Hanson
The "MmmBop" boy band now has four kids — and some advice for Lindsay.
by Sarah Hepola
October 11, 2007
Here's a shocker: the little boys who sang "MmmBop" are all married
now. They have four children between them. Three of those children belong to
Taylor, now twenty-four, the band's frontman, who is as famous for his pretty
face and his golden locks as he is for his songwriting chops. Since crashing
the Top
40 (and your head — admit it, you can hear "MmmBop" now) in 1997,
Hanson has continued to make albums and, much more impressively, hold on to their
fans. (On a sad note, the band's tour was briefly put on hold last week when eldest
brother, Isaac, twenty-six, had emergency surgery for a pulmonary embolism.)
A Hanson concert is populated by the same screaming girls who kissed their posters
in the late '90s, only now those girls are in college. Maybe they're married,
too. The amazing part is that they don't just know all the lyrics to "Where's
the Love"; they know the lyrics to The Walk, Hanson's
new album, an independently produced collection of catchy pop as inspired by
70s classic rock (Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers) as the Motown sound that once
defined them. While Hanson was in town for a (sold-out) concert in New York City,
we sat down with Taylor and his brothers Isaac, and Zac, twenty-one, to talk
about their new lives as husbands, their pasts as teen idols, and their futures
as
fathers. — Sarah
Hepola
Each of you got married relatively young. Why was that?
Zac: Most of it is that none of us were scared of it. In this society,
most people
push off responsibility till they get older. "Oh, I can't have kids.
That would take away from my own personal time." Or, "I can't
get married. That means I'd be committed." We've been making
music since we were little, and that meant making sacrifices Lindsay Lohan has nobody
telling
her, "You're an idiot."for what you really
desire and love. It's easier for us to say, "I'm willing to
sacrifice these things to live a fuller, richer life with someone." We
were always on a slightly different time schedule than some people. If you're
doing you're job since you're eleven . . . It was nine years after I
started my first job that I got married.
Taylor: I really, honestly never thought I wanted to get married or have kids.
But I was ready. I mean, obviously, it's about finding the right person.
But they also say it's about knowing yourself, and I think that's
why I felt so ready. And our business, it's almost like there's so
much going around, so much happening — the idea of doing the same thing all the
time, I was ready for that.
There has been such upheaval to your life, it makes me wonder if there was a
yearning for stability.
Taylor: That's probably part of it. And a moving stability. When you get
married, it's your own little support system.
Zac: In some ways it's easier to have that stability, but in some ways,
it's harder because you're responsible. You're not looking
out in the audience, going, [to imaginary groupie] "Hey, baby." You're
looking to the side of the stage, going, "Okay, what do I have to do tonight
to keep the love?" And I've only been married a year, and I know
that's the game. To keep your relationship vitalized. To work through the
crap.
Tabloids recently have been obsessed with child stars gone wild. For me, it highlights
how you guys have managed to keep normal lives. How did you do that?
Zac: I think the biggest element is that it was always our creativity and our
desire to make music that put us in our position. I mean, it was also dumb luck,
but we were the creative force.
Taylor: This business is so much about excess. And Lindsay Lohan has nobody
telling
her, "You're an idiot." I think she's talented. She's
probably smarter than the Parises of the world. With us, it's not so much
that we're clean-cut; it's that we're not completely in excess.
We drink and smoke and go out, but we're not completely out of control.
Zac: And actors aren't in control of their careers. They're reading
someone else's lines. For us, it was always our music, and we didn't
want to screw that up.
©2007 Sarah Hepola and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Sarah Hepola has been a high-school teacher, a playwright, a film critic, a music editor and a travel columnist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, and on NPR. She writes the Scanner blog for Nerve and lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. |
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