Name 3 Songs:  You have an upcoming album. You’ve released two singles, “Turtleneck” and “What If You Change?” leading up to the album that will be out in August. What was your headspace and emotional place going into the writing process for this record?

Jansen Hogan, The Wldlfe: It’s lover era, baby! It feels good. 

Most of the music before had been breakup music and that’s always fun to write – and to be honest, it’s a lot easier to write sometimes.

But this one is a lot more sweet and love songs and some stuff in between, but also still has the upbeat nature that is in our DNA. Our music is very in your face and loud. And on this record, we tried to be a little bit less that, but also include those parts of us. 

We’re more than just loud, you know? And I think contextually and the song concepts really allowed us to do that. So yeah, inspiration was love.

There’s sometimes a stigma around pop music that it doesn’t have a deeper meaning. But this is shifting now where pop music can be pop and still be deep. Have you thought about this as a songwriter in a pop band? About the balance of making a “pop hit” versus “deeper music” that still is pop? 

Yeah, totally. Because the last song that we wrote for the album was… a down-the-middle pop song. It sounds like it should be in a Trolls movie. Or a Target commercial. And that’s my number one hope for it. 

The song is called “Be There.” We were in a room with a guy named Sam Hollander who’s worked on a lot of really great music (“Check Yes, Juliet” – We The Kings, “Love Drunk” – Boys Like Girls).

So we wrote “Turtleneck” and then after that, on the same day, he showed us this song that he had been trying to figure out. And we were looking for a song that’s really upbeat and almost annoyingly happy, but is super positive. Like a love song that isn’t necessarily romantic. 

And so we were like, what if it was just, “I’m gonna be there?” You know, like when this is happening to you, when this is happening to you, when this is happening to you, I’m gonna be there. It’s one of our favorite songs on the record. It’s definitely, I would say, the most pop song we’ve ever done.

It works really well because it’s not necessarily trying to go over anyone’s head and I think sometimes you need that.

In thinking of your music being pop-leaning…. Sometimes you want to make a pop hit. Sometimes you want to make these songs with deeper meaning. How do you juggle the balance of writing both?

I think it’s just how we’re feeling on the day. I’m writing a song every single day of my life. There are people that are really good at that and I feel like I get burnt out really easily and then all the songs sound bad. 

But for this record, I had a lot more songwriter-y stuff that felt really right for the record, but we didn’t want it to just be that. Before we started recording, and we were doing our last writing sessions, we knew we needed some of that too. But for the last record, it was all upbeat pop stuff, and that came really naturally. So I think it’s just kind of the day and the mood.