Hotline TNT on Jack White, Sufjan Stevens, and the Shoegaze Industrial Complex

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

It's been very nice to see Hotline TNT's third album Raspberry Moon be so warmly received, and it's well-deserved too; the hooks are bigger, the melodies are thicker, and it's pretty much in every way what you'd want from a band following up a breakout like 2023's stellar Cartwheel. I hopped on a call with band godhead Will Anderson late last month to talk through a variety of topics pertaining to his career and listening to music in general, and I quite enjoyed his refreshing sense of candor throughout. Let's get into it:

One thing that the press bio mentioned quite a bit was working as a full band in studio working with a producer for the first time. Tell me about the challenges and rewards of changing your approach up.
Yeah, I mean, any time there's a press bio, there's some kind of angle that I don't say anything about—like, "Oh, that's the angle you're going for." Having said that, there were some key differences in this record. For the most part, it's still the same process. I have the demos ready to go, and then we get into the studio and flesh them out—whether it's just me and the engineer or me and several bandmates. But this time, there was some more space allowed for seeing what happens when the four of us are in a studio together. I left space for, like, "Let's write a new song right here in the studio"—and that happened in one case. Some other songs got pretty radically changed once we were in the studio.

Given how this went, do you think you're gravitating towards an overall approach you'll want to embrace with future records?
Hard for me to predict. To be honest, I keep surprising myself with what happens with this band. I didn't know that there was going to be four people writing this record together. Pretty much every time I've made a prediction, it's not worked out that way. so I just try to stay open-minded. Maybe the next record will be a completely wide-open jam collaboration, or maybe I'll go back to Garageband and do it all myself. I really don't know yet.

You've been making music for quite a while, and when I talk to independent musicians who have been in various projects, sometimes they're pretty surprised as to what catches on with the general public. Was that your experience with Cartwheel?
Absolutely. With that one in particular, at some point I did know that it was going to be released on a bigger label. But leading up to that point, it was just another album. I did it the same way I've always done. The team had grown by the time it came out—there was a manager, a lawyer, a publicist—but even then, until it actually came out and got good press coverage and all that followed, I didn't think it was going to be any different than all the previous records I'd done.

I've read that you had an initial hesitancy towards signing to Third Man. I'm curious to hear you reflect on that now that you're two records deep with the label.
I don't want to say it's a 180 from the beginning, but it's pretty close. I was hesitant at all, I'm now pretty gung-ho as saying they're the best label in the world. If a magic wand tapped me on the head and said, "Okay, you can do your DIY label-slash-band but now you have a billion dollars," I'd probably do exactly what Third Man's doing. They are, in my opinion, just a DIY label scaled way, way, way up, with more resources.

They're easy to make fun of, I think—and I have made fun of them a lot, especially earlier on, because it's Jack White and he's a millionaire, and millionaires should be made fun of. But once I got past that, I was like, "These guys are awesome." They've been really easy to work with. I couldn't say a bad word about them.

That's funny regarding Jack White. We're close to the same age, and when the White Stripes were at their peak he was obviously highly revered as a mystical, Beck-type figure. Around the early-to-mid-2010s, he had this period where people were just incessantly clowning on him just for existing. I almost feel like he needed to kind of just exist to prove that he actually cared about music and wasn't just like gonna turn out to be another garden-variety shithead.
Very few people can reach that level of success, fame, and fortune and not just become a celebrity—and most celebrities aren't that cool. But, as time has has gone on, he's put pretty much every dollar he's made back into the record industry and curating and supporting music, which feels a little rare, honestly. He still has his vanity projects—a red-and-white Jeep Cherokee or whatever—and who wouldn't, at that level? But whatever.

Speaking of labels—is "Julia's War" named after the record label?
Definitely. Doug from [They Are Gutting a Body of Water] is a close friend of mine. It was a funny origin—the first lyric in the song happens to be Julia, so that just became the file name on the GarageBand demo. I have a very small early-stages imprint myself called Poison Rhythm, and Doug had said to me, "You took that name? I was going to name our next record Poison Rhythm." And I was like, "Well, now I'm gonna name a song after your label." It's a respectful nod.

Tell me a little more about your imprint that's in the works.
It's super early-stages. It was pretty much just a placeholder name before we were on Third Man—I used it for the 7" we put out. I've since put out a record for this band called Ram from L.A., and we have another one on the way this fall—a 12" for a band called Combat Naps. I'm pretty much trying to be the next Third Man someday.

Talk to me more about the importance of labels to you as a music listener. When you're first really getting into music, knowing who's putting what out is a pretty formative way to discover stuff you haven't heard before—like digging through the Matador back catalog for the first time.
To be honest, the first music I got super hard into wasn't like that. Like everybody else, I was into Weezer and Red Hot Chili Peppers or whatever, but in early high school I got into the Strokes and the White Stripes, and by the time they really hit they were already on RCA and V2, so I didn't have a shepherd showing me the origins of where they were coming from.

Even with Matador, I feel like they were out of my awareness until a little bit later in life. I guess I knew about Saddle Creek. They were a label that was curating a vibe that, at one point in my life, I was pretty into—or even, like, Asthmatic Kitty, to be honest. I was super into Sufjan Stevens when I was young, and I was like, "Okay, this guy must be a tastemaker, I want to see what else he's working with." One of the bigger roles that a good label would have is, "I'm going to listen to this record because he's put it out, and he's put out other cool stuff, so let's see what else he's got."

What was the first Sufjan record you heard?
Seven Swans, actually. I grew up in Wisconsin, and he played a show at UW-Stout in Menomonie, 30 minutes from my house. I'd seen his name, and he has a cool name, obviously. There was also an Other Music promo video back in the day with Aziz Ansari where they talk about Sufjan, and I was like, "What is this?" I saw he was coming to Menomonie and I was like, "I'm gonna go." He was touring Seven Swans, and there were probably 15 people there—and I was one of them.

Dan Licata and Edy Modica pop up in the video for "Julia's War." I actually had Dan on the newsletter last year, both of them are hilarious. Tell me about getting them involved.
The band and I have a pretty important relationship to the Brooklyn comedy world. For our last album, we had a video for "I Thought You'd Change," which had Eric Rahill and Jack Bensinger in it.

They've also been on the newsletter recently.
Oh, really? Eric is, like, my favorite. I'd met him through another friend at one point and had seen his shows a bunch, and one day I just shot my shot and was like, "Would you ever want to do a music video?" He said yes, and that's how us working with comedians started. I was on the Joy Tactics podcast, and then he brought a bunch of comedians to that video. One of them was Jill O'Connell, who I met that day on that video shoot, and we've been dating ever since. She introduced me to Edy and Dan, and that's the long story short.

What do you find funny in terms of comedy? What scratches your itch?
I'm pretty particular. I'm not necessarily an easy laugh, but with Eric, he plays a character that's right on the line of, "Is this a real guy, or is this a character?" Kyle Mooney is probably my top dog. I can watch his videos a zillion times and never stop laughing. His and Eric's work is extremely real and very hard to watch because of how real they are.

The "Julia's War" video also depicts a shoegaze boot camp of sorts. It's very referential in terms of Hotline TNT being pigeonholed as a shoegaze act, which increasingly doesn't feel like such a tight fit with what you're actually doing.
Even going into the promotional Instagram teasers we were doing for this album, we were like, "The next phase in new American shoegaze is coming." I don't think we're a shoegaze band at all, but—and not to make broad strokes about the state of rock journalism, whether it's TikTok comment sections or actual journalists—everything is just getting called shoegaze now. Even a band like TAGABOW versus us, I think we sound pretty different. But both are seen as, like, tentpoles of the shoegaze movement or whatever, if I may be so bold to call myself that.

I think the word is just being mutilated. It doesn't mean anything anymore, and that's been happening for as long as rock music has existed. It doesn't bother me at all, but the video is definitely like the Yo La Tengo video for "Sugarcube" where they're going to rock school. It's a nod to being like, "Alright, you guys want to succeed? You got to be a shoegaze band. Here's what you do: You gotta get the guitar pedals." Meanwhile, we famously don't have pedal boards, and you can hear the lyrics and melodies. It's not the Webster's dictionary definition of shoegaze.

What's been happening with shoegaze, trend-wise, reminds me of what happened with chillwave in the early 2010s.
For sure.

You had a few people who did something that was very easily imitated, and instead of going to the sources of original inspiration—Boards of Canada, early Ariel Pink—and being like, "How can I make this my own?," you just had people being like, "I'm going to recreate this sound note-for-note." I think the major difference is no one really made any money off of chillwave. I think people are making a little bit of money off of the shoegaze revival stuff, but I could be completely off the mark there.
If you find out who they are, tell me. I'd love to get some of that money. I won't name names myself, but a lot of it is very cookie-cutter copy-and-paste. There's an aesthetic and vibe that's being emulated across the board, which is not interesting to me at all. Most of the classic shoegaze records, I don't listen to at all—but, like you said, if you want to call it shoegaze, alright, we're shoegaze. I don't care.

You initially put the first record out solely on YouTube, and in the years since the conversation about streaming and how it affects artists' financial situations has grown in a bigger way. I'd love to hear you reflect on that decision and how it ties into what you observe these days.
I would love to keep my music off these streaming services. I'm not going to say anything that you haven't heard before, but I hate them. I don't think it's a good way to consume music. Even calling it "consuming"—I don't think it's a good way to listen to music, I read Mood Machine, which echoed everything I and, I think, a lot of us feel about streaming services—but I don't know what can be done about it until there's someone like a Taylor Swift combined with, like, Drake and Kendrick and everybody else at the top boycotting those things. I'm having a hard time seeing how things are going to change.

It's a tool that we're using to facilitate some semblance of a career. I remember seeing my manager talk about this a while ago. Somebody was complaining, "Why are the record stores going away?" And there's Funko Pop stores thriving around the corner. Until there's a free library where you can take every single Funko Pop home with you whenever you want, the record store is just not going to compete with that.

As far as Spotify itself, whenever it popped up originally I just wasn't using it for some reason. I used Apple Music, and I didn't use it that seriously—and I still don't, really, but the difference between those two platforms is kind of big, in my opinion. I'm still using Apple Music the way I use iTunes: I know what I want, and I go to it in my library and listen to it. The Spotify interface is way more set up to be "discovery," as they call it, and that's just never been part of my my habit as far as listening to music off my phone. When I do discover music—and I'm not even trying to toot my own horn here—I find other ways to do so rather than having it come up on autoplay or shuffle on my phone.