Iglu & Hartly interview

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Currently spreading feel good party vibes on their European tour, US pop/punk/rap/whatever?! band Iglu & Hartly took time out between getting drunk to speak to HUCK.

HUCK: Tell us a bit about your album?
Jarvis Anderson: It’s a manual to dominate your life. It’s basically really positive. It’s like all the feelings you need to feel when you feel like you could do something crazy.
Sam Martin: Not like jump off a bridge.
JA: In a good crazy way. Like change your life for good, fucking awesome, like do what you really want to do!
SM: It’s basically mesh into a CD all of our experience.

HUCK: Your sound is quite eclectic, where does that come from?
JA: It comes from a keyboard and a computer, a guitar.
Simon Katz: It’s evolved over a long time. We started in Colorado 4 years ago and it’s changed a lot since then. We’ve made 300 songs and each song progressed in a different way.
SM: Jarvis grew up making hip-hop beats in high school and then it kind of just progressed from there
JA: And then it just progressed to a kind of 80s/early 90s feel, you know that optimistic feel to it. That’s kind of like a lot of our music.

HUCK: You all met in Boulder, Colorado. How did you find it?
SM: Fate actually just drove us there.
JA: It’s a decent school and it’s a good place to party. You can snowboard which was my main thing to go to Colorado for. It’s really flat and then all of a sudden there’s huge mountains, and it’s a really amazing place to be when it snows. It’s really one of the most beautiful places in the world.
SK: It’s like a little oasis.
SM: But Simon and Jarvis met actually first in college in Freshman year and then I met them through some mutual friends and got it together. We started making music and ended up locked up in a basement for like 6 months. That was all we wanted to do just making music and then going out at night and then we eventually just stopped going to school.
JA: We would basically make music all night, all day and then go to Sorority chicks’ parties at night.

HUCK: So what made you move to Hollywood?
JA: It’s a very optimistic feeling place. We were getting kind of sick and tired of Colorado, it’s a small town, you know. If you weren’t like wearing a black hoody and rapping like Aesop Rock or some some weird underground shit that nobody even knows, people didn’t get you. It was like a really big underground hip-hop scene and we wanted to make pop music that was fun to sing and that people could actually dance to. We always like to see people moving and really feeling like all the vibes of everything and that really just wasn’t happening in Colorado. We visited LA a few times and it was always like the place people could just go and do something really crazy and no one would be like ‘it’s weird’.
SM: Yeah, we went down there a few times during school to play a few random shows and people just always more open to what we were doing. Boulder was always the same kind of crowd you know, like a few of our friends and college kids. You can only go so far there.
JA: It was fun though, we used to have a lot of fun playing little shows, do you remember when we played Breckenridge? We kind of started out in the ski towns we used to drive around in his big ass brown suburban, we tagged it with stickers and we used to drive all these mountain passes like super-high.
JA: We’d get pulled over every single time, we’d be fucking wasted like just smoked a joint. We’d be super high and we’d be talking to the cops and they’d be like “Oh, we’ll show you where your hotel is”.
SK: It was just the next step, we were looking for something new you know like live in a different city, meet new people.

HUCK: So have you embraced the kind of beach sunshine culture then? Are you into surfing
JA: Yeah definitely. I go surfing with one of my managers Jordan, it’s fun to get out there. I mean I’m not any good at surfing, I can get up and go in the direction of the wave. But it’s still rad!

HUCK: How do you think sites like MySpace and Facebook have affected you as a band?
JA: Basically it made us!
SK: It gives the ability to reach fans without having to do tours all around the world. It’s great for a lot of people to know about you when you’re an unsigned, unknown band - you can just put your music out there for everybody.
JA: And it’s cool cos it enables us to talk to people all over the world that we wouldn’t be able to talk to before, like somebody in Australia. It’s not really dorky anymore. It used to be really fucking dorky though!
SM: Yeah it’s good to communicate with people, see what they’re getting into, it’s cool.

Iglu & Hartly’s debut album 'And Then Boom' is out now!
www.igluandhartly.com