Cover photo courtesy of joan & their team
The combination of 200 million global streams and more than one million monthly listeners across platforms appears humble once you get into the music of the Arkansas duo joan. They have steadily become a compelling name in modern pop for their own music as well as the craft of their behind-the-scenes work producing for others. Their ability to seamlessly blend nostalgic sounds with infectious hooks has clearly garnered a loyal fanbase, allowing their music to take them from sweaty, packed-out hometown shows to massive international festivals and sold-out arenas across Asia.
Following the 2023 release of their debut album, superglue, joan is ushering themselves and fans alike into a new era. Singles like “space,” “alibi,” and “lucid dreaming” have set the tone for their sophomore record, this won’t last forever (released September 25 via Photo Finish Records). This is the culmination of what they have learned along the way. Following collaborations with artists such as McKenna Grace, J-pop sensation NOA, and K-pop group EPEX, the duo has refined their songwriting and production skills to align fully with their vision.
I caught up with Alan Benjamin Thomas of joan to talk about their journey so far, their new music, and what it means to create timeless songs in an ever-changing industry.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Grayson Lockwood: So you guys just got off a big tour and had some dates with Bloc Party. How was it with them? Is that a band you guys were inspired by? How does this compare to other bands you’ve played [with] or other stages you’ve played at in the past?
Alan Benjamin Thomas: The tour was awesome. They are very kind people. We had a little bit of interaction with them years back. We played a festival in Germany that they were on, we met them then, and they were gracious and kind and awesome. And then Louise, their drummer, has posted about us a lot and will do covers of our music and stuff, which is sick. She’s been amazing.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t know their music a ton before I’d heard of them, but I was familiar with their style of music and was familiar with some bands from that era, especially when they first got that Silent Alarm record. Then I realized later that I had heard their music quite a bit; I think it was Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or something that they were on. Anyway, now I’ve become a big fan, kind of retroactively. Yeah, they were so kind. And these were the biggest shows, the biggest venues we’ve played. We played Forest Hills Stadium, and the irony is, we had just come off on our own little [tour]. It was called the Close Friends Tour, and we were playing Wyatt Water Tower here in Little Rock, which is maybe 150 capped. It’s so small, but we packed it out. It was sweaty and small and fun and loud and all those things, and then we’re playing in front of this 10,000 seater at Forest Hills, which is crazy. So, we’ve done the gamut. We’ve done the whole spectrum of stuff, so it’s been pretty cool.
Gray: A lot of artists feel that everything is being rehashed and redone. How do you keep things refreshing with a unique sound when there’s so much to be gained playing into retro elements of music?
Alan: Well, I think one thing we definitely lean nostalgic in our sound because we love those sounds, and it just feels like home for a lot of people. I think nostalgia is a really powerful tool to make people feel connected, and I also think I’m not against trends at all. I’m not against the new sound the new this or the new that, but I do tend to kind of subscribe to the idea, or maybe the ideology that, some of those sounds are going to come and go very quickly and there are certain sounds that I think we may collectively as music lovers might go, “Yeah, that’s cool,” but its cool for a minute and then the next thing comes. And for some reason, there’s this pull from humanity for not the fast new shiny thing, but what’s the thing that we can keep going back to.
And I’ve always told Steven [Rutherford], and we’ve told each other this and preached it to ourselves time and time again, “Are we writing good songs?” I don’t really care what the production elements are as much as I do, “Can I sit and play this song on a piano or on acoustic, and it still touch you in some sort of emotional way?” And if the answer is no, then what are we doing?
I will hear a hyperpop song — and nothing is hyperpop out here — and I’m thinking about how this is brain chaos, and it’s cool for what it is, but the production is the cool thing about this to me, this specific thing. I don’t leave the song singing the melody or remembering the lyrics; it’s just a cool, flashy thing. And some people love that, it scratches their brain in a certain way, and it’s beautiful and it’s great. That’s the beauty of music, it’s a universal thing, so it’s gonna hit different people in different ways.
But for me, and my brain, and my heart, and how I love music, it’s all about the song. And there’s even songs in our discography that it’s not that I am not proud of them, it’s just I go back to them and think we probably chased a thing that wasn’t timeless on that particular song, probably never play that song live, whatever it is because we probably fell prey to chasing a sound or chasing a thing that I’m not proud of. And we have other songs like “brokenhearted” or “i loved you first” or a lot of songs on this album where I am like, I could play these songs forever because I feel like we were chasing a feeling and a timelessness that feels like it could’ve been written in 1985, or it could’ve been written in 2025, and that’s what I’m chasing always.
Gray: Who were your main sources of inspiration as kids, influences from your parents, and who has remained an inspiration and influence to you all now?
Alan: For me, it was my dad’s radio and my mom’s radio, and that was everyone from Prince to… My dad was everyone from Prince to Bob Seger, the Eagles, probably more Don Henley solos than the Eagles, and then, ya know, Michael Jackson. All the big 70s and 80s, early 90s, kinda heavy hitters. But it was pop then, but also kind of rock. He listened to KISS, and my mom was more of Guns n’ Roses and country radio. So I kinda got the gamut growing up, and I think it was all pop, kind of. My favorite all-time artist, literally of all time, best songs of all time, is singer-songwriter James Taylor. I love James Taylor. I got to see him live a few years ago with my dad, and that was a special core memory for me.
Again, I think it all comes back to songs. All my favorite artists have written really beautiful, brilliant songs. And you know they are sung by several different artists. I love the way it used to be, where someone would record a song, and it was some maybe no-name artist. And then an Elvis would come and take it because it was such a great song, and then record it as Elvis, and you find out now Elvis had nothing to do with that song. It was just a beautifully written song played on some local radio station, and then it got pitched to him and his team, and then it became whatever massive song it was.
But that points back to the song; it’s the song that is kind of the key. And I think Steven would say his parents weren’t maybe as influential in terms of what he was listening to. He jokes about listening to Metallica and stuff growing up, but it was more of a heavier sound, and that’s what he grew up playing in his high school bands and stuff. I think he fell in love with pop music and really good songwriting in college. It was a newer thing for him.
Gray: In terms of songwriting for you guys, what did or does it typically start with? Lyrics, melody, different riffs, a certain group of instruments, and how has that evolved, and what did you guys do for the current album?
Alan: We’ve always had kind of the same process, actually, which is normally I come up with a very crappy voice memo of me humming a melody or an acoustic and me singing in it or a piano in my house and me singing. Just sort of some chord structure of little ideas, and me frantically explaining it to Steven on the phone. Very producer brain. And I’ll send that to him very unfiltered. I normally won’t even send it unless I’m very excited about it. And we have a very good working relationship where we just kind of know when we both get stoked about something, it’s like, “let’s press go on that.” That’s kind of stayed the way we’ve worked since day 1. What’s changed is we used to be able to demo things out and get maybe 70-75 percent there, and then we needed a polisher, a producer to co-collab with us and get us there. And then the pandemic happened, and we all had nothing but time, and we put the Malcom Gladwell 10,000 hours in, and we just put our heads down and worked for two years learning and honing our craft of songwriting and production, and now we produce everything ourselves.
I’m really proud of us for that, and we’re really confident in it now. It used to be kind of scary because it would be like I don’t know how to make this vision. I hear the vision of the final product in my head, but I don’t know how to actually get there. And we kind of learned there were some tricks and tips, and we were overthinking some things, and I feel like now we’ve learned the craft of it, at least enough to support ourselves. We’ve even started producing other people, which is fun. People who were joan fans, or I love how you got this sound, or like, can you help me get that same thing? I’m kind of viewing joan as a joan the artist project and also joan the production writing team now. It’s opened up our minds in a whole new way and opened up our work in a whole new way.
To answer your original question, our process has kind of stayed the same, except now we’re way more confident and kind of have an assembly line system of workflow. And we have a studio in Little Rock. We renovated a house, and now we have an actual workplace. So we’re not in bedrooms anymore, we’re in an actual place to work. So, we do this 9-5 every day.
Gray: Do you guys still stay based in Little Rock aside from tours, or anything you need to travel for in regards to producing?
Alan: We’ve not left, we’ll go to Nashville or LA when we need to, and tour wherever. Our family is here, and the cost of living here is amazing; it’s an amazing city. It’s a river city, so the Arkansas River runs right through it, and those are my favorite cities in the world. We’ve been fortunate enough to go everywhere, and all my favorite European cities have huge rivers running through them. I’m not saying this is compared to a European city, obviously not quite the history, but the same feeling I get here.
We just haven’t needed to move. Just because of the internet, the importance of social media, whether it be good or bad in the end, is here now. The only people I would say have to be in a music city, realistically, are people wanting to write solely. If you want to be a writer and that’s your aim, I think you have to be in a city where those sessions are cranked out every day. And you can pull doubles, and you know, do that thing, or else maybe if you’re an important enough writer or make a name for yourself, people will come to you in a different town. I’m not saying that’s us at all. I think we’ve established ourselves enough in the industry that if you’ve heard of joan and if you like what we do enough to collaborate with us, a lot of people have been willing to come to Little Rock, which is really cool. I don’t know that would be the case if we didn’t have a studio, though. We at least have an infrastructure; if we didn’t have that, it might be a different story. I’m staying put, I freaking love it here.
Gray: You guys just produced for Ipex, the K-pop group. Did they come to Little Rock?
Alan: Yeah, we did a song with them. So, that one, we actually wrote the song called “so nice” and sent it. One of the singers in the band recorded a cover of one of our songs. Our song so good for some reason, has done really well in Asia, I don’t know why. But he recorded the thing, and we thought, “Oh, cool, so we connected online.” We said Hey, we love y’all’s stuff, let’s record together. And they’re like “great.” So, our teams started talking. They said, “Hey, we would love a song, like what joan does.” So we wrote basically a verse and a chorus of that song and pitched it to them. They loved it and thought hey let’s finish it. We (Ipex) will record vocals, and do you guys wanna feature on it? Yeah absolutely.
So we did it, and then they flew us out to freaking South Korea, and we recorded a music video, which was so sick. A very different world of music videos than we’re used to. They dance. I don’t know how to dance; I’m terrible at dancing. Steven actually can dance, and for some reason, I guess because I’m the singer, they were like, “You need to dance.” And I’m like, you have this backwards. I am not the guy who needs to be dancing in this (he says laughing). And so, I would strategically hide behind certain people in the group dances so I wouldn’t be seen as much and stuff. So it was a trip for sure, but yeah, we produced and wrote that song for them.
Gray: How do you feel you guys find the balance between what you reveal in your songs and what remains personal to you individually? Do you feel like that has changed at all since you’ve garnered more fans?
Alan: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think we’ve always been decidedly open books with that stuff. There’s certain personal stuff that maybe we talk about in songs or write about that maybe we just make a little vague. Not that anyone is deep diving and going “oh, they’re talking about this person or whatever.” One thing I love about pop music is the accessibility of it, and I never wanna write stuff that’s so so so personal or my situation only that it can’t be latched onto by maybe the greater group of listeners. Because at the end of the day, I would hope our music is casting a wide enough net that anyone can listen and identify with something. Maybe not every song, but something from our catalog that they’re like, “oh, I love that, and that speaks to me in this way.”
So in that way, we do dive into some personal stuff. But we write narratively too. We’ll have a friend go through something. I think back to “i loved you first”, one of our old songs, which was very much inspired by and written by my first heartbreak in 7th grade. It’s reaching way back; I don’t feel those things anymore about my 7th grade girlfriend Lauren, who absolutely wrecked my heart. But that was loosely based on that, and I was trying to dive into that.
That’s kind of the beauty of music is you can kind of time-travel and transport and maybe even emphasize or sympathize with others and their situation, even if you’re not currently going through that. We’ll write a breakup song, and that feels like I’m trying to embody in my vocals that feeling, so when the listener hears it, they think oh, I feel his pain. But I’m happily married with children, so there’s that weird juxtaposition of that. And I never want it to come off as not genuine because I felt that heartbreak, it’s just maybe not what I’m feeling at this moment in my life. Yeah, it’s a balance, and it’s a thing we kind of tackle every song and every project. We think about that a lot.
Gray: What is your favorite song on the new album and why? How do you anticipate it will be received by your fans, and have you seen patterns with songs you hold most close being surprisingly received? Previously, what have been your favorite songs, and what songs have you been surprised by in regard to how well they’ve done in the past?
Alan: So, on this new album, probably my favorite song on it is the title track this won’t last forever. I don’t really know why other than I just love it, and I would say it’s one of the most joan things we possibly could have written and produced. It feels very now but also very 1987, and I love that about it.
In terms of previous discography, there’s definitely been songs, or I guess on this album, but “alibi,” I love that song, and it means a lot to us, and it was one of my favorite songs, but I didn’t see it having quite as much reach as it has so far. And it’s not insane, but we got mega playlisted on that on Spotify. There are other songs we’ve released that I thought would do that same thing before that one maybe. To double click, that’s a really techy way to say that, but to really zoom in on even a deeper thing on this question is artist expectation, and I’ve learned not to have any anymore. The industry is so ever-changing, it seems like every week there’s a new AI song or production or something. A friend of mine just sent me a pneuma bounce. He fed it his lyrics, he fed it a vocal, and maybe an acoustic guitar track, and he prompted “make this whatever,” and he gave it all the way he wanted it to sound, and maybe even references, and it spit out, and he sent me the bounce. It sounds like a radio-ready song. And no human touched any element of what was spit out. It was all like a large language model; I don’t know all the science behind it.
So if that’s what we’re having to compete with in the future, I’m just gonna keep doing what we’re doing and hope that it connects with people. Because I can’t control anything, the minute we think we have an in with some whatever industry, somebody this or that, that person goes to a new company. There’s turnover. I’m constantly surprised by what speaks to our audience or even people that aren’t necessarily like joan fans, but people who heard about us for the first time, maybe new fans. Constantly surprised by what works and what doesn’t work, and what people latch onto and what they don’t, and what industry people think is a hit and what isn’t, and inevitably it never is what they say it is. I throw my hands up, and I’m like, I don’t freaking know anything. I just love what we do, and I wanna keep doing it. I have no idea. The whole thing is a big mystery.
Gray: I wanted to give you an open space to say anything you want to say about the new album, what you’re excited about.
Alan: The album, this won’t last forever, is, I think, the culmination of– we flew to New York in the beginning of 2024 to meet with our label, Photo Finish, and we showed them three demos. If I remember correctly, we showed them “heart body mind soul,” “magic,” and then a song called “surface level.” It exists, but we did a YouTube video thing for it, but it’s not a full song yet. It did not make the cut. And that was the beginning of this album.
It was a year and a half in the making, and I think this album represents a lot of things for us. One is, it’s our sophomore album, which I’m not anxious about if people are gonna think it sucks. I don’t worry about that stuff too much because I feel like, all ego aside, Steven and I have really good internal filters of what is good and bad. And that’s all subjective anyway, because there are songs that people love that I don’t get, and there are songs that I love that other people are like I don’t get. So it’s like who knows.
But it’s a year and a half of really hard work. It’s all us. We produced it all, we wrote it all. It’s our blood, sweat, and tears. It’s handcrafted here in our studio with our own hands. And I’m really proud of it. I think that the general theme of it is exactly what it says: this won’t last forever. And there’s a middle track called “tutto passa” that’s an Italian phrase that means “this too shall pass.” Steven, his wife’s pregnancy was termed high risk, and with all that happening, he just had this looming cloud over his head, where he’s having this beautiful family moment, and there’s this impending doom thing where it’s like, we don’t know what’s gonna happen. He wrote a poem about it and showed it to me, and I was like, “This is the theme of the album.” We need to at least use this lens to think through every song that we write for this and produce for this.
And the idea is really simple: it’s good and bad, all things pass. Which can be very depressing and also very joy deriving. You can be in the worst season of your life, and you can rest in the fact that it won’t last forever. The sun will rise tomorrow. There will be a new day. That thing will go away eventually. Time heals. And then we were on vacation this week, and I’m playing with my daughter, who’s about to turn four, and my son, who’s about to turn two, and my daughter has these sayings where she’s trying to say a phrase and it’s clearly wrong, but it’s really cute how she says it. She used to say instead of “next beside me,” she said “come sit next to side me.” And it’s just this cute little girl thing, and my wife and I would look at each other and say, “I hope she never says the right thing because it’s just so cute.” And then this weekend she’s like, “Hey, come sit next beside me, Dad.” And I’m like, who are you? You’re fourteen all of a sudden. And it’s that thing that I wanted to last forever. I wanted her to stay packaged in this little toddler ball. But she’s gonna become a woman and one day get married and have her own kids, or not. Or have a massive career. I don’t know what her future is, but it’s gonna be beautiful and awesome.
But there’s a sadness to it as well. This beauty won’t last forever. Our lives won’t last forever. So we tried to write the whole thing through that lens. And I think we did it. Who knows what people will think of it, but I’m really proud of it, and Steven is really proud of it. And it’s definitely our best foot forward. It’s the best thing we could have produced and written at this point in our lives.
Closing
With this won’t last forever, joan steps further into their own lane, after honing their craft for years to a sound that is both timeless and modern. From producing in their Little Rock home studio to collaborating with international artists, Thomas and Rutherford continue to expand their creative reach without losing sight of what matters most at the end of the day: not just the message, but like all great artists, the songs themselves.
