MMMBOP MADNESS

Boybander Isaac Hanson talks family and fame

Teenage girls all over the world had Hanson posters on their bedroom walls, and now, 25 years after forming their band, the brothers from Hanson are closer than ever.

“I’m deeply proud of being their brother,” eldest sibling, singer Isaac Hanson tells WHO. “I find them to be deeply intelligent and conscious as people and [they] always have been.”

The band made up of three brothers, Isaac, Taylor and Zac may be best-known for major hits such as “Mmmbop” and “Where’s the Love”, but they’ve been working in the industry for more than two decades, primarily focusing on songwriting. “We were a little bit quiet for a couple of years between the Hanson album and the latest tour, but last year we celebrated 25 years as a band and it felt really important, it felt like something we had to put a little stake in the ground,” says Hanson. Now on the back of their 2017 world tour, the boys are heading Down Under to promote their latest record – a double album titled String Theory.

So what exactly can diehard fans expect? “This is a symphonies project, which is kind of a musical of sorts. There’s definitely a narrative to the show, it is broken up into two parts. It’s also a double album, which is similar to the show, so in a sense you could call it a concept album – the show and the album are exactly the same thing,” says Hanson.

“It’s been a really fun experience and it’s been really special not only for us but I think for the fan base as well – firstly getting to show people a different side of this band than they’ve ever seen before,” he tells WHO.

The 38-year-old says the chemistry he has on-stage with his brothers is one thing that has never changed, no matter how insane the cult following became.

“The music itself was our authorship, it was our music,” Hanson says about growing up a famous teen. “People often like to talk about topical things like girls throwing underwear on stage and screaming out – which on one level is interesting – but that’s not really why we did it… In fact, I think in some cases you might almost say that that would be the kind of thing that would make you almost want to quit rather than keep going,” he says. “But the truth of it for us was, in the end, the connections we were making with people, even though there was a lot of fanatical responses. In the beginning [it was about] the connections that we were making.”

Fans can continue to enjoy those connections when the boys return to Australia in February 2019 for their String Theory Tour.