Pop Duo joan on their Sound and Upcoming Debut Album

In an exclusive interview with L’Officiel Singapore, Alan Thomas and Steven Rutherford of joan talk about making the best album for themselves with superglue – their first full-fledged album coming out next April.

Thomas and Rutherford have been active in the pop scene since 2017, and have taken their life experiences as integral starting points for their music. Ahead of their one-night concert in Singapore last week, I got to sit down with the two-piece band from Arkansas and chat about what makes the joan sound different.

What makes the joan sound?

Alan Thomas: It’s changing as we go, but we've always said that we want to be known as a pop band. And I like that term because it is all-encompassing, and it can be so many different things. There's some stuff we do that has a nostalgic bit, and some things we do that have a forward-leaning bit.

Our new stuff, like our first album coming out next year, superglue, is more band-centric and less electronic with fewer synths. It’s more real and acoustic, with real drums, guitar, keyboard and piano. We’re just trying to write good songs; songs that in 20 years, we can listen back and be like, “It still hits the same.” The same way you listen to your favourite song from your childhood; it still hits and makes you feel the same way.

Steven Rutherford: I would say that how we approach songs, at least up to this album, has been taking each song as each individual song. As we go into the session and write the song, we try to ask, “What does this song need?” For us, it's never been that it needs to be this specific sound or this specific writing style. It's cool because now it feels like it's this whole group of songs that feel like they work well together and still feel very joan, even though they're different.

Since you’ve been talking about superglue a lot, can you give us a little sneak peek into what we can expect from the album?

AT: This is the most personal thing we've written. To Steven’s previous point, it's been so song-by-song like, “Here's an idea. Let's just flush out this idea in this little space.” And then we move on to the next idea.

And this is the first time we've ever sat from start to finish and gone, “Okay, here's the big life questions that we’re asking, let's write a song about that.” I would say the whole album, thematically, is questions of why we are here, from the meaning of life to seeing the meaning of life through our friends and thinking back on memories. Our first love, our first handhold, our first friendship that we thought would last forever. That's what our new song flowers is about. You thought this friendship would never end, and then you realise you haven't talked to this person in 10 years. Really, it’s just life themes like that.

Plus, we both had babies recently, little girls that just turned one. And so that's shaking our whole world in the best way. We're just asking a lot more questions and getting answers that we didn't expect through them. So this is just a truly personal record.

Can you share any inspirations you've had that shaped your sound, in addition to your personal experiences?

AT: For me, Coldplay has been the top. They are the music gods to me. Chris Martin can do no wrong in my eyes.

For this album, the inspiration for every song has been different, but we used to write some personal, and some fictional ones. I would have a melody or he would have a narrative idea and it would just work. So we would go, “Well, this phrase or even these syllables work really well with this melody.” It's kind of the Max Martin approach to songwriting where what sounds best, feels best. So the new album is still that but much more personal. We've been all over the map in the past with fictional versus non-fictional, but themes lately have all been extremely personal to us. 

SR: For the new songs, life experience over everything was the inspiration. But we also had never done an album before. So I listened to so many albums, just to case study and learn how to fall in love with an album again. Learning to take 12 songs at a time rather than a single sound, and thinking, “How does that inspire me?” It was a lot of listening to Remi Wolf's album, for example, and being like, “Well, how did those songs all work together? And why did they make me feel like they do in the way that they're put together? And why does track four of the album feel like it needs to be track four?”

For me more than specific sound inspirations, it was more like studying albums, and remembering why albums are so cool, and why people fall in love with albums.

AT: The goal is, how do we make the best album possible for us right now? We'll see what the public thinks, but for us, this is the best possible joan thing we could come up with. So here's hoping everyone else agrees (laughs).

SR: We love putting all we can into every piece of the project we're doing. Even down to tracklisting, we didn't want to just throw 12 songs together. We wanted it to be like, track one is there for a specific reason. And track 12 is there to mirror track one to put the whole thing together. There are mountains and valleys to the whole album.

So it’s important to you that your listeners take in the album in its specific order?

AT: I think everyone's gonna find the three tracks that they love but we definitely went for the sit-down experience. It's not that long, it's just 35 minutes. So yeah, top-to-bottom would definitely give the best rendition of how it is in our minds.

SR: Some people don't care as much about albums. The way it's set up is you can listen to songs on there, and they make sense on their own, but I would love for people to listen to it as an album and really let it tell the story that way. That’d be awesome.