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Interview Podcast Audio The Weepies
Hideaway

Just like most rock stars, Steve Tannen and Deb Talan are up at all hours of the night, and they have only themselves to blame.

But Tannen and Talan, the husband-wife duo better known as The Weepies, are not feeling the effects of a drink-and-drugs-induced bender. They're feeling the effects of Theo, their 6-month-old son, whose arrival came in the midst of the duo's work on its new album, Hideaway.

Lucky for Tannen and Talan, Theo "really loves mommy's voice," allowing the pair to both keep the baby smiling and make progress on what turned out to be a nuanced collection of folk-pop songs.

Tannen broke away from daddy duties for a few minutes to tell us about Theo, Hideaway, and the upcoming balancing act of bringing their new arrival on tour.

Hey Steve, how you doing? I'm good, man, how you doing? Not too bad. So are you at home right now? I am, man. I'm sorry for the delay. The baby freaked out, so we had to put him down for a nap. These things happen; not a problem at all. It's pretty rock n' roll. It is pretty rock n' roll [laughs]. Your baby is six months old? Theo, right? Right. His name's Theo. He just turned six months, and he's, like, nonstop--he's unstoppable. I would imagine. He's the size of a 1-year-old. Oh really? OK. [laughter] He's huge; he's eating solid food. He's ready to head to high school right away. He's going to be an NCAA star I think. I don't know. [Laughs.] Well I'm sure that creates all sorts of interesting situations in terms of songwriting and organizational things and whatnot. It's hard enough being a parent, but living with your bandmate and trying to put all that together, I'm sure would be a bit of a difficult chore unto itself. Well, I don't feel like we have anything more difficult than all parents. That's the truth. We have both of us around all the time. And that's a huge plus. On the other hand, we do live in a tiny, tiny apartment with all of our recording equipment next to the crib. So it's definitely tight quarters. Right. Get Theo a good pair of earmuffs or something. I don't know. I don't know man. I think we're going to start him on the drums pretty soon. I'm not kidding. He freaks out about the music. He loves it. That's great. He shakes with anticipation when we play. That's fantastic! His favorite music is old blues. He loves Robert Johnson--the high voice. Awesome, wow! It's clearly his favorite. He also really loves mommy's voice, as you would expect. Of course, of course. Well that's fantastic and certainly it's substantially better than the opposite. What if the opposite were true, if the baby just happened to hate music? [Laughs.] Exactly. We're just waiting for him to rebel and be like, "You know, I like silence." [Laughs.] Right, right. The first baby ever that liked silence. Exactly. So I did want to ask about songwriting. Since you don't have some palatial estate that allows the two of you to go off, seven rooms away or something. Right, leave the baby with a phalanx of nannies. Exactly. How have you managed to do it? This record has a number of different nuances to it, but I would imagine that the two of you--before you even head down this road--develop something of a system that allows you to write. I know some of the songwriting occurred before Theo was born and all that. No, absolutely. You're totally on the money about what you're asking about. I get what you're saying. And you're right. Here's the deal. We've been living and working together for five years now, Deb and I, and we both work all the time. Meaning, we sort of live our lives. We go through what we're doing, and we always have a tape recorder handy, an instrument handy, a notebook handy.

It's a very specific type of person who would do that, and we both feel really lucky that we both do this. And so having the baby just means it's a little crazier to get in the actual craft time. But we've been able to live a pretty crazy life and keep writing for years. We don't necessarily need quiet time in a cathedral all by ourselves to meditate. Right, get away from it all. Exactly. And really listen to the music within ourselves type of thing. That's not really what we do and it's been in some ways more fun already over the last six months because fun songs are what the baby likes and [they] distract the baby. Nonsense lyrics and nonsense tunes are great, and so it's been really freeing to just be like, "Well, now we're going to sing a song about not crying." [Laughs.] Right. I'm like, "We're going [to] sing a song..." "About the joys of eating avocado." [Laughs.] Right, exactly. The only people up on the coast at 4 a.m. That's it. Let's sing a song about that, and it really hasn't been as much of a challenge as you would think. It's been really organic. Well, that's good to hear. It sounds like you maybe had already sorted it all out before Theo arrived, and now that he's here, it all works really well. I think that most parents probably just incorporate their kid into their lives. And obviously, the whole center of your life changes, but it doesn't change the basic structure of what it is. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Do you have kids? I don't, but I have lots of friends and relatives who do, and we have spent lots of time with them from birth on and seen the development. I've never done this before. It does change, but you're absolutely right. I didn't have your experience. For me, I was like, how do you change a baby? [Laughs.] My wife says, "Are you joking?" [Laughs.] I say "No, like, what do you do?" [Laughs.] So, for me, it's all an eye- opener. Well, that's good. It's kind of fun. Yeah, I know. [Laughs.] Well, I also wanted to ask you about the whole Mandy Moore thing. Writing with her on her Wild Hope record last year, I was most curious whether or not you guys took anything in particular away from those sessions--other than, obviously, her friendship and the flattery that must come from having someone like her think so highly of you and your music and talent and that kind of thing. Absolutely. I would say that we learned a lot from the experience. First of all, she's just a great person, and she's really down to earth and we had a great time. In terms of learning, her management company is called The Firm and they are also the label. And they basically were able to make a record in a big studio with a producer and all the perks. All the trappings, right. Yeah. All the trappings, exactly. Sort of that '70s, now you got a record deal and you go do the thing. We hadn't had an opportunity to do that before. We do everything at home, and then we outsource as we are able to. For this, we went up to Lair Studios outside of Woodstock with Mandy and it was this unbelievable cathedral-like playground of music. They had a couple of pianos, they had a couple of Wurlitzers, they had several drum sets. It was just a playground. Right, an adult musician's playground. Yeah, with a producer named John Alasia who really knows what he's doing in terms of letting the musicians and the creative people that you've invited into the space, do their thing. That, for us, was inspiring to see if you are able to set it up like that, how that could work. And in the future we might want to do that, if we can get there. Something to aspire to. Exactly. And, of course, it's a very different way because we're used to recording whenever we feel like it. There's a disadvantage in that you may not have 100 different spaces and all sorts of different instruments and incredible acoustics and the rest. But on the other hand, if you're both up at 4 a.m., you know, and it's a quiet little time, you can just turn the mikes on and get a really great take. You can capture something. That's very true. There are clearly benefits and costs to each way of doing things. Exactly, and I don't think that Hideaway would have come out quite as intimate if we had done it in a big space with a big budget. On the other hand, working with Mandy, we saw some great possible ways of doing it in the future. That's a good way of putting it. Have other opportunities--whether they are writing or just collaborations in general--come along since then as a result of people hearing what you guys came up with for that? They have, but I don't know how everything's related. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, sure. What started happening in 2006--and we don't know why--is that people started contacting us who we'd only just heard of, or were fans of. And the Indigo Girls is a great example. We got a note from Emily Saliers, one of the Indigo Girls. And that sort of thing is a tremendous--I don't want to use the word "blessing"--opportunity and we've been very grateful for it. It's been incredible. And then there are other people who have been really nice to us that we still haven't even met, talked to, or e-mailed with, like the guy from Snow Patrol. Oh yeah, Gary Lightbody. He nominated you guys for the Shortlist Music Prize. And he put us on his celebrity playlist [on iTunes], and then he talked about us in a couple of interviews. The first we heard of that, we were driving in a car, listening to the BBC, sort of late-night driving from one gig to another, and we're listening to Gary from Snow Patrol talk. And he's talking about his record and we had just gotten his record and we thought it was really good and thought he had a really interesting take on what he does. He started talking about us and our record. We sort of freaked out, you know, "You're kidding, that's so amazing!" Right, that's very cool. Very cool. So we can't see a direct cause from one thing to the other--other than we're just keeping doing what we love doing as well as we can. Yeah, that's all you can ask for, absolutely. Yeah. Let's talk about licensing. You guys have had so much success in getting your music out there through TV. Certainly there's a lot less backlash that comes with that sort of a thing now that the music industry is in such tatters, and that these sorts of deals--whether they be TV, movie, or commercials--are such an excellent way to get your music out there in such a cluttered environment. But, I'm wondering whether your opinions about licensing evolved over time? Or have they stayed the same as the landscape has kind of changed a little bit? Well, we do feel like one of the ways that we discover new music is through film and TV and even commercials. Absolutely. At this point, who doesn't? Well, exactly. And just as listeners, we don't have a problem with that. When you hear a Ricky Lee Jones song in some TV show, what I think is "Oh, I haven't heard that Ricky Lee Jones song. What's that from?" And what I don't think is that Ricky Lee Jones is a "sellout."

For us, it sort of starts to blur the lines when you start to get into commercials. Nevertheless, there have been some amazing songs on commercials too. All the way back to Peter Gabriel with "Talk to Me," like, 10 years ago? I remember, I hadn't heard the record yet, and I saw the commercial, and I was like, "That is awesome!" You know what I mean, like, "What song is that?" And so it's a balancing act between being able to access listeners and letting people hear the new music and not wanting to sell chemicals. Right, exactly. We did two commercials. We've done a whole bunch of film and TV, and in each case, we said, "What's the show?" "What's the story?" "How are you going to use it?" And it's almost always really cool. For the commercials, first we were approached by Old Navy, and the guy knew our whole record, knew all about the music. And he's like, "What I want to do is remix it eight times for eight different flavors, and we're going to keep it intact, but we want to have different people mix it to recast the song eight times." And we were like, "That's cool!" It was a really interesting idea, and we had been talking with people anyway about possibly doing a remix record, and we thought, let's try it and see how it comes out. And I think it came out really great. Yeah, it did. I've only seen one or two of the ones that used it. Exactly. Yeah, it comes out great. It's a good representation. Yeah, I guess they did some extra ones, and they used one of them on a behind the scenes at the Old Navy thing. And it's on YouTube, and I thought it was great--and the use of it was great. And if it's creating something a little new, and in that sort of creative way, I just don't have a problem with it. Obviously you're not going to go down the road of putting your songs in chemical commercials and things like that. But it also probably matters about who the people are that are approaching you that are representing these people. If they clearly are either fans or just that they get the music and the record. Yeah. And who you are. That's certainly a good starting point. Yeah, we're music lovers. That's the bottom line. We feel like that's the people we relate to, and we pretty much have run into that in the licensing field. People don't get into licensing usually unless they really know music. Most of these people are really encyclopedic. They kind of have to be. They know everything. They're like, "Is this in reference to this album from blah-blah?" And I was, like, not consciously, but I love that record. You know what I mean? [laughter] Right. You're digging into my subconscious right now. No, totally. I'm, like, are you writing a thesis or something? It sounds like you guys are going to go on the road in June, right? Everything is up in the air still. We are trying to make it happen, yeah. But you very much would? Obviously, given that you guys were on the road for such a long time in 2006. Yeah. You probably want to take this record back out as well? Sure, absolutely. We are trying to make it work with the baby. Yeah, that was my main question. Does Theo sit at home and hold down the fort or does he come along? Yeah, right, we're going to give him 20 bucks and see what happens. He should be fine. No. Exactly [laughs]. Bad idea. No, we are a family. We go everywhere together, and if this happens, it has to happen in a way that's cool for him. You know, it's amazing to us to think how young he is. We're used to just going, not worrying so much about where we're sleeping or getting there. And now we have to really rethink that.

So we want to make sure that there's some sort of consistency with where he sleeps, how he sleeps, who's holding him--just safety issues. And if we have to put the tour off for a couple of months in order to make that happen, we will. But obviously, our live performances have been a big part of our lives, and we didn't get to do that in '07, pretty much at all. So, yes, we're looking forward to making that happen again. Got you. It's just a question of making it happen in such a way that you're not jumping into the car and just driving and figuring it out along the way, kind of a thing. Well, it's just really about safety, and I want to make sure that he keeps being happy. He's such a happy little guy, and it's so funny being a parent. You just don't want to screw it up. Right, yeah, exactly. It would certainly change the course of a tour, regardless if the shows are going well or not. Exactly. Well, Steve, I really appreciate the time. It was good talking to you, and I wish you guys luck with this record and with the tour--and most importantly with parenthood. Thank you so much. All right, have a good one man, thanks a lot. I appreciate the help.