by Giliann Karon (@lethalrejection)
Will Anderson didn’t intend for Hotline TNT to be a solo thing, emphasizing that his decision was mostly circumstantial. Now a full time career musician, those circumstances are increasingly within his control, and Raspberry Moon boldly marks the evolution from a “project” to a band. For the first time, Anderson ceded some authority to the rest of the members, which sometimes meant following their vision in lieu of his own.
If Anderson maintained his hardline DIY approach—like he did when uploading Nineteen In Love as one long YouTube video or nearly passing on the opportunity to release Cartwheel on Jack White’s label, Third Man Records—the final record would likely resemble the demo versions. Instead, “The Scene” took cues from the swirling instrumentals that Mike Ralston, Lucky Hunter, Haylen Trammel concocted, rather than Anderson’s hollering rendition about wanting someone to throw hands your behalf.
On “Break Right,” the band’s first full collaboration, each puzzle piece snaps into place, revealing a vibrant mosaic of saccharine piano and thick bass. Rather than sticking to the shoegaze influences of Cartwheel, they drop the bit and lay everything bare. “This is the sound of TNT becoming a band,” Anderson said of the track, a single off the album.
10 months of touring for Cartwheel pushed the band to the brink. Aside from the inherent squabbles, Hunter fractured his kneecap and was rushed to the hospital during their set at Poland’s Off Festival. Rather than canceling their tour and flying back to New York City, Hunter played the remaining dates sitting down. In these moments, it dawned on Anderson that Hotline TNT was a viable project and these were its core members. The days of splitting $200 between four adults with day jobs were over.
Hunter never intended for his music to surpass the underground. Throughout college and post-grad, he shuffled between cities, falling in and out of bands. He fronted Weed, a Vancouver band that enjoyed a small cult following, but were fated to remain DIY legends. When his visa expired, he moved to Minneapolis to pursue a master’s in education near his family in Wisconsin. Between grad school and his parents’ unexpected divorce, he put music on the back burner. Some odd years later, Anderson plucked a riff from Weed’s final recording session off the cutting room floor, and Hotline TNT was born.
Part of transforming his hobby into a career required opening up to critique and collaboration, and Raspberry Moon is the sound of a band coming into its own, harnessing each member’s talents and intuitions, even when they were at odds with each other.
Hotline TNT by Graham Tolbert
GILIANN KARON: You toured for 10 months straight, which I'm sure is very physically and emotionally taxing. What insights did you gain that helped you collaborate while writing Raspberry Moon?
WILL ANDERSON: This album is a product of these four people sharing the recording studio together for seven days. This album would not have turned out this way if it was not those four people. We all went through like those 10 months together. We laughed, we cried, we almost got into a fist fight more than once. And the product is what you hear on the album.
GK: You just finished your first leg of tour. Were there any things that you tried live that you wish made it on the album?
WA: It's hard for me to say, “I wish we'd done it this way.” This is just always what happens. On pretty much every album, we’re gonna push things in different directions when we play the songs live. I try not to get too attached to it.
I think it's cool when there's a different version of the live rendition. There are two schools of thought in the band. Some of us like to practice the songs in front of a crowd before we even record it so we can see what works and how the crowd reacts. Some people want to get it dialed in and rehearse before we play it in front of an audience. It's a balance.
GK: What's your experience with playing unreleased songs live?
WA: I love it. I think it's cool. Mike, our drummer, always says, “I'd be happy to write a riff in the hotel and play it the next night.” It’s fun to see what happens and where it goes.
But some people in the band would be horrified at that idea. I’m on the Mike side of things. I like to do some playful experimentation. I get the other school of thought too – if somebody's paying money to come see us perform, I wanna respect their time and money, so I don’t want to put out a bad product.
GK: Raspberry Moon is your first album with full input from your band. What was the process like after you played your demos?
WA: Some of the songs changed a lot. Sometimes I’ll give them a finished demo and they’ll say they don’t like a certain part, to which I say, “I didn’t ask you to like that part.”
Eventually, I did cede full control and be like, “you know what? You’re right. I think there's a way for us to workshop this and push it into a new direction it wouldn't have gone in otherwise.” I think some of the best results came from that process.
GK: Which songs changed the most?
WA: “Dance The Night Away” is the one that changed the most. That was originally twice as fast. It was not a ballad at all. Now it's a straight-up ballad. In retrospect, the original demo was super corny. I’m happy we slowed it down.
GK: You talked a little about this earlier, but how did you ensure that everyone's voice was heard without straying too far from your vision? Or, when did you decide to cede control to the band?
WA: It's still ongoing. It’s a push and pull for sure. I’ve been doing the band for seven, eight years now, and these guys have only been in for a year or year and a half.
I don't wanna say “pick your battles,” but these guys are a part of the band. They're all putting the rest of their lives on hold to tour for 10 months. It doesn't seem fair to be like, “this is just me in the recording studio and you guys have to do what I say.”
It wasn't a healthy way to do business. I want everyone to feel ownership and like they're a part of this creative project together.
GK: What are some techniques that you didn't get a chance to try on Cartwheel that you really wanted to do on Raspberry Moon?
WA: The live drums would be the obvious thing to say.
I've said this in a lot of interviews, but the fact that it was always me before was a matter of circumstance. It wasn’t planned. Whenever it was time to record, it was always a transition period of, “I'm not really a rock drummer, but I've been touring with you for the last year and now I want to stop, so I'm gonna stop.” At that point, I was gonna record, so I decided to do them digitally.
Finally, I got a drummer who's ready to rock. He's a lot like me. He's ready to die for it and we're gonna keep recording and writing music together.
GK: Something that stood out to me about the new album is that it’s crisper and moves away from the shoegaze influences on Cartwheel. Was that a conscious decision or something that happened after input from the full band?
WA: Neither, I would say. It wasn't conscious.
I wasn't like, “I gotta step away from traditional shoegaze or anything.” In my opinion, we've never been a traditional shoegaze band, but I know we get categorized as that.
GK: At this point, shoegaze means whatever you want.
WA: Yeah, we have loud guitars, wall of sounds, but we also have melodies and there's hopefully a bit of beauty in there too. It wasn't like, “we gotta change the sound up.”
I think Cartwheel started going in the direction of jangly pop-rock songs and naturally kept going that way. Listening to more music like that has probably influenced us, but I never wanted to sound drenched in reverb and can't tell what I'm singing. What I had available in the toolkit at the time, as far as studio technologies, has gotten better and better.
GK: What song was the hardest to write?
WA: The last song on the album, “Where U Been?”
That’s a song that I had a demo for pretty early. I think it was one of the first things I wrote for this album. I’d sent the demo around to the guys and I had pretty much abandoned it because I thought it wasn’t working.
I went through a few iterations on my own. Haylen, our bass player, pretty much plucked that one out of the trash and was like, “you need to finish that up. I think there’s something there.” I’m really glad we did. I'm really glad we did. It took a lot of time and I had to take space away from it to figure out where the song was supposed to go. Now, it’s one of my favorites.
GK: How much time did you spend writing each part together, or did you do it all individually and come together after?
WA: I'd say around 75, 80% of the songs are pretty much the way it's always been – I’m gonna make the demo and write the skeleton, if not several parts. “Candle,” for example, is 100% me. I taught the guys their parts and they added their own flavor.
Most of the album was done that way, but we left space on purpose to write brand new songs in the studio. That’s what happened with “Break Right” and “The Scene.” “Dance The Night Away” and “Where U Been?” changed radically. It varies.
GK: What was your favorite instrument, texture, or any sort of effect that you used on Raspberry Moon?
WA: One of my favorite moments of the album is on “Letter to Heaven.” There's a long instrumental section right after the chorus, if you can call that, and the outro of the song. Amos, our producer in Wisconsin, had multiple rooms full of random instruments and equipment.
I think it's called a musical mic. It’s a kid's toy. You push a button and it makes a percussive kinda xylophone sound. if you listen to the layers of that song, you can hear it. There's like a children's room's toy being held down for the outro of the song. That's what comes to mind as my favorite little nugget of musical texture.
GK: What’s the significance of the moon motif in the album title and Path of Totality tour?
WA: I've tried not to get too deep into that with the interviews 'cause I want people to take whatever they want from it. All I will say publicly, is that ‘Raspberry Moon’ is just the vibe of our band and this year, and the album. Obviously my songwriting, lyrically and otherwise, owes a lot to nostalgia and late night drives.
GK: What are your favorite bands you've discovered while doing Instagram Q&A in the van?
WA: People have often told me that's one of their favorite things we do when we're on tour. There was a Paul Westerberg song that I’d never heard before that I love.
Alright, this is a band name that I cannot defend at all. I'm not gonna say any bad things about it, but it's a choice. I love their music and the record is great. The band is called cootie catcher. I think they’re Canadian.
GK: Last question. What’s your craziest Victory Royale story?
WA: The one that comes to mind is one of the first times I played with my friend Matt Berry, who has played in Hotline at different times. I started playing Fortnite late in life, several years after everyone else was into it. And he’d played in the early days, so when I got into it, he was like “oh you’re playing Fortnite now? I’ll play with you.”
I didn’t know what I was doing, still don’t, but we were playing around and I got eliminated early, so I was spectating him. I could hear him on the microphone and he had a controller. All I heard was super sweaty controller sounds and heavy breathing mixed with pulls of his vape pen.
He threw a grenade, and that's something that never works, in a final, last-ditch effort. And it killed the enemy. I just remember him screaming.
Raspberry Moon out June 20 on Third Man Records