joan is a band from Little Rock, Arkansas, consisting of Alan Benjamin Thomas and Steven Rutherford. Read on for a conversation backstage where we discuss their tour with Bloc Party, their new album This Won’t Last Forever (out Sept. 25), grounding themselves in their hometown, and being jealous of Ed Sheeran’s touring setup.
Known for their I catch them on the second day of their tour with Bloc Party, whom they’ve met them through their manager, Alan tells me, and it was a no-brainer in deciding to come along. They’re grateful, as, despite the hiccups of being the opening band, it’s gotten them playing some of the biggest venues they’ve ever played. And it shows— it’s one of the nicer backstage areas I’ve seen, resembling something of a poolside area of a resort, or a pretty hotel garden.
There’s a lot of nostalgia in the air. Twenty years of Silent Alarm, longer than Joan have been a band, “My brother listened to them more than more than I did, but I heard their music growing up a lot too, through high school, so it has a lot of nostalgia. Steven says. “Especially this record that they’re that they’re touring with right now.”
“I remember hearing them first on Tony Hawk Pro skater, the game. One of their first songs was on it,” Alan adds.
Growing up. And for Joan, Little Rock is like their oasis. Both born in or around Northwest Arkansas, they made the decision to ground themselves there, staying and building their home base studio.
“We’ve never felt the need to move, Steven says. “We grew up around there and after university, we both ended up living in Little Rock, and we just love it. Our manager is from London and our booking agents are from New York and Germany and LA and our label is in New York. We were just like, we could be in New York or LA, but then we’d be traveling anyway, going somewhere. For us, Little Rock is a central place, so we just never saw a reason to move away.
“No one cares in Little Rock,” Alan adds. “I feel like there’s a constant rat race in the bigger cities— Nashville and LA specifically, but I like to just go [there] and dip our toes in the water, and then go back home to the slowness. There’s just not a lot of the music industry in Little Rock— other than normal local bands— so it feels nice to be just living in our own little world there.”
It’s always been there that they work best, and they keep coming back. It’s long been a place to unwind from the hustle and bustle of the larger cities. “It’s a place to retreat from after we tour,” says Steven. It was only fitting then, that this album started and came together quickly there— a sort of gift or present, a guiding light to show they were in the right place, physically and mentally. The stars aligned.
“We had just moved into our studio,” Alan said when I asked of the album’s conception. “We spent probably January to August of last year, just writing as many songs as possible, just making literally anything that came to mind, so we had country ideas and ‘70s vibes ideas and just a bunch of different sounds, just throwing as much as we could at the wall. There was a run of probably five songs that we did, and we were like, this is an album. And the album name is This Won’t Last Forever. And it just was very clear, and it was like, all right, this is what we have.”
“We’re kind of studio rats,” Alan says. “We like touring— it’s just part of it— but we love being just holed up in a studio creating. I think that’s most bands. I know a lot of people are like, ‘Oh I love being on the road’… I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Touring has been a huge part of the bands past two years— fresh off a tour with Misterwives, they’ve jumped right back into touring with Block Party, to which they were added last minute to replace Metric— all the while working on new music.
They’ve been busier than ever on the road. “I would say being on the road is good for the writing side of our songs. I think we compile a lot of ideas while we’re out and on the road.” But making music on the go is harder. “It’s way harder to do it on the go,” he says about making music around their busy touring schedule. “We’re finishing an album right now. We’re finishing two songs right now. And in two days we’re recording vocals because we have an off day. It’s hard to even do that. It’s like, how do we find a place that works? This is the first tour we’ve done where we’ve had to work on music while we’re on tour. Finding somewhere to make it happen [is hard]. Everything just works at home,” Steven says. “It usually feels better at home.”
“I remember watching Ed Sheeran’s songwriter documentary,” Alan says, “and being really jealous of the schedule being that big and having the bus and all the semis. He literally would walk from stage to a green room; they set up a green room. I don’t remember what record it was he was making, but Benny Blanco was producing it— and Benny just came on tour with him, and they would go work in a green room and then he would work until it’s time to walk on stage. I don’t even know if he sound-checked, cause it’s just him. And he walks on stage in front of however many, tens of thousands of people, plays like an hour and a half, goes right back to the green room and he continues. It’s almost like the show was an aside to what he was working on. And I was like, we just can’t. We’re not at that that level yet. You’re not doing that in a van. So, it’s harder at this level to do that. But I envy that for sure.”
But however small their band is, they have the work ethic of Ed Sheeran. They do write on the road, and get a lot of ideas from travelling. “Usually, whenever we come home, we have a lot that we want to get home and work on,” says Steven. “Because it’s so hard to do the studio thing on the road, usually we’re jotting down notes or doing voice memos of melody ideas or whatever. And so, whenever we come back home, usually it’s easy to get back in and dig into all that stuff.”
The album came together a little differently than usual this time, but once it had, the two knew lightning had struck. “Usually for us, we’ve never had it to where we were top down, where we have the concept of the album and then everything built from there,” Steven said. “Usually—we’ve only done one album— but for EPs and everything, it’s always been: let’s write the songs, and once the songs are completely there, then that determines what the album is. This time it was more like, we had the idea of what we wanted to say in the album, and we worked with everything within that framework this time. In the fall, we did heartbodymindsoul, eyes, and face. Even those three we knew we had something pretty strong there. We did heartbodymindsoul, face, and eyes all in the same week. And there was just something that felt cool about it.”
Maybe it was that they were their own production team now. Over the pandemic, Joan had become a fully-functioning unit, as Alan honed his production skills and steered the two into being able to self-produce. Over time, they’ve been getting better at trying new things and taking risks with their sound.
“For this album we have no co-production,” Alan says, “[except for] ‘body language’ we did with Shane Becker. We had two eps called hi and bye (2021). That was our first batch of songs that we did all in house. When the pandemic hit, we couldn’t tour; we couldn’t do anything. The whole industry was shut down, so we just took that opportunity to put our heads down and watch a lot of YouTube videos and learn a lot of stuff and just trial and error. It took that cycle to build confidence. With production, I needed that year or two to just try stuff and start trusting myself. [Steven] has always been kind and trusted me with [?stuff], but I just always felt like I was missing something, that there was a gap in my knowledge. And you can always learn more. So hi and bye, a lot of the EP before that, Partly Cloudy, and then Superglue our first album was all us. Then this album.”
There’s a confidence that shines through in the songs that suggest Joan are at their fully formed. They are taking risks with their sound. “I don’t want to put so many limitations on it where you just know what to expect with every Joan thing because it sounds like the last thing we did.” Steven says of how he approaches the songs. “We love to chase the song and let the song dictate where it wants to go. And we always joke that it’s either going to be the thing that helps us continue rising and growing as a band or the most detrimental thing about us is going to be that we let the song take it where it wants to go. Sometimes that might be at the expense of an overall project having less cohesion style-wise. On Superglue specifically, if you listen to that album, to us it feels cohesive, and I think to our fans it does, but you could objectively listen to it and go, this song and this song sound like almost two different people, but it’s still us. We kind of make it akin to, like, Coldplay, which is one of my idols. They can do whatever they want and it just kind of works. I’m just like, I want to be like that.”
There’s a confidence that comes in doing that, trusting your song and musical instincts entirely. And the result is a great one— “face” takes on the appeal of a 2000s ballad, and “heartbodymindsoul” takes a more contemporary approach. “We’ve been joking that [“face” is]— the joke was Peter Gabriel meets Phil Collins, which would be the band Genesis,” Steven says. “A lot of people don’t know that— or young people don’t know that. But yeah, kind of like Tarzan soundtrack kind of vibes. “face” in particular felt like it needed a retro treatment,” he adds about chasing the song, “and we gave it that, with basically every element on the song.”
And the thread running through them is the components of someone, all the things that make someone that you love who they are. “The songs aren’t even obviously about a very specific thing, even though that’s the title,” Steven says. “But the concept and the overall idea of these songs is very much just love songs, different ways to just be like, I love everything about you, even your eyes and your face and your heart. And so pretty early on the idea was, having face, heartbodymindsoul, eyes. Magic has a lot of that in it, and sort of an EP leading up to the album with body language. We wanted to do that since the fall, just to have those as the release that all feels very in the same world, and all lyrically nod to each other.“
But like anyone honing and taking risks with their sound, some songs took them a few tries to get here. “On this album, we have a song called ‘supernatural’ that was going in a different direction completely,” Alan says. “It had a different name, a different chorus, and different feel. We sat on it for a long time, and it just never felt right. One day I remember maybe hearing the title of the album being that song and we got in and tried to make it work and still it didn’t work, and it was like oh, whatever, maybe it just isn’t supposed to be there, this isn’t supposed to happen. And then the next day we went in, and it became a completely different song that started from that idea. And that just happens sometimes, where you have to go as far as you can with it and then be totally okay with just letting it die if it needs to.”
“If on day two or three, we’re beating our heads against the wall trying to force it,” Steven adds, “we’re both just like, okay—”
“Either we need to take a break and come back,” Alan finishes. “That one we had done it twice; we had pursued it, couldn’t get past the chorus, took big break with lots of other songs worked on, came back to it, two days straight tried to get it to work, and we were just both like, what if we just pivot? And we pivoted and found it in like an hour.”
“I think it’s my favorite song on the album,” Steven adds.
I ask if they’ve ever picked up a song they put down years before.
“cover girl was one of the first songs we ever wrote in 2017, and it came out in 2020. Three years, it sat on the hard drive,” Alan says. “There are still songs that are all great songs of ours that have never seen the light of day that I think could work in some project or context. We’re not weird about that. If it works in a project, then it’s time.”
Listen to their latest single, alibi, out now.
