Hanson.net's Second Anniversary Video
Transcript

Intro—

Taylor: Hey, everybody. What’s up?

Ike: (In odd, deep voice) Heeellloo

Taylor: We wanted to wish you guys a very happy two-year anniversary. You guys rock.

Zac: (As though he’s in a movie from the 1940’s screaming “happy new year!”) Happy anniversary!

Taylor: Two years. It doesn’t seem like a year. I was like, oh yeah, it’s been a year. Wait a minute…It’s been two years. So it’s gone by really fast.

Ike: (Who has been speaking pretty much this whole time, a low, indistinguishable rumble in the background.) Thank you guys for all your support, for sticking around, for making this site as awesome as it is. Thanks for all your activity. (Blah blah blah, I may be saying I know where Jimmy Hoffa’s grave is, but you can’t tell because I’m not annunciating.) We’ve enjoyed the last two years.

Zac: (Sound astoundingly like Taylor) Yeah. Um…we’re still working away on the record just trying to finish it up now. We’ve put together a video to kind of catch you guys up on what’s been going on. And ah…

Ike, Taylor and Zac: (In quasi-unison) Here it is.

 Outside interview scene, Taylor sitting on the ground in front of what looked like LA scenery—

Taylor: Um…well,  the last…two years ago, I guess now, (quiet aside) which is crazy, the end of 2000, we finished the tour and right after that we pretty much had a lot of material so we, um, went back home, took a break, and we started recording things immediately. And, uh, before we knew it we had all these songs and that was…it was pretty immediately we were working on the record.

 In the studio footage—

Taylor: (Speaking over a bunch of Ike/Zac background babble and activity.) First day at the studio, we’re getting set up, the drums are going up, guitars are going up, keys are getting on the stand (?). This is day one.

(Insert rough Crazy/Beautiful recording. Coolest line: “Melancholia dreams, tell me what it means.” There is some debate if the song everyone's been calling Crazy/Beautiful is actually part of Underneath.)

Interview footage/Matthew Sweet—

Taylor: Actually, at that point we had written with Matthew Sweet already.

 Matthew Sweet: (In his yellow-chaired house as we saw it in the Rolling Stone pic last year, speaking in a Midwestern-twanged sweet guy type voice.) Well, we wrote Underneath. It was the first song we wrote together, and it worked just beautifully. In fact, for me it was really one of the best co-writing experiences I’d ever had, which is especially funny because it was me writing with three other people. Which in theory would have made me go, “wait a minute, I can’t handle one, let alone three!”

 Taylor: Matthew had a real phobia of writing. You know, we’ve done some…probably more co-writing than he had at that point, so we were kind of comfortable with it and we just said “let’s try it.”

 Matthew Sweet: I guess I met them over at a rehearsal place where we wrote it and ah….um… you know, we all kind of got there and ah…those guys kind of started jamming and playing, which is also cool. It was just like they were all set up and really like to play.

 Taylor: And immediately, we walked in the room, because we were late (cynical aside) as usual…

 Ike: Yeah. (Laughing in the approximate equivalent of a golf-clap)

 Taylor: Matthew says… (Trying to carry on to the point of the story in the face of what’s obviously about to turn into an Ike ramble.)

 Ike: It’s not my fault! (Laughing for real, a big deep grown-up guffaw.)

 Taylor: Matthew says…Matthew says…. (Trying to jostle his way in over Ike, in a preciously enthusiastic puppy-dog type way. Ike continues laughing, but finally dies down.) I’ve um… (Taylor sounds lost and tentative for a moment, as if he’s shocked Ike is actually shutting up and letting him speak.) I’ve had this idea…

 Matthew Sweet: We all just kind of sat around and I had a couple of little ideas to sort of start from…

 Taylor: We just jump right into it, and before you knew it (plane drones by overhead) we had um…we had Underneath. Probably in about two hours we really had the framework of the song. (Plane continues droning overhead.)

 Matthew Sweet: I don’t think we spent more than, you know, two or three hours and we pretty much had the whole song finished.

 In the studio footage—

Taylor and Ike are heatedly discussing the mechanics of something musical; Impossible to transcribe with my degree of patience. Distorted cords of Underneath float through the fight. (Erm. Discussion.) This rough, casual version fades out and is gradually replaced by what sounds like final, studio recording.

 (Insert Underneath, pleasant [and I mean this in the best possible way] guitar-heavy ballad. Coolest line: [Taylor in beautiful, plaintive and impassioned falsetto] “…And you make it hard to breathe…”)

 Interview footage—

Taylor: It was such a refreshing first co-write of this record. I think we were all… we were pretty fresh on the record we didn’t have a lot of, you know…

 Ike: (Breaks heavily into the conversation and the camera briefly swings in his direction, for the first time making it clear that Taylor isn’t alone on this random hill near the LA airport.) Jaded. Jaded opinions.

 Taylor: (Carrying on and using Ike’s words, but not even pausing or acknowledging his brother’s contribution.) Jaded opinions about what was happening. I think we were really just on the ball on this song, and it just came out. And then we ended up meeting with Bob Marlette, who was working on some hardcore stuff for our record company (What, Taylor? Your record company? Don’t you mean the record company, seeing as how Universal owns practically every label in the free world?)

 Bob Marlette: (Presumably he’s sitting somewhere and not just a disembodied voice. It sounds like there might be traffic behind him.) When people ask me how can I go from, say, Tracey Chapman to Black Sabbath er….just that kind of contrast, and I said music’s all the same. It’s all the same. Where we’re all, you know, dealing with our, you know, emotions and what we need to understand from the music, and I think Hanson’s the same way.

 Taylor: We liked him a lot, and we went in there, and we went back to our home studio and basically we recorded the song Wake Up and Dream Girl. (Insert Dream Girl, relatively mediocre, up-beat ballad. Coolest lyric: “please say it will always be that way, no matter what they say,” quite by default. There aren’t many other options.)

 Isaac: (?) That was rocking.

 Taylor: That’s amazing.

 (Llama: you’re listening to some other song, right?)

 Isaac: (?) I know. That’s what I’m saying.

 Taylor: That was such…this is such a… I mean… what… (Futilely grasping for words, like he’s just been told that someone misread the prompting cards in 1998 and Hanson did indeed win best artist.)…totally amazing.

 (Guitar solo, drums sneaking in at the end.)

 Taylor: (To Zac, presumably.) You’re not going to come in like that until…

 Ike: No, come in on the verse.

 Taylor: He’s not going to come in like that on the first verse. Yet. Okay?

 Ike: (Rumble of dissention.) 

 Taylor: Not on the very first verse. Because you’ve got to…

 Isaac: But it feels good.

 Taylor: Dude, it feels great, that’s why the second verse. That’s why that’s going to be the second verse. (The background noise is composed entirely of what seems to be Zac screaming at a distance: “Figure it out! What you need to do is figure it out!”)

 Isaac: (Snippy, verging on pissy.) You’re wrong, dude. You’re totally wrong.  Just do what feels right, because what you need…you need momentum, and the problem is, if you don’t get the drums in there you’ll never…and nobody will ever listen to the song.

 Taylor: (Speaks beneath Isaac, undermining his every point with white noise but never quite managing to make himself heard.) I don’t think we’ve struggled with any song more than this. This is like…you know?

 Isaac: Yeah.

 Taylor: …One of the songs.

 (Insert more polished—but still bland and Creed-esque—studio version of Dream Girl, notable for some tasty vocals on Taylor’s part, but little else.)

 Bob Marlette: I enjoyed working with them immensely. ’Cause of… You know…not only the obvious of being very talented, but also being…um…really good guys. Really well-balanced, good guys. (And I would so tell you otherwise, what with Hanson-sanctioned camera people here and all. Walker probably wouldn’t actually do me physical harm if I told you what I really thought of them…) I thought it was great.

 Interview footage—

Taylor: We finished with Bob. What happened then was, there was a place in France, a (dramatic flourish) a castle that, Miles Copeland put together, where he brings different writers. We really wanted to go to the castle, um…for years, because we had friends who had gone there before. And um, we decided to ah…make a little trip to France.

 Castle in France footage—

Ike: (Reverentially quiet) Alright, it is day two here at the castle. Song one is done. Song two, we have to get started. Okay? That’s where we are. (Faint dining hall sounds surround his voice, speech and clinking silverware and glasses.) Kewl.

 Interview Footage—

Taylor: There’s not a lot of time where you get to be in such a cool environment with so many talented people with one focus, that everyone has. Everybody’s there to write songs. Everybody there says, “I don’t know what’s going to come out of this, but I’m kind of just…you know…at your beck and call. Let’s dive into this and see what happens. There’s so many different types of music, I mean there’s… we… there’s so many different people from so many different backgrounds and they just kind of are thrown together. And…

 Ike: To give you a perfect example of the different types of stuff that we ended up doing…

 Taylor: Yeah…

 Ike: I mean, I ended up doing…writing a song with…the co-write…with a guy who is French. The bass player that was the resident bass player that was there, and then, and then…um… a guy named Damon Lee. And we just ended up writing this song called Someone, which was…a…bi-lingual. Song.

 (Ike singing. “You were looking, for somebody…je ve trouve…”  His French is high and reedy, somewhat feeble and Midwestern.)

 Ike: Hey, that was wrong, wann’t it?

 French man: Je TE trouve…

 Ike: Je te trouve?

 French man: Truuuu

 (Someone is played. Even in another language, Ike is only capable of writing mushy love. And that’s all I have to say about that.)

 Interview footage—

Taylor: That was just a lot of writing. Out of that…how many songs came out of that? Fifteen songs?

 Ike: Fifteen songs.

 Taylor: So over a period of a week we wrote fifteen songs more songs. Breakdown was one that was already molded and kind of in place.

 Ike: We had a lot of verses and…

 Taylor: (Displaying blatant disregard to the fact that his brother is attempting to get a word in edgewise.) Basically…well, basically every melody there was already written. Um, but there was some…sort of the story. It was originally called Insignificant Breakdown, and it was different…um… just a different take on the song.

 (Insert slow, dreamy, and sad piano-based Breakdown. Lyrically, it’s got this whole depression-as-a-physical-place-you-can-get-stuck-in-vibe. Best line: “You can’t help you’re so insecure / you’re hurt right down to the core…”)

 Taylor: So we finished at the castle, and there we were with a lot more songs and…

 Zac: (!) At that point we went and we worked with Greg Wells. (Birds chirp pleasantly in the distance.) We wrote a song called Hey.

 Greg Wells: (Screech from Saved by the Bell and Greg Wells, separated at birth?) Basically, they called me. Uhhhh…I thank maybe two or three weeks after the castle was over and said we’re going to come out to LA, do you want to try writing a song? And so we did, and it went pretty well.

 All three Hansons speaking at once, with Ike finally winning out: We came up with the melody…

 Taylor: The chorus! Which is basically the chorus today. (Singing) Hey, when I’m making my movie… (/Singing) We didn’t have exact lyrics…

Zac: All we had was “hey, when I’m making my movie...,” we left and we ate, and when um… we came back and no one remembered how it went. The next morning, umm…the house that we were staying at got this call…and it was Greg singing the original chorus to the song, and…He was like… “I woke up, I heard it in my sleep…”

Ike: He heard it in his sleep, he…you know…he woke up at four o’clock in the morning and he called the house and said I got the… I got the chorus idea.

Greg Wells: (Sounding half asleep and all tinny, obviously being replayed from an answering machine message.) It came to me just like fifteen minutes ago as I was asleep. I swear to God, it was like I heard the radio station. So there it was. So Taylor, I’m positive this is what the original chorus was. Okay, and the key is D, I can’t sing, my voice is all froggy, but this is the first part of the chorus. It was like…one, two, three… (Greg Wells sings, unsurprisingly screech-y. It’s hard to get just what he’s saying, but “let’s work it out” figures prominently.)

 Isaac: And I know what it is, and I was like “oh my god, that actually is it.” But the thing was, the second chorus we had written was actually better.

 (The studio version of Hey kicks in, a revelation of passionate, poppy Hanson wailing away in harmony and just generally being wonderful. A marked highlight is the white-boy-scatting Taylor does throughout almost the entire clip, hovering just over and above the chorus of the song. Best lyric: “After Sunset Drive cruising, baby, you’re just yesterday’s prize.” Hanson! You evil users!)

Taylor: We recorded um… we recorded with Greg, we recorded with Bob, we recorded with a guy named John Shanks, and we recorded some stuff with Stephen Lironi. (Is that a note of apology I sense in his voice?)

 Isaac: Here we are a year later, a year plus later, and we’re ah…we’re still not done with this record. (Dogs can be heard barking in the background.)

 Taylor: We’re not done with the record. The thing is, now we’re about to be able to finish the record and just get people on board enough to wrap this thing up and…the good thing about it is everybody... everybody in this group is looking at those songs and saying, you know, we’ve got a really killer record and we’re so anxious to get out there and play.

 (Music runs behind Taylor’s motivational speech, a bouncy, jangling guitar and percussion mix.)

 Greg Wells: Okay. Here comes my prediction for the twenty years from now Behind the Music: I think without question they’ll still be performing and recording, and doing music.  Umm…as a unit.  And I think, you know, it will be revealed that Zac is very privately and quietly the dictator of a small, third-world county. Um…Profiting of sweat shops and stuff like that, and generally exercising his dominance over weaker people. Um… Taylor, I think will have become a cake designer. And he’s doing big wedding cakes, with really a lot of frills and colors, and flowers… a lot of flowers on his cakes. Ike will, um, buy a ranch in Montana, and um… concentrate on levitation. Floating. I see Ike floating.

 Zac: You’re going to erase that, right?

Ashley Greyson: Yeeaaahh…(Laughing)

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