Firstly, congratulations on the stage! How are you feeling?
Savannah: We’re feeling good.
Brandon: Overwhelmed and excited.
Savannah: I think we’re finally able to appreciate it now. It’s been an hour, so we’re like, “Okay. Yeah, that was amazing.” And now we just want to have fun.
How long does it usually take you to decompress from that high? Does it stay with you for a while?
Brandon: I think the whole day… for something like this, you’re just kind of in an explosion of excitement in your head, and then you’re like boom, boom, boom, go, go, go. And then I don’t think it calms down until you kind of get in bed, honestly.
Savannah: Oh I’m already I’m like, ready to have a good day! [Laughs]
Your set was stunning!
How much planning goes into it? Are you super hyper meticulous, or are you just like, “You know, let’s just wing it! Let’s see how it goes!”
Savannah: No, I think there’s obviously an element of spontaneous energy going on, but I think we’re preparing for a headline tour in September, October… we go on tour in November here in the UK. So going sort of… in that direction of what we want it to look like with our new album and everything; it was fun to start now and to start for this show.
So it was a lot of like pre-planning, pre-manifesting and we did visuals, we played three new songs, one song that’s unreleased… So I don’t know, it was it was a good trial –
Brandon: [It took] months of preparing the visuals, then a couple of days of putting them together.
Then like, honestly, improvisationally, [we] got on stage being like, “I hope everything works great, right?” That’s kind of what it’s like. Our creative team that works with Sav and I: they’re here from Berlin.
It’s our first time sort of, hanging out in real life, and we’ve been working on these visuals together via Zoom calls for a couple months. Literally, I would say since March.
So seeing it in real life for the first time on a giant screen and like, doing it as a whole thing was improv really? We haven’t rehearsed with the visuals! This is our first time, so I’m just grateful that it didn’t all blow up, and that it was great.
Talking more about that visual element: it’s so distinctive as to why people love seeing you perform! It makes your performance very 360.
Savannah: Yeah.
Take me through the process of crafting those visuals. Does the music come first or the visuals come first? Do they work together?
Savannah: You know, I think in any process of anything that we’re doing, we’re very visual dreamers and thinkers.
When we were in the studio making this project, we were visualizing it and we were thinking about it and manifesting it and thinking about what it looked like. So the music is always first, but once the music is there, the visual element almost comes so naturally because we’ve been thinking about it subconsciously the whole time.
Brandon: It’s like a manifestation for sure, like a mental manifestation.
Savannah: So yeah, I would say the music is always first, but it’s like the visual aspect is like piggyback riding in the entire time. It’s just as important, I think, having a full picture and having a real vision is what artistry is. And it’s really important to us.
Well, to add to that, you both are in some amazing fits right now!
Obviously people can’t see this, but you are decked out for the London summer.
Savannah: Thank you!
How much of that comes into it as well?
Savannah: Oh my god, so much. I mean like I like I said, we literally think about everything as it’s happening. And then when it’s time to execute, we have all of these ideas sort of saved up and banked.
I don’t know, we just wanted to feel fun and comfortable and, to people who didn’t know us, to have a good first impression, I think, was important.
Brandon: Yeah. First impressions are everything. Just kind of like what Sav was saying about the piggybacking sort of element of all of this coming together to create a full thing. 360, like you said.
I really just think that we care so much about how people can understand or digest what it is that we’re doing, and every single detail… all the way down to, like a logo or a font or a strobe light, like, matters so much to us. And we think about that and we appreciate that with artistry, when people pay that close attention to what it is that they’re doing.
I love that as a creator and uh, and I just want to give people that full world and like deliver it correctly. Like we could have walked out to just our single logo on the screen today, opening up the stage.
But to us it’s about the experience in the world. I think that’s what Betweenfriends is.
To add to that you both have fans from all over the world, which must be wild to think about when you’re crafting a song or a concept.
How much are you thinking, “Okay, actually, I know that there’s a fan living – I don’t know – in Japan, that might connect with that moment.”
Do you think very globally, consciously or not so much?
Savannah: That’s an interesting question because this record that’s coming out [on] August 1st… it was the first time that we made something, kind of like, for us. But then when it was finished, we were like, “This is for the world”. And we feel like there’s at least one song anybody could connect to.
It feels like it’s for the world, and I think it had to be for us before it could be for the world. It’s like, you know that saying [where] people are like, “You have to love yourself before you can love someone else”.
I think, wow, was that for us. It was us loving ourselves before we could love anybody else.
Brandon: Like, delivering something like Sav said… we made it with the world in mind.
Savannah: Yeah, yeah, we did.
People might not know you are brother and sister.
Savannah: Yes!
Are there any moments where you genuinely have like sibling bust-ups when you’re trying to make artistic decisions, or is it very cohesive?
Savannah: I think vision…
Brandon: [She] just gave me a dirty look because I talked too long!
Savannah: He was just repeating what I had just said and I feel like I answered in such a great way. I was like [throws him a look]. See that sibling… like, it’s not in creating, it’s in stuff like this where I’m like, we’re a team! But no, we’re best friends.
That’s amazing. I’ve talked to bands before where they say sometimes actually having someone in your corner – especially in this industry, that can be so brutal – is so important versus if they went solo.
Do you feel that the longer you’ve [been in] the industry?
Savannah: Absolutely.
Brandon: I don’t know if either of us would want to go through how tough this job is if we didn’t have each other. Honestly.
Savannah: No way. It’s having someone in your corner to trust… trust in this industry is so hard. And I was born with an built-in trust. And it’s the best.
Brandon: I would be so unsure if I didn’t have a partner that I could constantly just be like, “What do you think? [Are we] doing this right? Should we do it like this?” Like we’re constantly just, like, fueling our machine and I think that it would be really lonely and sad to do it alone.
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This interview has been lightly abridged for clarity.