HOLLYWOOD, HERE WE COME!
J: WE LEFT OMAHA TO GO TO L.A. SIMPLY BECAUSE THERE WERE JUST MORE PEOPLE HERE TO WORK WITH ON OUR MUSICAL PURSUITS. L.A. HAS THE BEST PRODUCERS AND CREATIVE TYPES, NO QUESTION ABOUT IT.
G: We were like, “Yo! We gotta get out to L.A. and take it to the next level.” A few of our friends that we came up with had already moved out here. Everyone would tell us, “It’s a great spot, you can’t beat the weather, there are endless people doing what you wanna do.” So that was it. We said, “Let’s get out there ASAP!”
J: We knew if we were taking the year off before going to college, we had to be as productive as possible. The move was pretty cool. Our first week in L.A. was the most fun week of my life, just because it was all new.
G: Here, everyone is working toward something. Everyone has aspirations in the entertainment world. People have big goals, big dreams. The sky’s the limit.
AskJacks
TOP FIVE THINGS WE’RE GOOD AT
1. Entertaining. Making people laugh. Getting them on their feet.
2. Putting together recreational basketball games. Calling twelve homies and saying, “Okay, we’re rendezvousing here.” We make it happen.
3. Making breakfast food. Eggs, bacon, toast. When we get together, we can whip up a mean morning feast.
4. Being nice. It’s easy to be a jerk, but we’re actually good at being kind and considerate to people. We make it our mission.
5. Answering questions. Which is prob why we started #AskJacks in the first place. We’re pretty open about our lives, our likes, our screw-ups. We’re really comfortable talking about ourselves, and we want our fans to feel free to ask us anything they’re curious about.
J: I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in L.A. who has an actual desk job. Everybody out here is working on their own hours, honing their craft, doing their art. The creative energy is at an all-time high.
G: We loved it from day one. It was a pretty easy transition, once we figured out the freeway and parking situations.
J: I don’t know why, but I expected the food to be bad. Maybe because L.A. is so big and you hear about the smog and pollution. I thought it would be dirty.
G: Dirty food? Seriously?
J: But it’s actually amazing. Great restaurants, great food. In particular, some great steakhouses and Chinese places.
G: We heard the traffic situation was awful—and that’s no lie.
J: It takes twenty minutes to go a mile. In Omaha, that same distance would take you a minute, no matter what time of day. Even at rush hour.
G: There are so many aggressive drivers. Little old ladies behind the wheel will cut you off! But that’s okay; I was like the only aggressive driver who lived in Omaha.
J: Overall, I would say L.A. is exactly what we expected. It’s what we came here for, and I think we linked up with the right people from the jump and started making music.
G: We also weren’t alone—like we said, we had a lot of friends out here who started out with us on the internet. Now they’re our best, best friends—as close as our Omaha homies. They helped us and introduced us to a lot of like-minded people who keep us motivated.
AskJacks
TOP FIVE THINGS WE SUCK AT
1. Being on time. We are at least fifteen minutes late to everything. L.A. runs on “studio time” and everyone is kinda chill with it, but honestly, we gotta work on our punctuality. It’s embarrassing. If it’s Ellen, though, we’ll be on time . . .
2. Being concise. We can’t answer a question in a few sentences, much less a few words. We love to ramble; we love to rant. We should probably stop ourselves there . . . or we won’t shut up.
3. Cooking. We are both lacking in this department. We can maybe make a few random things, but in general, the takeout menu is our best friend.
4. Working out on a regular basis. The intentions are there, but we just can’t seem to get on a schedule of going to the gym or exercising. It’s really bad, we know. We always say we’ll do it. It’s not that we’re lazy, it’s just that other stuff gets in the way.
5. Getting enough sleep. Same as with working out, we mean to catch enough Zs, but there’s too much to do and too few hours in the day. Also, traveling to different time zones kills us.
NO DOUBTS
J: Of course, along the way, there have been people who tried to discourage us. Haters who said, “Coming from Vine takes no talent. You might as well give up now.”
G: I remember we were at our high school graduation parties and all these adults were going around asking kids, “So where you goin’ next year?” It was the same story: this college, that college. But me and Jack were like, “We’re movin’ to L.A.” Dead silence.
J: Crickets. Or “What do you mean? Why would you do that? You gotta get an education!” L.A. is an education. Working in the entertainment industry is an education—a hands-on one.
G: That was discouraging. Because there were a lot of people who just didn’t believe we could do this.
J: But we proved ’em wrong.
G: Oh yeah. But our dreams seemed so farfetched to them.
J: How many times did we hear, “You might as well go to college and take the safe route in life”?
G: Safe is boring. Maybe it’s guaranteed, but it’s boring.
J: Take a risk or two. If you don’t do it now, the opportunity might not be there down the road.
G: You may hit traffic, but keep driving down that freeway!
J: Nice metaphor!
G: Did you catch that?
J: But seriously, on the flip side, the majority of people in our lives were positive and gave us great support. So the negative ones . . . they didn’t distract us in any way, shape, or form. We knew we were gonna follow our dreams out here.
G: No doubt.
OUR BIGGEST FANS
G: Teachers, coaches, family. These were the people that believed in us the most. Mrs. Schau and Ms. Harmon, and Ms. Kleppinger, our entrepreneurship teacher. They really wanted us to go for it, to build it. Right in the beginning of senior year of high school when we started to get this following—maybe ten thousand followers—she was our biz teacher and she really encouraged us.
J: She saw the vision. She said, “You gotta take this and run with it.”
G: By May and the end of her class, we had millions of followers. She said, “This is just the beginning. Follow your dream, make a lotta money.”
J: Sometimes it takes just one person to tell you, “Hey, it’s possible.” You think your dream is crazy, and then someone comes along and says, “You’re not nuts. This is real. This is possible. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg if you are willing to give it all you’ve got.”
PUT DOWN THE PHONE
J: Social media is both a good and bad thing. From our perspective it’s a great thing; it’s our life. We wouldn’t be here without it, and it allows us to connect with our fans all over the world. But on the flip side, if it invades your life and you lose touch with the real world, it’s a negative. If you’re not interacting with people through anything but electronic devices, that’s not good. We know kids who sleep with their phones.
G: I’m not pointing a finger, but . . .
J: I don’t sleep with it. Maybe it’s on the nightstand next to my bed.
G: Social media should be used to your advantage, but it shouldn’t be your priority. Not even top five. I’m on it maybe fifteen minutes a day max. When I’m bored . . .
J: When you’re in the bathroom.
G: Yeah, not sure I wanted to share that—thanks, man.
J: No problem.
G: I’m not great at posting. I do it when I need to, but I don’t want to get sucked into it. I’ve been there before, and I don’t want to be there now. I’ve got too much going on.
J: You also have to be careful what you say or the Twittersphere will jump all over you. It’s not just public personalities or celebrities that have to be careful about what they put out there, we all do. Watch your words. Words have power and they can hurt, even unintentionally. It’s great to express yourself, but social media makes those words go far and fast. Think before you post.
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU PUT YOUR FOOT IN YOUR MOUTH?
G: Physically? I’m not sure my legs are that long.
J: When I was a kid, I used to put my foot in my mouth all the time. I bit my toenails. Once I was in sixth grade, my mom was like, “Jack, you gotta stop biting your toenails. That’s just weird.”
G: Okay, that’s foul. I need to erase that image from my mind.
J: It’s true. I mean, I bite my nails today all the time. Why are toenails any different?
G: ’Cause they’re on your feet, dude!
J: Okay, but I think this question is asking in the figurative sense. In that case, I put my foot in my mouth weekly. Maybe daily. I’ll see something that’s negative about us online and I’ll just wanna go in on them. Or sometimes, I’ll see a topic that I have a strong opinion on, and I need to say something.
G: Then you regret it.
J: Sometimes. Not always. But I’m quick to the pull that trigger, you know? If it goes against what I think and believe, I can’t keep quiet.
G: I hear ya.
CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET?
G: Me, yeah. I can keep my lips zipped. Johnson . . . never. What’s in his head is on his Twitter.
J: That is not true. Not entirely. Okay, maybe a little true.
G: I see you right now. You’re typing, “I cannot keep a secret! #looselips.”
J: Next question.
DO YOU HAVE ANY BAD HABITS?
G: Jack bites his nails. He’s chowing down on them right now.
J: Jack is just perfect. He has no bad habits. It’s really annoying.
G: Can I have one of yours?
J: Sure, help yourself.
DO YOU EVER EAT UNHEALTHY?
J: He eats way too many bacon cheeseburgers.
G: It’s got the dairy, the protein, the carbs from the bread. I see nothing wrong with that.
J: If you say so, man.
TUNING IN
J: When we first started recording music, there were these two kids who went to a local high school, Turner and Travis Eakins. They were brothers, and they helped jump-start our entire musical career. They said, “Hey, we do these beats—why don’t you guys come by sometime, check them out, and do some original songs.” We didn’t even know we could do that—write our own music?
G: That email sat in our inbox for months before we even did anything about it and met with them. We never thought we could do this. Big shout-out to the Eakinses for reaching out to us.
J: Then we went to Travis’s house, and we recorded our first four songs out of this makeshift recording studio in his closet. He and Turner produced the beats, and that gave us the momentum. We sold enough copies and got some buzz going, and that gave us the marketing power to go out to L.A. It opened doors with bigger record producers.
G: It’s pretty crazy. Last night we met with the guy who did “Starships” for Nicki Minaj. And the day before, a guy who worked with Ariana Grande. Who would have thought we’d ever be meeting with these hitmakers?
J: Not us. Or we would have answered Travis’s email a lot sooner.
G: We work in some really cool studios now, but it started in a closet. Just sayin’.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
G: Vine was our ticket, clearly. We started on Vine in July 2013 right before senior year. Before that, we were messing around on YouTube in third and fourth grade, but our friends busted on us about it, so we dropped it. Jack told me about Vine—I didn’t know about it.
J: We were in Lincoln, Nebraska, at this big high school convention, and all the kids there were talking about Vine, and I jumped on it. I had my own account.
G: He convinced me to do a Vine with him, and it had like sixty followers under “Jack Johnson.” We said, “If we get to two hundred followers, should we change it to Jack & Jack?” And we did . . . and we did! By the time school started in August, we were grinding them out, and we had maybe twenty-five thousand followers. Our “Nerd Vandals” Vine brought us from thirty thousand to two hundred thousand in a week. We had a million by our second semester senior year. We posted every day, and a few went viral. We were addicted to watching the numbers grow. Vine was the passion at first.
J: We became the “Vine Kids.” It was like the snowball effect, and before the end of the school year we had five million followers. It was a huge stepping-stone for our dream, but we never thought it would take on a life of its own. We never thought it would replace going to college. Ninety percent of what we posted were comedy videos; the rest were music covers. Then we churned out four original songs, and we realized music was the direction we wanted to take it in.
G: And it took off. We made Top 75 on iTunes with our first single, which is kinda crazy.
J: And we started to ask ourselves, what could we do if we had the right resources, the right producers, the right people in our corner? The passion kind of shifted to music. We can’t abandon the funny stuff because that’s where we started, but the music is what we’re focused on now.
G: It wasn’t out of nowhere. He was always rapping and I was always singing, and my sisters pushed me into show choir. Although we did keep that pretty quiet and understated so people wouldn’t make fun of us.
J: Once we put out the first single we realized, “Hey, this is legit.” I don’t know when we made the final decision to not go to college and move to L.A. Probably right around May, around the college deadlines. The hardest part was convincing our parents to let us give it a shot.
G: My grades weren’t great, so I think it was easier for mine to accept an alternate possibility to college. Yours were great, so your parents were probably not that eager for you to give it up.
J: We had to make them understand this could be a career for us. We could make money at it. We could be creative and successful. All the other kids were going to college and that had always been the game plan.
G: It is a little weird to think about that—we’d be sophomores in college now. And when we go back home and hang with our Omaha friends, college is their world. Finals and cramming and stuff. They’re doing the college thing and we’re not. I remember the last year of high school I was so focused on college. I wrote like seven essays, and then we didn’t go.
J: Writing those college apps build character. That’s how I see it.
G: Now that we’re doing our music, the Vine sketch comedy thing is a little hard to put behind us. Some people don’t take us seriously because of the jump.
J: But I think Vine has helped us in a huge way. We wouldn’t be here without it. So no complaints for the road we’ve taken. Wait and you’ll see. That’s what I like to say to people. You wanna see what we can do, trust me, you’ll see.
STUDIO VS. VIDEO
J: We’re very visual, so the idea of making a video and translating our music into that form is really fun for us. Our roots are in video with Vine, so it’s a natural for us. But that said, in the recording studio is when some of the best vibes go around. Collaborating and making something that sounds rhythmically pleasing to the ears . . . that’s amazing. You can’t top that.
G: I love the process as a whole, creating the music from scratch then putting a kick-ass video to it. It’s fun to see it all come together. I really don’t know if I could choose one part of it I like more than the other. Both are cool and creative in different ways. Both work your brain in different ways.
J: And then there’s the featured stuff that we’ve done with Alli Simpson, Madison Pettis, Dyllan Murray. When we work with other people it’s less pressure. With Alli on “Roll ’Em Up,” it was kind of a doo-woppy pop vibe, and that’s something we wouldn’t normally do, so it gave us a chance to try new stuff. Always good to broaden your horizons.
G: It’s way more chill on set when you’re not the star. Which I know sounds like a crazy thing to say, because who doesn’t wanna be a star? But we’re actually okay with it. Sometimes it’s nice to just sit back and let someone else worry about the details, you know?
J: Plenty of spotlight to go around. As much as we like to be in charge creatively of our work, it’s nice sometimes to take a backseat on someone else’s. And help out a friend.
G: Exactly. And you might learn a thing or two. It’s good to stay open, especially in this business because you’ve got so many creative, talented people. Why not vibe off each other?
WHERE DO YOU GET INSPIRATION FOR YOUR SONGS?
G: I would say mostly from what we observe and what we experience.
J: Yeah, for example, “Wrong One” is about breaking up with a girl, how you backstab each other, and that’s based on stuff we went through in high school with our girlfriends.
G: It can be based on something we experience on a day-today basis—or just one night out.
J: And our fans inspire us, too. “Tides” was written to lift our fans up if they’re in a bad spot in life. Music can be about anything; there are no limits on what you can or can’t talk about.
DID YOU GUYS EVER GET FRUSTRATED AND FEEL LIKE GIVING UP?
J: Never. The thought has never even entered my head.
G: Sometimes it’s stressful, but we put it into perspective: How lucky are we to be doing what we’re doing? At our age!
J: We are making music and online content for our fans, doing what we love.
G: That’s why we won’t ever let each other get to that point.
G: And we’re really connected to our fans. A lot of what we do is for them.
J: We would never abandon our fans—we’re gonna give you the same love back.
IF YOU COULD RECORD WITH ANYONE, LIVING OR DEAD, WHO WOULD YOU RECORD WITH?
J: I wish I could get Jimi Hendrix on a guitar solo on one of our songs. I just watched his documentary last night with a few buddies and it was the dopest thing ever.
G: Bob Marley. That would be sick. Someone living?
J: This guy Anderson Paak we both love and would like to work with. J. Cole on a rap track, or Bruno Mars on a funk hook.
G: Beyoncé, Adele . . .
J: Oh yeah, I didn’t even think of the ladies. Of course, you would.
G: Alicia Keys. Alessia Cara.
J: Anyone who’s killin’ it and has a cool vibe, we’d be down for it. We love collaborating with fellow artists.
WHAT IS YOUR GO-TO KARAOKE SONG?
J: “Sweet Home Alabama.” That’s mine.
G: “Funky Town” maybe? Nah. Wait, I’m thinking.
J: He’s thinking.
G: “The Distance” by Cake. I know, so random.
J: It’s a good tune. I approve.
WHAT IS YOUR RINGTONE, AND DOES IT MATCH YOUR PERSONALITY?
J: Mine is just the factory ringtone that comes with your Apple phone. I’m too lazy to change it. And I realize that if you do pick a song, it becomes the most hated song in your brain after two weeks because you have to listen to it over and over and over again.
G: You’re assuming that people call you.
J: It’s like, “Damn it, not that song again!” and it just irks you.
G: It irks me too. Irks is a really good word, by the way.
J: Thank you. I try.
G: I just go with the basic ring as well. What does that say about us?
J: I don’t know. Maybe we’re really boring. Or lame. Or indecisive.
G: Stop . . . you’re irking me!
WHO—IN YOUR OPINION—IS THE FUNNIEST PERSON ON THE PLANET?
G: Jim Carrey’s hilarious. Kevin Hart. Will Ferrell. Adam Sandler’s a beast. It’s hard to choose just one.
J: Okay, I’m picking my one person: Dave Chappelle. That’s mine.
G: Then I’ll go with Louis C. K. He’s funny as hell. That’s my choice.
WHAT JOKE/GAG MAKES YOU SHOOT MILK OUT OF YOUR NOSE?
G: Okay, wait, that actually happened.
J: I think it was in my kitchen.
G: I don’t remember what you did or said, but I do remember the milk flew.
J: I think what makes me laugh the hardest is when I’m not allowed to laugh. Like you’re mid-laugh and a teacher yells at you, “Stop laughing!” I can’t hold it in. I lose it.
G: Jack and I used to be in the same study group with this old guy, Mr. Wish.
J: Don Wish. The man!
G: He was a veteran; he was in the war. He was intense. He tutored us in Honors Biology, and for some reason, whatever he said used to crack us up.
J: We would laugh so hard.
G: And that was bad, because he’d get mad, and when he got mad he was scary.
J: Scary but funny . . . ya gotta give Don credit.
