Words: Christian Crider

The Hanks are an alternative rock band hailing from Los Angeles. Their most recent album, Distance, is a catchy yet artful release, with all the polish of a major-label offering. Reax got singer/guitarist Josh Grondin on telephone as they toured the Northeast.

REAX: How have The Hanks evolved since your debut album, Your New Attraction?

Josh Grondin: I’d say about fifteen pounds, collectively, give or take. I guess that we’ve played a lot of shows since then, about two and a half years of touring off that first record, around three hundred live shows. So I think that’s a big part of it. Everyone really develops a lot from that. And I’ve had more experience as a songwriter. 

REAX: There’s a vague notion of belief put forward during some of the tracks on Distance, would you like to expand on this idea?

JG: It’s not like a religious thing, or anything. It’s more about how at different points in a band, and as an artist in general, there are times when there are plenty of reasons not to be an artist. For most people, it’s not a very realistic notion as something to pursue. So you definitely have to kind of hold your ground a lot. If you are kind of putting out there, 'Yeah, I’m a musician, and I want to make a living of it,' it’s not something that you’re necessarily going to get a lot of support from a lot of people. My parents, in particular, have been pretty supportive, but it’s not something that seems very realistic.

REAX: You’ve released Distance independently, what were the major factors behind this decision?

JG: Our last record we released independently, and then we re-released it for an independent label. With this record, we were going to put another EP out, and then it kind of evolved into a full-length, and we just wanted to go through the whole creative process independently so we could do our own thing and make the record we want to make, and just not be held up at all by trying to get backing by a label. It’s certainly a lot easier to have creative control, and there’s a lot of financial things that are tricky to figure out. That’s obviously the biggest hurdle, the financial backing. But anyway, that was a big plus. In the stage we’re at now, we sell most of our CDs ourselves, through touring and off our website, so self-releasing it allows us to keep 100 of the profits, and since we’re doing most of the groundwork now anyway, it makes more sense to release the record independently. 

REAX: Distance seems to deal mostly with hopeless or hopeful interpersonal relationships, what was the inspiration behind these themes?

JG: It just came on a case-by-case basis. It wasn’t intentionally thematic at first, or anything. The record definitely had a feel, musically and lyrically. We’ve done a lot of demoing and songwriting, and there are some other songs and stuff we didn’t put on the record, and this group of songs seemed to be the most cohesive. When the record was done and all the lyrics were done, I tried to look at the album as a whole and just try to find a simple concept that you could distill everything down to, and that seemed like a good one.

www.thehanksonline.com