Tanlines of all Seasons

The first time I listened to Brooklyn-based duo Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm – better known as Tanlines – wasn’t after the recommendation from a friend, or because I’d read about them in a magazine. It was just the middle of summer, and my sun-darkened self really related to their name. They didn’t disappoint. Their first full-length album, Mixed Emotions, which dropped in March 2012 after four years of EPs and remixes, is a confident statement of a band that has found their sound. Emm’s introspective lyrics float on a sea of intricate drum beats and lilting melodies that get your nerves tingling.

Tanlines at the Paradise | Photo by Vijayta Narang

They still have a ways to go where live performances are concerned. Their show at the Paradise on the 28th of November was energetic and confident in terms of sound, albeit a technical glitch. But it lacked certain elements that make a show a performance; their entrance could have been built up a little more and the crowd was disappointed at the lack of an encore. To the duo’s credit, however, they got the crowd dancing and were enthusiastic and interactive. Yours truly even got a shout-out (I may or may not have freaked out a little). It’s safe to say that given a little more time they will have found their footing where showmanship is concerned, and their concert-ready sound will be shown off to its best advantage.

Eric Emm of "Tanlines" at the Paradise | Photo by Vijayta Narang

I had the opportunity to interview Jesse, who answered a few questions on their music and their influences:

QUAD: You and Eric met while working on a song together for your band Professor Murder. What made the two of you want to make music together?

Jesse: We became good friends, and I think it’s better to make music with friends than with anyone else. If you have relatively similar interests and get along with each other, it goes a really long way. You can always find someone who’s a great guitar player, but if you don’t want to spend, you know, every hour with them when you’re touring and playing it’s never gonna work.

Q: What would you say each of you brings to the table where Tanlines is concerned?

Jesse: I would say I focus more on drums and keyboard, and Eric focuses on vocals, lyrics, and he’s also more the producer/mixer in the group. So there’s a lot of really subtle things he spends a lot of time on, all the crafting, the sounds. I’m quicker, more “move on to the next thing,” he’s more “stick with it and define it.”

Q: You’ve been putting stuff out for years now, but Mixed Emotions is your first full-length album. What motivated to you seek out an Internet/YouTube-based scene initially?

Jesse: I think we needed to take some time to figure out what kind of music we wanted to make, what we’d be good at. I look at the beginning period of our career as just, like, figuring out what kind of process we wanted to use, what kind of sounds we liked, what kind of songs we wanted to write. And then we got to a certain point where we were just like, “Okay now we’re gonna write this album.” And I think the album is a huge step forward. I think it really builds on the work we did the first couple of years together.

Jesse Cohen of Tanlines at the Paradise | Photo by Vijayta Narang

Q: How would you say your sound has evolved?

Jesse: In the beginning we were doing a lot of half-baked ideas. A little bit more experimental but also playing a lot of instrumentals, a lot of remixes, just sort of any opportunity to explore our palate of sound. Writing the album was very much more about song writing, lyrics. I think it’s matured. It’s more purposeful.

Q: A big theme in lyrics on all the songs seems to be about loss of identity. It’s very introspective and almost wistful. Where did that stem from?

Jesse:  I try not to speak too much for Eric when it comes to lyrics, but as a listener, I hear a lot of that too. I know a lot of that comes from getting older. And the other part of it is that we wrote a lot of the songs while we were moving out of our studio. A lot of the work we did writing the songs was at the same time that we were literally packing up to leave. And I think there was this existential anxiety about losing our home and what was going to come next. That worked its way into the mood of the album a lot. It’s not by any means a tragedy, it’s just that the mood of the album was conceived at a time when we weren’t sure we were gonna have a career as musicians, we weren’t sure of anything at all. In the context of it being an electronic album, it’s kind of a mix of feelings, happy and sad, light and dark.

Q: How did you come up with the music for the album?

Jesse: I like all types of music, but when I sit down to write something I usually play the drum part first. It’s what I’m most into. Those things turned out to be the backbone of a lot of the songs. A good example would be the first song in the album (“Brothers”): when you take away the vocals, it’s at its core electronic, the bass sounds are huge on that song, the synths are these rave-y lines, and it has all these elements of electronic dance music. When you put the vocals on it’s kind of this mournful, simple, but melancholic.

"Tanlines" at the Paradise | Photo by Vijayta Narang

Q: What would you describe your sound as? No can seem to settle on a defining term.

Jesse: A band never wants to assign itself a genre. I’m too close to it, so I don’t want to have it sound like anything else, it’s mine. We sort of jokingly refer to it as “existential pop.”

Q: A lot of people are saying that your music has a strong ‘80s element to it. Do you agree? Is that intentional?

Jesse: It doesn’t bother me but there wasn’t really music that sounded like this in the ‘80s just because the way we make our music wasn’t possible back then. But I like that people hear it and I think if people have a nostalgic feeling when they’re hearing a song then we’re doing something right, because we’re making that person feel something.

Q: Why the name “Tanlines?”

 Jesse: I should have a great answer to that but we picked it because we needed a name, and now we’re stuck with it. But the more and more I think about it, a tan line is the line between where the sun hits and where it doesn’t and I think our music is on that line.

Q: Has having a full-length album to perform for audiences affected your shows in any way?

Jesse: Yeah, we have a lot more songs to play. It never seems like we have enough. We’re doing the first album tour so we only have so many songs we have to play. I think that there’s a point in your career where you wanna leave people wanting more. It’s still just our first-album tour so it’s a good place to be.

 

About Vijayta Narang

Vijayta is a film student who shamelessly indulges in music, art, and other vices through the QUAD. She is an ardent lover of coffee, fantasy novels, and sweaters,

View all posts by Vijayta Narang →

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