future was coming. It was not behind us.”
Hanson ended up co-writing Underneath’s gorgeous, goosebump-raising title track with Matthew Sweet, “an amazing writer and a lovely guy,” who was actually opening for Hanson on the Underneath anniversary tour until he suffered a debilitating stroke in Toronto this month. [Editor’s note: This Hanson interview was conducted before Sweet’s stroke.] Other notable collaborators on the album included Gregg Alexander, Greg Wells, Michelle Branch, Joe Chiccarelli, Luis Conte, Danny Kortchmar, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Abe Laboriel, and Sam Farrar — whose band Phantom Planet, in another full-circle moment, is currently opening for Hanson’s Underneath tour. While the independently released Underneath may not have been the commercial juggernaut that Middle of Nowhere was, it was a turning point for Hanson’s career — solidly establishing their reputation as credible artists, and erasing the boy-band stigma they’d been wrongly saddled with.
“[Underneath] is kind of a coming-of-age record in a lot of respects,” says Isaac, now age 44. (Hard as it may be to believe, Taylor is now 41, and little Zac is 39.) “It’s guys who have gone through their adolescence being excited about music, then in their later teen years they’re still pursuing the dream, making that second record. By the time you get to the third record, it’s like, ‘Who am I, and what am I really trying to do in the world?’ There have always been themes like that in previous Hanson records, but this record really cements it. It talks about the more painful side of growing into adulthood. Not surprisingly, we took on a lot of painful challenges in the process of getting the record released at all, so it’s both this coming-of-age story in the sense of us as writers, as musicians, as human beings, but also very much on a business and personal band-career level. It was kind of like, ‘Hey, we graduated college. Time to go out on our own.’”
Isaac says he and his brothers “saw how volatile the business was” at the time of 3CG Records’ formation, an era when record-label mergers and layoffs were epidemic and illegal downloading was a scary new industry concern. But they were in a unique position to launch an indie label, because their early success had coincided with the advent of the internet — so they knew how to have a direct line to their devoted fans. When Middle of Nowhere was breaking, at a time when Taylor recalls skeptics in the industry “thought websites were cute,” Hanson’s website was already up and running at full force with chat rooms, fan blogs, and access to exclusive backstage content. By 2000, Hanson had even launched their own ISP, allowing fans to get dial-up service through Hanson’s website — another “massive risk” in their career that ultimately paid off.
“I think our biggest advantage was we were the same age of the emerging active internet user,” explains Taylor. “And because of our age, we understood the potential of it, the possibility of it, and the changing tide in a more visceral way than a lot of the older folks who were already established in the music business. We felt, ‘This is a real opportunity.’ Did we take perfect advantage of it in every moment? No. But did we proactively seek to connect with our fans in that way? Absolutely. … That’s why there’s still active forums and fan clubs and street-team leaders all over the world for our band. They stayed out there, talking to each other. And that’s not meant to be egocentric to say, it just is a reality of what occurred.”
Isaac admits that when Hanson first went independent two decades ago and embarked on an acoustic tour that they were “purposefully underplaying,” it was “kind of unnerving as a band that had played arenas only five years before to be like, ‘We’re going to play a club.’ And the industry believed that we were literally just a club band at that point. … We were being told, ‘You’re never going to fill these rooms.’ … And in some cases, we were going, ‘Are 10 people going to show up? Are 1,000 people going to show up? Are 50 people coming?’ You’re still dealing with that reality that this is very personal. You believe in yourself, but you’re still like, ‘Is it going to work? I don’t know if it’s going to happen.’ So, the fact that we had those fans that were in [internet] forums, it gave us that confidence to at least be like, ‘Hey, this is a community. It’s not just us sitting in a studio, believing our songs are good.’ We have a connection with a lot of fans, and really, we would not be here without them, no question.”
And so, 20 years after “being told by the agents and the man and the previous management and previous label, ‘Your career is over, just hang it up, you’re done,’” Hanson have survived and thrived, against all odds, in an “industry which has been increasingly focused on very, very, very short-term wins.” They’ve basically proven that they right all along, even if that was never their overt agenda. They’re still on tour, selling out shows, and they’re still making music for their loyal fans — on their own terms. Those fans continue to be inspired by the brothers, so Hanson’s interview with Lyndsanity concludes with a message of hope from Issac, a lesson hard-learned from his group’s Underneath experience.
“Perseverance, I think, is the strongest theme in Hanson songs. It’s not surprising that a band that always felt a little bit misunderstood, either because of our youth or our pop sensibilities or whatever, would also have a lot of feelings about perseverance being important,” notes Isaac. “It’s actually something that I want to encourage people to think about. If you’ve got something in your head and in your heart that just won’t go away and it’s just bugging you, and you’re like, ‘I gotta do this, but it’s scary,’ if that scariness feels a little bit more like, ‘Yeah, it’s scary, but if I did it, I know I’d be happier than where I am,’ then you’ve really got to trust that in your heart. You really have to be willing to say to yourself, ‘Is there something more important than the fear I have that is keeping me from doing this?’ In other words, I love the definition of courage: Courage is not the absence of fear. It is a recognition that there is something more important than the fear. So, you’ve got to be willing to take the bullets and the curveballs and keep on pushing — because when we looked at rooms in cases when [our concerts] didn’t sell out and it looked scary, we just kept going. And so, you just have to believe in yourself and realize that there’s something more important than the fear. And at least at the end of the day, you can say, ‘I gave it my best.’”
Watch Taylor and Isaac Hanson’s full, extended Lyndsanity interview in the video at the top of this article.