Q: Congratulations on the new single and music video for “Worth It.” How has the reception been so far and how do you feel about the rollout?
Hogstad: So far so good. The blogs that have been covering it seem to really get the artistic but playful thing we were going for. It’s a fairly weird song, so we weren’t sure how it would resonate. We had fun with it though.
Q: Your lyrics feel like such a personal representation of how you feel and show affection. How did you first get the idea for this single and why do you feel it is so important to advocate for idiosyncrasy in your work?
Hogstad: This was originally a song that Jonathan wrote for his wife as a present for her birthday and then Brandon put his touch on it. It was nothing we intended to release, we were just having fun. But we ended up really liking it and wanted to use it for the album. We were going to rewrite the lyrics because all of the verses are just inside jokes about absurd moments in the relationship, like the time Jonathan’s wife unwittingly incinerated the mix-tape CD he made her for Christmas because it was handed to her in a paper bag that she threw into the fireplace. But reworking it ended up feeling inauthentic, so we kept the original lyrics.
It feels like asking us why we advocate for idiosyncrasy is a nice way of asking us why we made a weird song, and it’s a good question. In this case we really leaned into a funny, kitschy, trippy vibe that just amused us. We’re brothers, and we’ve been goofing around together for a long time. The object of the song (Jonathan’s wife) calls it the Hogstad hyena laugh when we get together and get in a certain mode. This song and video are definitely the product of the hyena laugh mode. We both love to tinker, and we wouldn’t do this if we didn’t enjoy the process. When we find something that sounds different, but still gives us funk-face when we hear it back, it’s super exciting. It’s occurred to us that this isn’t necessarily the best approach in this streaming age of playlist gatekeepers looking for frictionless additions to their hyper-categorized lists. But there’s a ridiculous amount of music coming out everyday, and what’s the point of adding to the heap if you’re not pushing boundaries?
Q: How do you feel your lyrics reflect how you love?
Hogstad: Poking fun at each other is the love language of Jonathan and his wife. Their wedding vows were half jokes about each other. A straight love song wouldn’t have felt genuine. But we brought the song into this project because of a higher level view. The upcoming album this is taken from (Creatures in the Dirt) is an inward journey that mapped to our lives over the last couple years through doing a lot of intentional inner healing work. Most of us have parts of ourselves that we struggle with. But the more we struggle against those parts, the more they act out. It’s actually much more transformative to come into relationship with those parts and accept them, and even love them. So the hook (“I want to take all, all of you, love”) really resonated with what we were learning about healing. “Worth It” is the last song on the album, where we arrive at a form of atonement. We really liked the idea of doing that in a playful way.
Q: You curated such a unique aesthetic with the music video. How did you get the inspiration to film it using an old Xbox Kinect camera and how do you feel that adds to the viewing experience?
Hogstad: Back in the day, we were going to these in-person weekly hardware hack meetups with a goal of learning how to hack a Kinect camera to use for our DJ/VJ project. We had this vision for what we wanted to do but it turns out that programming is pretty hard. But we befriended this really great programmer Chris Clapis at one of these events who helped us put together this program to process the Kinect camera information into these trippy 3D visuals. Chris built the backbone, and we learned how to modify and upkeep the program. It really added a unique aspect to the parties we were throwing. But eventually he left town and operating system updates broke the program. And then the pandemic broke dance parties, so we left the dead program alone for a while. Recently though, it dawned on us that everyone’s been saying that AI can help with programming. It definitely wasn’t easy, but we were able to wrestle with ChatGPT to help us fix the program ourselves and we even made some improvements. A music video was the clear next step to make use of the program. We were going to make a video for another song, and just do a little promo snippet for Worth It. But Brandon, just messing around, jumped up from below the frame to sing “Babe!!!” and Jonathan almost fell out of his chair laughing. So we had to lean into that direction and finish the video after that.
Q: How do you incorporate this unique visual style into your live shows?
Hogstad: We haven’t restarted the DJ/VJ project since the pandemic, but in the before-times, we would point the Kinect camera at the dance floor right in front of the DJ booth. The images it generates are pretty abstract and anonymous, so usually the dancers don’t realize that it’s them in the projections at first. Then they’ll look, start to get curious, and maybe wave their arm to check. Once they have the epiphany moment and realize they’re anonymously in the spotlight, they start to go hard and show off in the visuals. It was so much fun to see it happen.
Q: What do you have coming up on the horizon? (Album release, live shows, etc)
Hogstad: In April we’re going to be releasing our first full-length album Creatures in the Dirt. We feel really good about the music so please follow us and look out for that. We’re also working on reinterpreting the music in a live-looping context and getting back out to performing live here in New York City. That’s the next project.
Written by Nick Gumas
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