“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 20^th 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.

Hanson in 2024. (photo: Jonathan Weiner)

“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.

But tragically, new Tinted Windows music was not in the cards, as Schlesinger died of coronavirus complications on April 1, 2020. However, Taylor reveals that a Tinted Windows reunion had been in the talking stages, if only the four band members could finally figure out how to coordinate their busy schedules.

Twenty-one years ago, when Hanson released one of the earwormiest singles of the ’90s, the Jackson 5-reminiscent “MMMBop,” the song was summarily dismissed by many music snobs as a novelty hit, mere boy-band fluff. However, a new orchestral version of the perennial pop classic on String Theory — the brotherly trio’s career-retrospective double-album featuring gorgeous symphonic arrangements by Beck’s father, Oscar-winning composer/conductor David Campbell — not only puts the focus on Hanson’s impeccable popcraft and musicianship in general, but on “MMMBop’s” surprisingly dark and downright existential lyrics, which come into sharp relief when backed by Campbell’s lush strings.

“You have so many relationships in this life/Only one or two will last/You go through all the pain and strife/Then you turn your back and they’re gone so fast,” the Hansons bittersweetly harmonize. “So hold on the ones who really care/In the end they’ll be the only ones there/And when you get old and start losing your hair/Can you tell me who will still care?”

Sure, they’re all married fathers in their mid-30s now, but Isaac, Taylor, and Zac Hanson were only 16, 14, and 11, respectively, at the time of “MMMBop’s” release — and they were even younger when they wrote it. (Hanson have been a band for more than 25 years, and they actually made three local records before they ever landed a major-label deal.) Why on earth were they worried about losing their loved ones — and their hair! — when they were barely preteens?

“We had already experienced some trauma,” Zac, age 33, tells Yahoo Entertainment, referring to the many childhood sacrifices he and his older brothers made when they decided to chase their professional dreams. “We were seeing that we were outcasts.”

“We were traumatized. … We knew we were weird, and we knew we were making choices that were about the long tail,” adds 37-year-old Isaac — noting that “Weird,” another early composition that eventually appeared on Hanson’s breakthrough album, Middle of Nowhere, was also inspired by the brothers’ boyhood showbiz struggles.

“We were already having to make these decisions that were based on a love of music, a love of this craft, but also seeing that to do something you love, to pursue this thing, you have to give up other things,” says Zac, who was 8 years old when Hanson started gigging around the group’s native Tulsa, Okla. “You have to give up the crowd of friends for the future, of what could be, with not a lot of guarantees. It could just as easily have become a failure as it could be a lifestyle.”

“It’s the getting up every day, and trying, and realizing that you’re not necessarily going to get applause at the end of it. … We got turned down by pretty much every label there was,” says Taylor, 35, recalling Hanson’s demoralizing early gigs. “But the show that ultimately got us with an A&R person, that heard it and said, ‘Yeah, I want to sign it,’ that was a show that I would never hope anyone saw. It was terrible! There was like four people, watching paint dry.”

“All you have to say is: We opened for a girl singing karaoke,” Zac quips.

“Karaoke to Garth Brooks! It was on the flatbed of a truck, at a little festival,” Taylor chuckles. “The crummy show turns out to be the one where just the right person that understands gets on board and helps you take the next leap.”

Hanson performing in the 1990s. (Photo: George De Sota/Redferns)

The struggles weren’t over for Hanson once they got that big break and signed to Mercury/PolyGram Records. Middle of Nowhere did go on to sell 10 million copies worldwide, and “MMMBop” went to No. 1 in 27 countries, earned a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year, and topped critics’ polls in the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and Spin — but many other rockist critics were less kind. Then, shifts in the record business caused Hanson’s excellent follow-up album, This Time Around, to get lost in the shuffle, after the trio was transferred to Island Def Jam following the merging of PolyGram and Universal in 1999.

“We all watched the music industry start to crumble, with label mergers happening, and we were right at the heart of it. We were one of the bands that had been successful, so we were held onto as opposed to dropped,” Taylor explains, to which Isaac adds: “But we wish we would’ve been dropped, man! Holy crap.”

By the time Hanson released their third album, 2004’s Underneath, they’d gone independent — one of the first massive mainstream bands to do so — setting up shop with their own Tulsa-based 3CG Records. At the end of that album’s tour, Hanson played Carnegie Hall “as a statement to that whole project,” says Taylor, and the critical tides continued to turn. “We then began to set different [goals] throughout the career, because we need to keep reminding our audience, and ourselves, what this band’s about. So, we’ve continued to try to put ourselves out there and try new things.” The 23 tracks (several new or previously unreleased) on String Theory comprise Hanson’s sixth 3CG Records album, their most ambitious and joyfully noisy to date.

“There’s a funny thing when you start to analyze our career and our music,” Zac muses. “String Theory is this story about sort of aspiration, and fortitude, and fighting, and coming out the other side with your life’s conclusion. But when you look at our songs, what’s ‘MMMBop’ about? What’s ‘Where’s the Love’ about? What’s ‘I Will Come to You’ about, and ‘Weird,’ and — work all the way through the Hanson catalog — even songs like ‘Get the Girl Back’? They’re really all about ‘What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?’ That’s the story in so many of our songs.”

Despite their career ups and downs, Hanson managed to avoid the scandals, meltdowns, and general pitfalls suffered by many other child stars because, as Zac puts it, “We had the opposite of ‘stage parents.’ They weren’t trying to make us realize some dream they had. It was our dream.” Ruminating about other artists who weren’t so lucky, from Michael Jackson to Justin Bieber, who did go off the rails, Taylor adds:  “I would argue, in most of those cases, it’s a really challenging situation internally that happens on a huge scale. Meaning those relationships, with the family, were toxic — way before there was success. There’s plenty of [notorious child star] names we all know where you’re like, ‘Not super-surprised about that one.’”

This explains why Isaac, Taylor, and Zac have been so supportive of their much-younger brother, 24-year-old Mac Hanson, the sixth of the total seven Hanson siblings — who is finally pursuing his own music career, on his own terms, with his rock ‘n’ soul band Joshua & the Holy Rollers. “Benevolent big brother” Isaac even produced the Holy Rollers’ debut single, “Hey Hey.”

“For a long time, we’ve all known [Mac] was super-musical and very creative,” says Zac. “I think he finally reached a point where, through the combination of it being too compelling to avoid it anymore, and his no longer afraid to be ‘the other Hanson brother,’ he finally went, ‘S*** I’m just gonna do this!’ It shouldn’t be surprising that he’s musical, considering we all have the same genes.”

On the subject of family — and genes — Isaac, Taylor, and Zac incredibly have a dozen children between them, with Taylor and his wife of 16 years currently expecting their sixth child. It’s quite likely that at least one member of this new Hanson generation will decide to pursue music as well, and Taylor in particular is to prepared to help his kids down that bumpy road, with which he is all too familiar.

“I for sure know my oldest son and my third boy, they’re musically gifted, very interested in music. I know there’s musicality across the spectrum,” Taylor says. “If you’re going to be a musician, you’re going to have to do music because that’s who you are. So the question is, whether you’re able to survive the music business side while being who you are. It’s really almost like accepting a disease you have. Nature is really strong. Nurture is there, but you show up with the package: This is who you are. And so if it’s in you, it’s more a matter of: What do you need to do to be sane?”

Looking back on their own atypical childhoods, however, Hanson wouldn’t change a thing. “There’s one thought, really. The whole thing is giving you a total takeaway, which is essentially is it’s worth trying,” Taylor asserts. “It’s worth reaching. It’s worth the fight, the struggle, the challenge. At the end of it, even though you’ve been through highs and lows and ups and downs, that little kernel that you started with — which is a song, just a simple song — it’s still worth going through all of that crazy in order keep doing it.”

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

On Hanson’s first hit single, “MMMBop” — which went to No. 1 in 27 countries, was nominated for two Grammys, and helped the brotherly trio’s major-label debut Middle of Nowhere sell 4 million copies in the U.S. alone — the teen-idol siblings harmonized the surprisingly existential line, “In an mmmbop they’re gone/In an mmmbop they’re not there.” But 20 years after that single’s breakthrough, the Hanson brothers, now music business veterans in their thirties, are still very much here, celebrating an incredible quarter-century as a band. And this past weekend, their career came full circle as they returned to Austin, Texas’s South by Southwest festival, where they were discovered on a softball field way back in 1994.

Returning to the baseball diamond here at @sxsw in #austin 23 years after our first visit #Hanson25 pic.twitter.com/5KLPuyVTP2

— HANSON (@hansonmusic) March 18, 2017

Sitting in a loft overlooking Austin’s bustling Sixth Street, Zac Hanson, 32, recalls that famous, life-changing SXSW moment — sort of pop music’s equivalent of the old Hollywood “Lana Turner was discovered at Schwab’s drugstore” urban legend, and definitely the sort of fairy tale that hardly ever happens at SXSW anymore.

“We weren’t invited to play a showcase, nor did we know anyone in Austin,” Zac says. “We basically just showed up and started busking in the streets. Pretty much just anyone we could find, we would say, ‘Excuse me, sir, do you work for a record company? We want to sing you a song — can we sing for you?’ It really wouldn’t matter, so we did it in the streets; we did it at the record-label industry softball games.”

“We were building a fanbase, and we couldn’t play in bars, of course, but we would play wherever people would listen,” explains middle brother Taylor, now 34.

Zac admits that many of the jaded showbiz types that Hanson encountered at SXSW weren’t impressed — or were just taken aback to see youngsters roaming the “Live Music Capital of the World,” in search of a record deal. “It was a wild kind of experience: ‘Kids, singing in the streets, alone? Didn’t someone call Child Services on you?’ I don’t know, it wasn’t like that. It was just real,” he shrugs.

And of course, the brothers’ mom and dad were totally on board. “If you met our parents, it would make sense,” Taylor chuckles. “There was a lot of trust, and there wasn’t any fear of [the music business]. It wasn’t like, ‘Hey, if we walk down to this festival, all of a sudden drugs are going to be there, and you’re going to start doing coke at 10 years old!’ I think even in the most liberal, free-spirited families, people [have] this idea that you’re just going to be corrupted by starting young, by working young at things.”

“I actually think people need to start working younger!” laughs eldest brother Isaac, 36.

“There was always a cautiousness about it, like, ‘OK, that one guy’s shady, and that guy’s shady,’” Taylor continues, “but yeah, [our parents] were behind it.”

Whatever the risk might have been when the Hanson family journeyed from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Austin 23 years ago, the trip clearly paid off. The boys ended up at at a SXSW softball game, serenading a young lawyer, Christopher Sabec, accompanied by a boom box – and the rest was pop history.

“[Sabec] said, ‘I love what you’re doing; I want to be your attorney!’ We said, ‘We already have an attorney,’” Zac recalls. “He said, ‘Well, then, what do you need?’ And we said, ‘We need a manager.’ And he said, ‘OK. … I love what you’re doing so much, I’m going to figure out how to be a manager.’” Sabec quit his day job, moved to California, and “became the guy who helped us get signed. It was kind of a crazy thing.”

Taylor stresses, “The thing about milestones is, you don’t know until you’ve gone past them what things will stand out or what will be important. … You never would’ve thought that, going into the baseball diamond that day when it was hot as hell, that that would be anything to remember. But I do think that especially now, with technology and as we tweet out and share content and Facebook posts to our whole world, it’s important for young artists to have the experience of not just sitting in front of a YouTube camera, where no one can tell them anything they don’t want to hear and you can just delete the comments you don’t like.”

“Life doesn’t work that way,” notes Isaac.

“Just having to just stretch those muscles,” Taylor elaborates. “I mean, yes, you can be great and talented, and, yes, the world has changed and you can make a record on a laptop, but the exercise of hitting the streets and being in front of people and getting positive and negative feedback, and actually figuring out how to push past it, that would be a good lesson for artists. … We as artists need to be tough enough to not just wither when somebody says, ‘Eh, I don’t know if I get that,’ and still push past it. We learned that pretty early on.”

Taylor certainly knows what he’s talking about. Although Hanson came up in a pre-social media age, the band’s early career did coincide with the rise of the Internet, and online detractors were vicious, ridiculing the brothers’ pretty blond looks and dismissing them as a manufactured boy band or novelty act. They caught plenty of flak in real life, too.

“Hanson haters showed up [at our concerts] with their signs that said, ‘I hate you, you girls!’ — or whatever the heck they said,” laughs Zac. “We’d say, ‘Wow, this guy just drove down, spent the time to make a sign, so that he could spend six hours waiting in line just to show us a sign. … That moron just wasted his whole day, basically, dedicating his time to us.’”

“’Thanks for buying a ticket! That’s sad.’ We felt bad for him,” says Isaac.

Back on the subject of the Internet, ironically, despite all the online hate Hanson received in the ’90s, it was ultimately the Web that turned them into teen superstars. “When we first broke, the whole industry essentially was almost laughing off the Internet,” Taylor recalls. “You had MTV.com and Hanson — those were the two top music sites on the Internet, period. So our fans were among those early [adopters], and so when we needed to transition and start our label, having the connection with the audience directly through the Internet was one of the ways that we built that.”

And now, Hanson’s placement in a post-digital music industry is secure. In fact, they’re an industry unto themselves, with their own label (3CG Records); their own craft beer (the amusingly named MMMHops); their own music festival (Hop Jam, taking place May 21 in Tulsa); a new single, “I Was Born,” which they debuted at SXSW; and an upcoming 25th anniversary tour. Says Taylor, looking back on the band’s humble SXSW beginnings: “I’m definitely grateful that we learned about work ethic early on, just the idea that you’ve got to work at things. … And part of what’s really cool about having some history is, if you survive long enough — in this business especially, because it really is survival — you get to help frame the past, and frame the truth of the past and what’s happened. Sort of like whoever wins the war writes the history books.”

And as for how the brothers have maintained their famous teen-heartthrob looks after 25 years? “We have a special elixir,” Taylor jokes. “It’s something that we keep to ourselves. You have to pay in blood.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.