Q&A with Cameron and John from the band Twin XL
Stereo 550 has been a musical platform at GTB for 12 years, bringing art and soul to our agency and drawing people together through music. Over the past decade we’ve hosted nearly 100 shows, from emerging artists to seasoned performers such as Portugal. The Man, American Authors, Neon Trees and Third Eye Blind. Ultimately, GTB connects artists to the communications world.
With restrictions in place across most of the world we’ve had to get creative on how we connect as a team. This new challenge created new opportunities to welcome talent from across the country and invite our global team to join in events across our network. Recently we had the pleasure of hosting our fifth virtual GTB Stereo 550 featuring the band Twin XL.
Fresh off the road (pre-COVID) supporting Fitz & The Tantrums, Los Angeles’ based Twin XL’s sound is a balanced contrast of bright, summery, dark and mysterious. From his home in California, lead singer Cameron Walker-Wright performed the band’s hits “Neon Summer,” “Friends” and “Good,” before guitarist John Gomez joined him in a virtual conversation with Yasmin Sahni, ECD, GTB Toronto.
Yasmin Sahni: So you guys are a relatively new band. You guys formed recently, but you’ve known each other for a really long time. I know you, Cameron, were in Weather Star, and John and Steven were in the Summer Set. Is breaking up with your past bands like breaking up with a lover?
Cameron Walker-Wright: I think for John it was, I think for me it was a little different, but I’ll let him talk about it.
John Gomez: I mean yeah, in a way. When you’re in a band, it’s like you join a little circus troupe. You travel around the world. It’s hard to be in an active band and not have it consume your life in every single way. It’s sort of always there. You’re traveling all the time. It takes up your time, it takes up your life, much like a relationship. You build your entire life around it. It was pretty crazy seeing something you built and organized your life around for eight years no longer exist. It sort of shakes your identity a little bit. Like, ‘Who am I?’ I’ve always been this thing, and all these decisions I’ve made were based around this thing. Now I’m left with the remnants of all these decisions, but it’s no longer there. It’s definitely a process, almost like a grieving process, when you break up a band.
YS: How did you guys find your sound together after leaving these bands?
CWW: How did we connect and start this?
YS: How did you find your unique sound as Twin XL together?
CWW: It kind of happened without trying. It was like a happy accident is how we usually describe it. I’ve known Hohn and Stephen for over a decade now prior to starting the band, just from when they were playing in their band and I was playing with a couple different people and we crossed paths so many times. This is the short version: we ended up getting together because we’d known each other so long. I think one of the first songs we wrote together, just casually writing, was “Good.”
I think there was just something cool to it. Especially as a songwriter in L.A., you kind of do the writer’s circuit and you write with a bunch of different people, and I think there was a feeling about the first few things we did together that felt special. John called me and was like, ‘I wanna be in this band.’ I think just from the start, we had a special thing that just clicked. I don’t know how to explain it really, it just made sense from day one.
YS: Your touring schedule got cut short in February. Is that correct?
JG: We actually got lucky. We were on tour with a band called Fitz and The Tantrums from February into March, and we only had to cancel two shows of that tour.
YS: That’s really lucky.
JG: I felt for my friends who work for other bands and are in other bands who were just starting their tours. We were luckily just wrapping ours up.
CWW: It’s crazy because the last show we were going to play got cancelled the day of, so everyone from Fitz’s crew drove all the way to the venue and set up the production for the show that then got cancelled that afternoon. We all drove there to take a tour photo with them because we would’ve done that the last day of the tour. It was such a bizarre, surreal feeling to be in a big, empty venue with all the production set up to play a show that we couldn’t play. We kind of took this photo and had to say goodbye to everyone. It was a weird thing. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a venue that was ready for the show and then that show wasn’t going to happen, and you knew that from the get-go pretty much.
YS: That’s a weird feeling
CWW: Yeah, totally weird.
YS: That is a really weird feeling. What are your predictions about how touring is going to happen in the future?
JG: The thing about touring is that to go on a tour, especially a national tour or even a regional tour, all these venues are interconnected. If one state is shut down and not allowing events, or a group of states is not allowing a certain amount of events, it makes that routing really hard to get from point A to point B. I don’t know when it’s going to open up, or when it does open up if there will be short stints of like, ‘California’s open, we’re going to do a California tour’ or something. I don’t know if it’s going to be smaller pockets. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to be what it was for a while now, so I think artists are digging in and trying to either write or figure out their release strategies during all of this. I know we are.
CWW: Yeah. I was remembering those last couple shows on the Fitz tour. They were some of my favorite shows that we’ve done ever as a band, and remembering all these people just completely crammed in together, yelling the words to songs, and just really being compressed together, was almost a really sad thing because I don’t know when the next time is that I’m going to see that. Even if shows happen and it’s some weird social-distanced show, that feeling and that energy from a live show, who knows when that happens again.
