Everyday on Crasstalk we reach out to each other, strangers from vastly different walks of life, people who live a couple miles or thousands of miles away, for a chat, for guidance, or a laugh. Sometimes those moments turn into a professional contacts, sometimes they turn into fun, shallow friendships, and, sometimes, on very rare occasions, those moments can turn into the most important relationship of your life.
That’s the wonderful side of the internet.
The not so wonderful side is comprised of the misunderstandings, the battles, and the nastiness that can spin totally out of control when people have the protection of anonymity. The places populated by people who would rather shout into a hole in a wall and proclaim their rightness or their horribleness just to make someone else feel small.
That’s the other side of the internet.
Out of these two extremes comes Her Royal Harness, a pop duo formed on a message board and brought to life by Helene Jaeger, a Norwegian songwriter and London-based, British producer-instrumentalist Dylan Long.
Their new album The Hunting Room
However, I think they could benefit from having a more distinct perspective. The Hunting Room is a fun album, but it feels rootless. Obviously, pop music doesn’t always have to be deep and yes, some of the best examples of the genre are little more than blank canvases with great beats, but I found myself looking for something deeper with this album and coming up empty.
Jaeger and Long were nice enough to submit themselves to my inexpert questions about their formation and their progress as a group so far.
How you two came together through a fight in an internet forum is so modern and interesting and something many people can relate to. How did you go from arguing to deciding you want to work together?
Dylan: I think we both were looking for something new and realised that clashing and having different opinions on music or art, whatever, can only be healthy.
Helene: I love that about the internet, how it cuts right through social structure and geographical constraints. Online you can befriend people based on personality, whereas in everyday life you tend to spend time with people who happen to be in your general vicinity through school or work.
What was your very first creative collaboration? Did you meet in person or did you use tech to work together from a distance?
Helene: We passed a few things back and forth and after those results turned out interesting, he just said “OK, I’m coming over, we’re going to make music.” They were just ideas at that point, really, nothing too structured.
When did you two decide to take your creative partnership offline? What were the logistics of creating this relationship?
Helene: Around that same time, I was having a hard time finding the right people to play with and the ideas Dylan and I were working on started to make sense, the songs grew with his influences. Up til that point I’d only been writing on guitar and things were pretty raw. He opened up a much bigger sound.
How did you go about making the connection with Justin Gerrish? Sending a blind email to someone you’d like to work with and getting a positive response is, I imagine, one of the dreams of an artist, what do you think it was about you and your email that hooked him? What song did you send him?
Helene: Dylan was the one who got in touch with Justin; he’d read about his work recording and mixing the Vampire Weekend record “Contra”. I don’t know what it was that made him want to work with us, but it was an extremely happy moment when we got a positive answer back. What we sent was our first experiment, a song called “Battledrum”.
Why did you become disillusioned in your early work just when it seemed to be gaining traction?
Dylan: We’re often outside our comfort zones when working together and that’s where we think things are interesting. The early songs were really about working that out and making it fit together in this band. It’s probably like that for a lot of people, it’s something that never stops. We also really wanted to make a complete album where everything worked thematically and musically. Some of those early songs just didn’t make sense.
Her Royal Harness “Unseen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVqGjvWoOo8
(Image: Planetary Group)
