With their shimmering retro pop sound and carefully crafted eras, joan has spent the past seven years carving out a space that feels both nostalgic and refreshingly current. The Arkansas duo – Alan Thomas and Steven Rutherford – is preparing to release their new album this won’t last forever, a project born out of the tension between fleeting joy and inevitable change. When we spoke, they reflected on the strange limbo of finishing an album months before release, the grounding ritual of vinyl as both an artistic statement and a business decision, and the delicate balance between intimacy and scale in their live shows.
TCC: So how are you both feeling leading into the release of the new album?
Steven: Good and great and…
Alan: …nervous
Steven: …nervous. I was just telling our booking agent. It’s weird because, one, releasing an album is very strange. You have to be done with it pretty early on, like we were done with this album in the first week of June. We had been working on this album for a whole year or plus that. Even just June to now, it’s a long time to just be sitting on your hands hoping that the album does good, and ready for it to be out. So, on one hand it’s a nervous excitement, yeah. And then on the other hand, we’ve done this for so long, where we know that something cool could happen or literally nothing could happen. And the only thing we can fall back on is that we’re proud of the album, and that even if nobody else really connects with it, we connected deeply with it. And so, it’s this dual thing going on.
*Alan gets a piece of gum out*
Steven: Can I have a piece too?
Alan: Yeah, absolutely. Would you like a piece of gum?
TCC: Haha, sure, thanks.
Steven: For the record, we’re getting some gum.
Alan: Getting gum, on the record.
Steven: Yeah, you can quote me on that.
TCC: Was there a lot to do in the waiting around period? Like, do you have a stacked marketing schedule?
Steven: It’s all vinyl. That’s the only thing you wait on. Yeah, you have to be done 100 years in advance to get vinyl done in time. And then Taylor Swift comes along, and Sabrina Carpenter comes along and orders 10 million vinyl and they get bumped up in the queue and then we’re like, oh, actually, we should have done it six months earlier.
TCC: It’s really cool that you prioritize the physical media. I know there’s been a huge resurgence of physical media. Is there something about it that sticks out to you, that makes you want to pursue that path?
Alan: I love the nostalgia of it. I love the novelty? Novelty diminishes it, like that word specifically, but it’s tangible. Maybe that’s right – the tangible, physical thing about it. If someone releases an album, I want to hear it top to bottom, like, how they heard it. I want people to hear how much time and attention that we put into each element. I don’t want just one song to be heard. Like, I want someone to physically see it and feel it.
TCC: Definitely, there’s a lot of intentionality and having to flip a vinyl halfway through listening to the music. The deliberate sense of “I’ve got to get up and go make a change.”
Alan: And then on the business side, just, strictly speaking numbers – you make more money as a business with someone buying an album, like a physical, tangible item versus, you know, I’m gonna stream this one time on Spotify. It’s literally pennies compared to, maybe not even full pennies, compared to physical media.
TCC: Oh, for sure. And there’s a whole philosophical tangent somewhere here about how no one can own anything anymore, like genuinely, truly own anything.
Steven: Oh god yeah, let’s not…I’ll get depressed, haha. But also, just since the beginning, it’s been just as important for us to have the art along with the music. The visual side of things is very important to us – being able to read the lyrics while you’re listening to the album, literally on a piece of paper, and you can read and see the design that we created. It’s the most pure way you can you can ingest our music because it’s 100% from us, every part of every piece of the vinyl – from the track listing to which physical side of the album that we put the interlude on. Every design, it’s all us, we’re the ones doing it. I can’t think of a better way to listen to and experience our music and us as an artist than through vinyl.
TCC: Definitely. So, your upcoming album is called this won’t last forever. While I was sitting there listening to what’s been released so far, I was wondering what “this” is. Is there a period in your life that you wish could last forever? And then on the flip, is there a period of your life that you’re happy to leave stuck in that moment so you can move on from it?
Steven: It’s both.
Alan: Um, it’s both, yeah. It’s the Yin and Yang, good and bad. He can speak more into it, since it was his idea. But for my interpretation of his inspiration, it’s like the story, I was just telling the story to our team in here earlier. It’s putting my daughter to bed and her looking me in the eyes and saying, “I love you, dad.” That biological heart connection that we have. And then it’s also the idea of, “oh today was really shitty, and I need it to be done, and the sun’s gonna rise tomorrow.” It’s both things won’t last forever, and that makes me sad on one side, and then on the other side, this needs to change, you know? Tomorrow needs to be a new day, because today was bad or whatever. That was kind of the lens for the album and that’s why a lot of the lyrics point toward calamity. Sometimes it’s the idea of “my future is too bright” so something must be coming because things are too good right now.
Steven: It was born out of this intersecting feeling, where there were a lot of good things that were happening in our life as Joan and to us personally, and then at the same time there was this darkness that felt like it was just in my individual life and I was processing that. And so, for me, it was this darkness that made me want to remind myself, “this won’t last forever.” Also, the good parts of this won’t last forever. It’s just a reminder that kept showing up rearing its head in a good way, so much so where it was clear that this needs to be the overarching concept of what we write about.
TCC: What do you think comes naturally to you when you’re writing lyrics? Right now, we’re talking about time passing – it’s very existential. Past tracks have been romantic, reflective …there’s a lot of sentimentalism. Is there one specific area that feels most natural to you? Or do you think your lyricism is something that goes along with what’s happening in your lives in that moment?
Alan: We definitely cut our teeth on…I was gonna say we cut our teeth on more positive lyrics, but it’s not necessarily true, because some of our best performing songs are sad songs, but they’re like ballads.
TCC: I will say, a lot of your stuff is on my sad playlist…
Alan: Hahaha, yeah, we definitely love writing the ballads.
Steven: I think the concept of love…
Alan: …so complex.
Steven: You could write music on just that forever. There are so many different pages in that book, and it’s an ever-evolving thing, and a thing you can keep getting out of. And so, I think that’s where we started, and comes most naturally, for sure.
TCC: Do you find yourself gravitating towards writing about romantic love more so than platonic love?
Steven: Um, probably, yeah.
Alan: Yeah, agreed. I think more naturally, I feel like there’s more to write about, yeah.
Steven: Well, actually, platonic love, I think that would be, for me at least, a more stretching thing to dive into, as far as lyrics go. And that’s what excites me. It’s something that I’ve never really gotten too deep into so would be interesting to explore more.
TCC: Your sound pulls from a lot of nostalgic tunes…I think, particularly the layering and the choice of instruments is very ’80s. Is there anything that specifically draws you to the sound from that era? Is it movies? Is it just the music? Is it fashion? Or a little bit of everything?
Alan: A little bit of all of that. Personally, I have always been drawn toward a chorus-y guitar and a vintage keyboard. I think there’s something interesting about this era, I mean ’70s and ’80s, when they transitioned from all analog electronic music or electronics gear to this new digital thing, and they could just start doing stuff that you couldn’t do before. So now we have all this software to create emulations of all these old sounds that we’ve amassed and bought over the years. And there’s some weird sounds in there. On “this won’t last forever,” the title track has a rain stick sound, and it pitches up and down, depending on how you want to use it. I don’t think it’s a real sample of rain stick. I think it’s literally that they figured out the synthesis of how to make that sound, and we were like, “This is sick. Let’s put in this song.” There is something that excites me about that. We’ve had several discussions as we keep going and grow around how do we want our sound to shift and change? Or are we being kind of categorized as this one specific thing. And I think we’ve done a good job of keeping to our roots. But also, if we want to write a song that’s just an acoustic guitar and feels very Lizzie McAlpine, we’re going to release that song. It can all exist in the joan universe.
TCC: Definitely, it’s still true to who you are as a band.
Alan: Totally. And I just think there’s something about that nostalgia thing…we still talk about like John Hughes movies from the ’80s and how important the soundtracks were. Now, I mean, there are movies that have important songs, obviously, like the Lady Gaga Bradley Cooper movie – a Star is Born, where music was baked into the whole premise of the movie. But I can’t think of many songs these days that you’re like, I know that song because it was the love scene of whatever film. And so, that [the ’80s] was a really cool era. Like that still of John Cusack in “Say Anything.” We go back to that scene a lot, we even used it in some visuals. There’s something really powerful about film and music intersecting. It’s pretty cool.
TCC: If you were to make the soundtrack of a movie, what genre of film would you lean towards?
Alan: Probably like uh…Avengers 27…
Steven: Hahahah!
Alan: Like “Harry Potter” “Marvel” crossover.
TCC: Right, of course.
Steven: I would like to create music for a movie like “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Imagine that kind of movie with our type of music, where it’s like this almost dark, heady concept for a film, but also you are able to put light-hearted music over the dark moments.
TCC: I think that would be accurate to your lyrics too. A lot of your music sounds happy on the surface, but then sometimes you listen to it and digest the lyrics and you realize the sadness that comes with it.
Steven: Yeah, I think that’d be so fun to kind of like juxtapose that feeling visually.
TCC: Absolutely. You’ve done a lot of touring in your career – both opening for other artists and on your own. In your time touring, what do you think has been the most unforgettable moment?
Alan: Oh. One that sticks out immediately is playing our song “tokyo” in Tokyo, and watching the crowd respond to that. It’s definitely interesting and such a cool experience. I mean, anytime you see someone singing a song you’ve written back to you – there’s no feeling like that. But doing it in a foreign country where your language is not their first language is crazy to me. You know, we’re not necessarily a household name. So when we’re in this club in Tokyo and I’m like, we don’t know how many people are coming. We hope people come…and then, you go in there, it’s packed, and they know every word. Music is such a universal language.
TCC: So, the last time I got to see you perform live was in 2020…
Alan: Oh, what happened that year?
TCC: Hahah…I got to see you at the Mercury Lounge, and I remember the lighting cues were incredible and the entire stage set up was such a joy to experience alongside your music. I’m curious how important stage production is to you and what your dream setup would be?
Steven: The answer is, it’s way too important. Yeah, we think way too much about it. It bothers us too much. We spend way too much money on it every time. But just going, like, going back to the visuals with the music thing, it’s just a part of our DNA as a band. And so, even if we lose money on the tour, we’re doing it. It’s part of it. I will say it’s interesting, we’ve turned on the concept a little bit. We’ve done so much visual production on the tour, and now we don’t really know what to do, other than doing the same thing over and over again. So, now we’re thinking, let’s just strip the production entirely. Honestly, that’s a really exciting thing for us right now. We’ve had a huge package on every tour that we go on, and the lights are crazy…we’ve had the screens and everything synced. And now, what if, it sounds dumb and crazy, but what if we’re actually the show?
Alan: And when we started, it was just us on stage for a long time. And I don’t think until the super glue tour in ‘23 did we add two players. And so, I think part of it felt innate to like, we kind of need the show, the show elements to be the third band member or whatever. We don’t want to be boring on stage. But you know, you hear things like Ed Sheeran will go play like a pub, and it’s so different, obviously, than playing like an 18,000-capacity stadium. But a lot of those guys love doing the small shows more than the big ones. There’s something about that human connection. This last tour we did, we had one of our best friends, Jake, play guitar, and he can really shred. He can solo. And so obviously we let him, let him solo in the song and it was so much fun, we felt like a real band.
TCC: Okay, last one, a quick one. Do you have a dream collab? Or maybe dream DJ to remix one of your tracks?
Alan: I mean my top top top is Coldplay, yeah. Chris Martin is my top songwriter. I don’t really idolize a lot of people, but if there is one, he is mine.
Steven: Well, I was just thinking, or Fred again.. I think Fred again.. would be mine. Maybe not even a remix, I just want to be in the studio with him just watching the finger drums and remixing.
In conversation, joan is as thoughtful as they are playful – one moment diving into existential themes of love and impermanence, the next cracking jokes about gum and Marvel crossovers. It’s this duality that defines their work: music that shimmers with light while quietly holding shadows underneath. As they look ahead to the release of this won’t last forever and another chapter of touring, joan remains committed to the core that’s carried them from Arkansas rehearsal rooms to packed Tokyo clubs: connection, sincerity, and a belief that every moment – good or bad – has something worth holding onto.
After the interview, we got to experience an intimate stripped back performance of a few songs from the new album, as well as a full listen through of the entire track list. Alan and Steven are as enigmatic when it’s just the two of them as they are on a stage with a full lighting package, but the music really got to speak for itself that evening. The fans mingled and shared stories of their favorite songs as the duo took their time to interact with everyone in that room. this won’t last forever is out everywhere now, definitely go check it out!
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