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ABOVE
Jonathan
Hylander on his front porch in Highland Park, a neighborhood
just off the historic 110 freeway between Downtown Los Angeles
and Pasadena.
Photographed
on December 5, 2009. |
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Jonathan
Hylander, guitarist, keyboardist, and singer for The Voyeurs,
grew up in the South Bay and recently moved to Los Angeles
a few years ago and formed The Voyeurs with drummer Sean
Johnson when his previous band, E>K>U>K, broke
up, which Sean was also a member of. And in those short
couple of years The Voyeurs have become a bit of a landmark
on the scene with their catchy hooks, aggressively fun live
shows, and stellar debut LP. But what really adds the icing
to the cake is Jonathan’s passion for music, it’s
as if music chose him rather than the other way round.
One
thing that I think is interesting is that you grew up Southern
California, you grew up in Los Angeles?
Jonathan Hylander: I grew up in the suburbs
of Los Angeles, in Manhattan Beach, kind of a nice beach
town.
Were
you playing in band in high school?
JH: Yeah, I was already in
bands. My first band started in elementary school, I went
to Meadows Elementary and a friend of mine started what
he called concert band, it was sort of a club. It was sixth
grade and they let us use the stage in the auditorium to
practice so every day instead of going to lunch we'd just
jam. It was a huge deal. I started out as a drummer and
I brought my entire drum kit and set it up and we would
literally just mess around with instruments for the entire
lunch. It sort of changed everything. I'm surpised they
let us do that, there wasn't much supervision, it was a
really big deal. That band sort of turned into another band
that was more serious, cause at the time we were playing
Louis Louis and Green Day songs, where we started writing
our own songs and that band changed and evolved over time
and members came in and out and it went into high school.
I was in that band all through middle school; in high school
it broke up and I started doing different things.
When
did you meet Sean Johnson? My impression is that you guys
have been playing together for a long time.
JH: Yeah, we've been playing together for
seven or eight years now. Maybe a little bit longer. In
high school I was a drummer in kind of a hard-core band,
it was a pretty ridiculous band. The band was called Rock
Goggle Fantasy and it was super high energy. The South Bay
had a really vibrant music scene at the time, really awesome,
and we played this place called Scared Grounds in San Pedro
where every band played and everybody went to shows. At
the time my band and this band From, which Sean was the
drummer for, were probably at the top of the scene. They
were sort of a surf, prog rock band, really fast surf rock
with tons of time changes and mostly instrumental. The music
between the two bands was totally different but we both
had the same DIY aesthetic and the same heart behind it,
so we loved them. They were a really talented band and we
started playing tons of shows with them. They were all all
ages shows and a lot of fun, it was just a kind of a golden
period in the South Bay scene. The South Bay has always
had music coming through it, but it was just a huge scene
for us, being 17 and having a ton of kids come to see us
at a show and dancing like crazy, going nuts. Our bands
did a tour together which was more of a vacation, just going
to cities we didn’t necessarily have shows in and
trying to get them that day or we'd get booked on really
ridiculous things, and maybe the shows weren’t necessarily
worth it, but it was still worthwhile because we did all
these really ridiculous things. |
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At
what point did you start playing together?
JH: We started playing together probably
the year after high school. I was a drummer at the time,
but I had always done solo stuff, I was a guitarist at heart.
I had been in a couple bands as a guitarist before and I
really wanted to just have an aggressive rock n’ roll
band. Sean and I had bonded over being drummers and become
pretty good friends and I was like, "dude, you want
to join this rock n’ roll band," we were both
doing pretty extreme things at the time, "lets just
dumb it down a little bit and have some fun playing this
really easy music." And he was like, "yeah totally,
let's do it." I got my cousin, he was playing bass,
and that became E>K>U>K which became our first
band together. E>K>U>K evolved into a more serious
endeavor, I guess as all things do when you start really
simple, they just get more complicated, complicated in a
good way. We started with dumb rock n’ roll music
and it got more interesting to us, it evolved into something
more. We were together for four and half years, something
like that, and we ended up going to SXSW a bunch of times
and touring a bunch, doing little short jaunts constantly.
We got really good at booking little tours, and we'd go
out probably every other month doing these tours and were
able to come back with money after playing better and better
shows.
What
happened to E>K>U>K?
JH: It's a pretty long story, but as these
things go, people change and we all weren't feeling it.
Also, a big part of it is that we felt pretty alone as a
band, at that time we were playing a lot of useless shows
in L.A. You'd go there and you didn't talk to any of the
other bands because they were into their own thing, and
you'd never play with that band again because they’d
just disappear into LA. It was pretty disheartening. We
had been signed and we were working on an album and it all
fell apart, the record label changed their business model
into a management thing and we got dropped because of that.
And Sean and I felt like we were the only people we could
count on which essentially lead to us forming The Voyeurs
in the wake of E>K>U>K. Literally, early Voyeurs
songs are E>K>U>K songs. I bought a keyboard at
that exact time and started playing it constantly; we decided
to open up the sound a bit and got excited about music again.
Is that when you moved to Los Angeles?
JH: There abouts. We started
meeting a bunch of cool, likeminded people up here that
cared about helping out other bands and being a part of
something, which certainly invigorated us about playing
music live. We wanted that help and support, to be a band
with no support system is so mind numbingly bad for moral,
show after show with no one caring is pretty disheartening
in general.
How
do you feel about living here versus the South Bay?
JH: I love it, I can only speak for myself,
but I love being out here. I've found tons of support and
friends who care, which is not what you expect from LA.
Of course there are people who aren't like that but I guess
that's true in any social circle. I like the area too, I
like the whole package of being here in LA. I didn't know
that much about LA when I was living in the South Bay, which
I didn't even realize until I moved out here and sorted
the city together on the map in my mind. And I wasn't used
to the idea of going to a random show at a venue and seeing
someone I knew, because I thought it was such a big city
that that would never happen, but it seems it's not quite
as big as I had originally thought, which is comforting
to me. It has a bad |
The
Voyeurs - Civil War EP