Identical twins and long time (as in seven years) recording artists, Evan and Jaron, have racked up a major radio hit, “Crazy for this Girl,” on Sony/Columbia Records. And they’re big Mac fans, according to an Apple Hot News story.
Getting to this point in their careers wasn’t easy. After hearing from several commercial radio stations that the stations couldn’t play anything that wasn’t on a major label, Evan and Jaron determined to start their own indie label, dubbed “A Major Label Records.” The label drew some attention and the brothers landed a record contract with Island Records, but the record never took off.
“We regrouped and decided to write songs that would hopefully catch the ear of other major labels,” Jaron told Apple. “In that time we wrote both Crazy For This Girl and From My Head to My Heart.”
They recorded the tracks for these songs in a studio in their hometown of Atlanta, GA, and then shopped the demo around. When putting a personal recording studio in their home the twins first turned to a Roland VS-1680, but Evan also picked up a PowerBook, and they were hooked.
“It’s not that I didn’t like the Roland, it’s just that even with its mobility it couldn’t compete with the power, the disk space, capability or the portability of the PowerBook,” Evan said. “I’ve since become accustomed to the Mac, and my Roland is sitting in its travel case inside my closet. When I write a new song, I like to put it down on hard disk as soon as possible because I realize that I may never sing it again the way I do the first night I write it. Sometimes, that feeling doesn’t end up being the one that works best for the final version, but nonetheless, it’s certainly good to have that first inspiration on hand to draw from.”
The Evan and Jaron touring PowerBook is equipped with Digital Performer for recording audio, iMovie and Final Cut Pro for editing footage shot on the road and iTunes for making MP3 copies of their newest songs to send to their friends via e-mail. Evan records his guitar riffs into the PowerBook via Line 6’s Pod, a classic guitar amp simulator, and he brings his vocal ideas in through the PowerBook’s built-in microphone jack. He’s also a fan of Native Instruments’ virtual synths.
See the QuickTime full-length video of Evan and Jaron’s single “From My Head to My Heart,” premiering May 18 at 12:01 a.m. on their Web site.