5 Questions With - Karmin
I was going to do a regular “5 Questions With…”, but the situation changed and I was given an even better opportunity. A few days ago, I spent almost an hour on the phone with pop duo Karmin (whom you know I love) and a collection of other journalists. I got to ask a few questions, but mostly I’m going to steal theirs (I’ll give them credit, don’t worry!).
The whole thing has been transcribed word for word, so I’m not making any of this up, don’t you worry!
(warning: it’s kind of long)
(that’s what she said)
Moderator: Our first question comes from John Moser of Morning Call. Please go ahead.
J. Moser: Hey, I’m wondering with your first album, since so much of what first caught the attention of everybody with you guys were your covers, how did you approach the album? I mean, did you have material already done that you guys were interested in recording? Just sort of tell me how you approached the project.
A. Heidemann: Absolutely, John. It was a challenge, we have to say. We started posting original music on YouTube before the covers became a reality and nobody was really searching for a little duo out of Boston with a wooden box and a piano. We always knew that we had to come with original music that competed with the Lady Gagas and the Katie Perrys of the radio mainstream world, so we were writing songs that kind of would sound good in any genre. By the time we got signed with Epic Records, we had a lot of those songs ready to go with producers. We would go in and they would make them, of course, sound a million times better.
There were some songs we composed solely for the purpose of the album when we went into the studio. A lot of them were collaborations with some of these amazing producers and a songwriter called Claude Kelly, who you might remember wrote Grenade for Bruno Mars and Circus for Britney, amongst other huge songs. We were definitely very careful and we made sure to preserve as much of the Karmin sound that we could while making it compete with what’s out there in the mainstream world.
J. Moser: Okay. I’m sorry. Tell me, how does a white girl from middle-America become such an amazing rapper?
A. Heidemann: Well, thank you. That’s very nice of you. I grew up loving rap music but coming from a conservative Christian household, I wasn’t allowed to listen to a lot of what we would consider legit rap music. The parental advisory sticker really kind of limited my abilities to listen to that, but I always wanted to be a part of that world.
Looking the way I do and coming from a background where I didn’t necessarily curse or know much about the lifestyle, I just didn’t know the world would like my rapping so it was actually Nick, my band mate, who convinced me to post a video on YouTube. At the time, it was our biggest reaction we had ever gotten, so I’ve only been rapping for about a year.
Moderator: Our next question comes from Jerry Nunn of Windy City Times. Please go ahead.
J. Nunn: Can you tell me about live for you guys, is it very acoustic? Is it going to be more pop kind of stuff or what’s it like?
N. Noonan: Absolutely. It’s just going to be fireworks and we’re going to be up on an elephant. We’re going to be bringing an elephant up on stage. No, I’m kidding. It’s going to be a lot of live instruments, so it’s me and Amy, obviously. We have a guitar player, a bass player, and a drummer and they’re all killing. They’re ridiculous, so good.
It’s them and we have a little bit of track too just for all the stuff like strings and stuff that, obviously, we can’t do live. It’s a lot of energy, dude, and it’s definitely a lot more kind of like in the Maroon 5 type vein as far as like the live stuff but still a lot very, very hip hop based.
THIS IS ME THIS IS MY PART WATCH WATCH ARE YOU WATCHINGGG?!?!
Moderator: Our next question comes from Hugh McIntyre of Pop! Bang! Boom! Please go ahead.
H. McIntyre: Hello, guys. First of all, I want to say I’m really excited to see a Boston group make it this big. I’m calling you from Newton right now.
A. Heidemann: Thanks for the support.
H. McIntyre: Of course. I’m going to ask you I guess two questions. First, sorry everyone else is a little selfish for me, but just looking at the Boston scene, I know you come from Berklee, but how did you guys feel being a pop group and underground scene? How did you make that happen? We know the YouTube and all of that, but how did you make this happen within playing and within touring and stuff as a pop duo to become what you are now?
A. Heidemann: That’s a great question. It was really difficult. I have to say, I heard New York is a lot more difficult and Los Angeles, but being in Boston it’s a very large student population so we lost our fans every three or four years. They would move away. After opening for a couple of the larger bands in club scenarios, we realized that a wooden box and an acoustic guitar wasn’t really standing up against the metal rock scene in Boston so we started performing on the street.
We performed a lot on Newbury Street almost like homeless people with the guitar case open and some CDs for sale. That was actually the most successful format for us in the city, aside from YouTube, because there are a lot of people from different countries walking down shopping on Newbury. We tried to participate in different community events like we would do little talent shows here and there and open for local artists that were friends of ours, but it wasn’t easy.
H. McIntyre: No. Yes. Excellent. My second part of that is I write a lot about underground pop artists and sometimes an underground pop artist will become big, will get a label signed, and all of a sudden I read a lot about them. Blogs are saying, “Oh, well now they’re working with so and so. This isn’t really them anymore.” How are you maintaining the Karmin sound? How are you staying the same while you’re working with all these massive producers that you now have access to?
A. Heidemann: Man, it is tough, not from a point where we’re like, “Oh, no. They’re not letting us be ourselves,” but from the point of we have unlimited resources now and it’s so exciting for us to explore those things. We understand our fans and supporters can’t be with us in the studio when we’re deciding to do things so we’re being really careful.
This is a good example. Sometimes people will show up to a photo shoot with a rack of clothing and they’ll pull something off the rack and I’ll look at it and I’ll say, “That’s second album.” I know where we’re headed so we’re able to hold back to a certain extent to keep it relevant for this stage in our career.
Our label, Epic, has been so supportive. L.A. Reid, he signed us for what were, which was a quirky, honest duo that’s musically trained. I think you’ll really enjoy what’s on the album. We’re really proud of what ended up on there and we think it represents us really well.
H. McIntyre: Excellent. Thank you guys.
A. Heidemann: Thank you.
(you can tune out now if you want, I’m done)
Moderator: Our next question comes from Michael Dow of The Main Edge in Blue. Please go ahead.
M. Dow: Okay. I’d like to hear from both of you if you could think back to the very first time you laid eyes on each other, the first time you met, or your first conversation. People are fascinated by your story of how you two got together. Could you just tell me about the very beginning of Nick and Amy when you first met each other?
N. Noonan: Dude, absolutely. It definitely evolved into a relationship. We never really had a conversation until the very end of our freshman year, but we played in a couple of shows together. I was the trombone kid and they asked me to do a bunch of guys being the trombone guy in the section. Then they asked Amy to be the singer or the backup singer for a lot of stuff because she was known as being some hotshot singer on campus.
We knew of each other. She always hung out with the gospel crowd and everything, and I always just kind of hung out with the weird horn players. I was kind of more like the weird jazz head. We knew of each other. She was the hot singer and I was some weird homeless guy.
Late freshman year was the first time we actually had a conversation. We go away for summer and we came back and the first week sophomore year we met and actually talked at a party and really hit it off. That was it.
Moderator: Our next question comes from the Shay Fontaine of Page 21 Magazine. Please go ahead.
S. Fontaine: Thank you so much for answering these questions for us. I just have a few fairly easy ones. In addition to your breakout hit single, Broken Hearted, which has been doing amazingly on the charts, can you tell us from a music perspective what we can expect to hear on the album?
N. Noonan: Hello. Nice to meet you. Absolutely. Hello, absolutely; Broken Hearted kind of feels more like the pop end, but we definitely always made sure everything we do is …. The drums are nice and upfront and that it sits heavy and even the way Amy vocals sit on the beat when we first wrote it we think it had more of like an ... shaped feel because of the way it swings. She’s sings more of like a … feel rather than like …. There is a lot of that. The best way to describe that is just kind of unfortunately swag. The whole album has that feel where everything just kind of shifts back on the beat with a lot of big heavy drugs. Everything is very rhythmical leaning and of course, there is a lot of rhyming.
S. Fontaine: Okay. Did you and Amy write most of your material? If not, what other writers and/or producers did you work with on your new album?
N. Noonan: We were actually lucky enough that L.A. Reid loves our writing. We wrote and recorded like 50 songs for this release and then the ones he ended up picking were I think three or four of them we wrote 100% just by ourselves. That’s a pretty amazing feeling, but we did have some co-writers too – Claude Kelly, who co-wrote Grenade and Party in the U.S.A. and Circus for Brittney, stuff like that. Max is an unbelievable writer. He did a lot of co-writing and then, let’s see, I think that was about it.
Moderator: Our next question comes from Derek Shapiro of The Derek Shapiro Show. Please go ahead.
D. Shapiro: Good. Welcome to The Derek Shapiro Show and DSS TV Station. The first question I have for you guys, Nick and Amy, is that how are you dealing with the success of the new song, Broken Hearted, and what’s behind the song Broken Hearted?
A. Heidemann: Oh, my goodness. Well, we’re super, super happy with how everything is going with the song. Just really happy that our fans and supporters are liking our original music. We wrote the song because Claude Kelly was in the studio with us, the songwriter that worked on a lot of the album with us, and he was like, “You guys really need a song about you, about you guys.” We were like, “No. We want to write songs for our fans and about motivating people and he was like, “No, we need a love song on here.” We were like, “Oh, ….”
We start writing this song about how Nick and I met, which was at a party in college, and we had no idea that we would hit it off the way we did. Actually, the next day neither of us called each other, so it was like I don’t know if Nick was overthinking it like I was, but I was pacing around my room, checking my phone every five minutes like, “What is going on? Usually I get everything I want.” That’s what Broken Hearted is about.
It’s funny the word Cheerio kind of popped out when we were just recording it and Claude was like, “Hey, Amy I need you to do a really good end to the song this time.” I’m the kind of person that will just say something really silly to break the tension in the room so that’s where that came from.
D. Shapiro: One last question for Nick. How did you propose to Amy?
N. Noonan: How I proposed?
D. Shapiro: Yes.
N. Noonan: Hello. By the way, this is Nick. I always have her answer this question. I worked right down the street at a boxing club and I used to come over sometimes for lunch. I’d come over and this particular time I said, “Hey, I have a new song for Karmin.” She said, “Okay,” so I came over and I plugged the iPod in and I was just right there in the kitchen and Elvis Presley’s Can’t Help Falling in Love With You came on. She just kind of looked at me and just kind of looked like, “Oh, ….” Then I got down on one knee and did the deed. I was really nervous, actually. I didn’t think I was going to be nervous. I was really nervous.
Moderator: Our next question comes from Jill Martin of Seward County. Please go ahead.
J. Martin: We want to ask one more question too. As far as all the YouTube videos that you’ve done, what was probably the favorite as far as recording and do you have another one that you have coming up?
A. Heidemann: Oh, my gosh, we just covered our own song. We did a version of Broken Hearted. We just posted it yesterday so it’s brand new, but it’s one of our favorites so far because we flipped it around. It’s more of a ballad so that was really fun. I think in the past one of our favorites was Super Base, which was the Nicki Minaj song that we just with Questlove from The Roots.
J. Martin: Very cool. Who has been your favorite artist to work with so far?
A. Heidemann: Oh, my gosh, favorite artist to work with? Do you have a favorite, Nick? We actually haven’t worked with too many artists. We’re hoping that maybe the second album we’ll do some collaborations. L.A. Reid decided that we were just going to do 100% Karmin on this first release, but we would love to work with Kanye West. We love his work. I think Nicki Minaj. Nick would love to work with Chris Martin with Coldplay. I think those are the top three for now.
Yayyy! Big thanks to Karmin for sitting in and talking to us all for that long. There were many more questions, but I picked out the best for you all.
Karmin’s debut album ‘Hello’, featuring “Brokenhearted” is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hello-Karmin/dp/B007RXC3B2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336667512&sr=8-1">out now</a>!
The whole thing has been transcribed word for word, so I’m not making any of this up, don’t you worry!
(warning: it’s kind of long)
(that’s what she said)
Moderator: Our first question comes from John Moser of Morning Call. Please go ahead.
J. Moser: Hey, I’m wondering with your first album, since so much of what first caught the attention of everybody with you guys were your covers, how did you approach the album? I mean, did you have material already done that you guys were interested in recording? Just sort of tell me how you approached the project.
A. Heidemann: Absolutely, John. It was a challenge, we have to say. We started posting original music on YouTube before the covers became a reality and nobody was really searching for a little duo out of Boston with a wooden box and a piano. We always knew that we had to come with original music that competed with the Lady Gagas and the Katie Perrys of the radio mainstream world, so we were writing songs that kind of would sound good in any genre. By the time we got signed with Epic Records, we had a lot of those songs ready to go with producers. We would go in and they would make them, of course, sound a million times better.
There were some songs we composed solely for the purpose of the album when we went into the studio. A lot of them were collaborations with some of these amazing producers and a songwriter called Claude Kelly, who you might remember wrote Grenade for Bruno Mars and Circus for Britney, amongst other huge songs. We were definitely very careful and we made sure to preserve as much of the Karmin sound that we could while making it compete with what’s out there in the mainstream world.
J. Moser: Okay. I’m sorry. Tell me, how does a white girl from middle-America become such an amazing rapper?
A. Heidemann: Well, thank you. That’s very nice of you. I grew up loving rap music but coming from a conservative Christian household, I wasn’t allowed to listen to a lot of what we would consider legit rap music. The parental advisory sticker really kind of limited my abilities to listen to that, but I always wanted to be a part of that world.
Looking the way I do and coming from a background where I didn’t necessarily curse or know much about the lifestyle, I just didn’t know the world would like my rapping so it was actually Nick, my band mate, who convinced me to post a video on YouTube. At the time, it was our biggest reaction we had ever gotten, so I’ve only been rapping for about a year.
Moderator: Our next question comes from Jerry Nunn of Windy City Times. Please go ahead.
J. Nunn: Can you tell me about live for you guys, is it very acoustic? Is it going to be more pop kind of stuff or what’s it like?
N. Noonan: Absolutely. It’s just going to be fireworks and we’re going to be up on an elephant. We’re going to be bringing an elephant up on stage. No, I’m kidding. It’s going to be a lot of live instruments, so it’s me and Amy, obviously. We have a guitar player, a bass player, and a drummer and they’re all killing. They’re ridiculous, so good.
It’s them and we have a little bit of track too just for all the stuff like strings and stuff that, obviously, we can’t do live. It’s a lot of energy, dude, and it’s definitely a lot more kind of like in the Maroon 5 type vein as far as like the live stuff but still a lot very, very hip hop based.
THIS IS ME THIS IS MY PART WATCH WATCH ARE YOU WATCHINGGG?!?!
Moderator: Our next question comes from Hugh McIntyre of Pop! Bang! Boom! Please go ahead.
H. McIntyre: Hello, guys. First of all, I want to say I’m really excited to see a Boston group make it this big. I’m calling you from Newton right now.
A. Heidemann: Thanks for the support.
H. McIntyre: Of course. I’m going to ask you I guess two questions. First, sorry everyone else is a little selfish for me, but just looking at the Boston scene, I know you come from Berklee, but how did you guys feel being a pop group and underground scene? How did you make that happen? We know the YouTube and all of that, but how did you make this happen within playing and within touring and stuff as a pop duo to become what you are now?
A. Heidemann: That’s a great question. It was really difficult. I have to say, I heard New York is a lot more difficult and Los Angeles, but being in Boston it’s a very large student population so we lost our fans every three or four years. They would move away. After opening for a couple of the larger bands in club scenarios, we realized that a wooden box and an acoustic guitar wasn’t really standing up against the metal rock scene in Boston so we started performing on the street.
We performed a lot on Newbury Street almost like homeless people with the guitar case open and some CDs for sale. That was actually the most successful format for us in the city, aside from YouTube, because there are a lot of people from different countries walking down shopping on Newbury. We tried to participate in different community events like we would do little talent shows here and there and open for local artists that were friends of ours, but it wasn’t easy.
H. McIntyre: No. Yes. Excellent. My second part of that is I write a lot about underground pop artists and sometimes an underground pop artist will become big, will get a label signed, and all of a sudden I read a lot about them. Blogs are saying, “Oh, well now they’re working with so and so. This isn’t really them anymore.” How are you maintaining the Karmin sound? How are you staying the same while you’re working with all these massive producers that you now have access to?
A. Heidemann: Man, it is tough, not from a point where we’re like, “Oh, no. They’re not letting us be ourselves,” but from the point of we have unlimited resources now and it’s so exciting for us to explore those things. We understand our fans and supporters can’t be with us in the studio when we’re deciding to do things so we’re being really careful.
This is a good example. Sometimes people will show up to a photo shoot with a rack of clothing and they’ll pull something off the rack and I’ll look at it and I’ll say, “That’s second album.” I know where we’re headed so we’re able to hold back to a certain extent to keep it relevant for this stage in our career.
Our label, Epic, has been so supportive. L.A. Reid, he signed us for what were, which was a quirky, honest duo that’s musically trained. I think you’ll really enjoy what’s on the album. We’re really proud of what ended up on there and we think it represents us really well.
H. McIntyre: Excellent. Thank you guys.
A. Heidemann: Thank you.
(you can tune out now if you want, I’m done)
Moderator: Our next question comes from Michael Dow of The Main Edge in Blue. Please go ahead.
M. Dow: Okay. I’d like to hear from both of you if you could think back to the very first time you laid eyes on each other, the first time you met, or your first conversation. People are fascinated by your story of how you two got together. Could you just tell me about the very beginning of Nick and Amy when you first met each other?
N. Noonan: Dude, absolutely. It definitely evolved into a relationship. We never really had a conversation until the very end of our freshman year, but we played in a couple of shows together. I was the trombone kid and they asked me to do a bunch of guys being the trombone guy in the section. Then they asked Amy to be the singer or the backup singer for a lot of stuff because she was known as being some hotshot singer on campus.
We knew of each other. She always hung out with the gospel crowd and everything, and I always just kind of hung out with the weird horn players. I was kind of more like the weird jazz head. We knew of each other. She was the hot singer and I was some weird homeless guy.
Late freshman year was the first time we actually had a conversation. We go away for summer and we came back and the first week sophomore year we met and actually talked at a party and really hit it off. That was it.
Moderator: Our next question comes from the Shay Fontaine of Page 21 Magazine. Please go ahead.
S. Fontaine: Thank you so much for answering these questions for us. I just have a few fairly easy ones. In addition to your breakout hit single, Broken Hearted, which has been doing amazingly on the charts, can you tell us from a music perspective what we can expect to hear on the album?
N. Noonan: Hello. Nice to meet you. Absolutely. Hello, absolutely; Broken Hearted kind of feels more like the pop end, but we definitely always made sure everything we do is …. The drums are nice and upfront and that it sits heavy and even the way Amy vocals sit on the beat when we first wrote it we think it had more of like an ... shaped feel because of the way it swings. She’s sings more of like a … feel rather than like …. There is a lot of that. The best way to describe that is just kind of unfortunately swag. The whole album has that feel where everything just kind of shifts back on the beat with a lot of big heavy drugs. Everything is very rhythmical leaning and of course, there is a lot of rhyming.
S. Fontaine: Okay. Did you and Amy write most of your material? If not, what other writers and/or producers did you work with on your new album?
N. Noonan: We were actually lucky enough that L.A. Reid loves our writing. We wrote and recorded like 50 songs for this release and then the ones he ended up picking were I think three or four of them we wrote 100% just by ourselves. That’s a pretty amazing feeling, but we did have some co-writers too – Claude Kelly, who co-wrote Grenade and Party in the U.S.A. and Circus for Brittney, stuff like that. Max is an unbelievable writer. He did a lot of co-writing and then, let’s see, I think that was about it.
Moderator: Our next question comes from Derek Shapiro of The Derek Shapiro Show. Please go ahead.
D. Shapiro: Good. Welcome to The Derek Shapiro Show and DSS TV Station. The first question I have for you guys, Nick and Amy, is that how are you dealing with the success of the new song, Broken Hearted, and what’s behind the song Broken Hearted?
A. Heidemann: Oh, my goodness. Well, we’re super, super happy with how everything is going with the song. Just really happy that our fans and supporters are liking our original music. We wrote the song because Claude Kelly was in the studio with us, the songwriter that worked on a lot of the album with us, and he was like, “You guys really need a song about you, about you guys.” We were like, “No. We want to write songs for our fans and about motivating people and he was like, “No, we need a love song on here.” We were like, “Oh, ….”
We start writing this song about how Nick and I met, which was at a party in college, and we had no idea that we would hit it off the way we did. Actually, the next day neither of us called each other, so it was like I don’t know if Nick was overthinking it like I was, but I was pacing around my room, checking my phone every five minutes like, “What is going on? Usually I get everything I want.” That’s what Broken Hearted is about.
It’s funny the word Cheerio kind of popped out when we were just recording it and Claude was like, “Hey, Amy I need you to do a really good end to the song this time.” I’m the kind of person that will just say something really silly to break the tension in the room so that’s where that came from.
D. Shapiro: One last question for Nick. How did you propose to Amy?
N. Noonan: How I proposed?
D. Shapiro: Yes.
N. Noonan: Hello. By the way, this is Nick. I always have her answer this question. I worked right down the street at a boxing club and I used to come over sometimes for lunch. I’d come over and this particular time I said, “Hey, I have a new song for Karmin.” She said, “Okay,” so I came over and I plugged the iPod in and I was just right there in the kitchen and Elvis Presley’s Can’t Help Falling in Love With You came on. She just kind of looked at me and just kind of looked like, “Oh, ….” Then I got down on one knee and did the deed. I was really nervous, actually. I didn’t think I was going to be nervous. I was really nervous.
Moderator: Our next question comes from Jill Martin of Seward County. Please go ahead.
J. Martin: We want to ask one more question too. As far as all the YouTube videos that you’ve done, what was probably the favorite as far as recording and do you have another one that you have coming up?
A. Heidemann: Oh, my gosh, we just covered our own song. We did a version of Broken Hearted. We just posted it yesterday so it’s brand new, but it’s one of our favorites so far because we flipped it around. It’s more of a ballad so that was really fun. I think in the past one of our favorites was Super Base, which was the Nicki Minaj song that we just with Questlove from The Roots.
J. Martin: Very cool. Who has been your favorite artist to work with so far?
A. Heidemann: Oh, my gosh, favorite artist to work with? Do you have a favorite, Nick? We actually haven’t worked with too many artists. We’re hoping that maybe the second album we’ll do some collaborations. L.A. Reid decided that we were just going to do 100% Karmin on this first release, but we would love to work with Kanye West. We love his work. I think Nicki Minaj. Nick would love to work with Chris Martin with Coldplay. I think those are the top three for now.
Yayyy! Big thanks to Karmin for sitting in and talking to us all for that long. There were many more questions, but I picked out the best for you all.
Karmin’s debut album ‘Hello’, featuring “Brokenhearted” is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hello-Karmin/dp/B007RXC3B2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336667512&sr=8-1">out now</a>!