[Lisa Wagner]

Interesting article that raises some good points. Some of which I personally agree with and some of which I don’t. While obviously there seem to be many people fascinated by these in-depth analyses, personally we don’t find ourselves going down these rabbit holes a lot. We’re more interested in the music they created and in what makes music great and beautiful rather than the personality/talent aspect behind successful bands and musicians or who was the bigger “genius”, though those discussion can be interesting.

The four of them undoubtedly had their unique things to bring to the table and the article depicts Paul’s strengths and their differences well. But as I said before, since I don’t think any of them came any close to the magic they created as the Beatles once they went solo (one of the points I disagree on with the author), I think it’s kinda obvious that the combination had much more of a role to play.

Paul wrote insanely beautiful melodies but I can’t think of more than a handful (if even) of his solo stuff that came even close to being in the same ballpark than what he did with the Beatles. Go figure.

What’s for sure is that unlike anyone else, together they left behind enough music, history, stories and aspects to their creative and personal lives on this planet to inspire and intrigue millions of people and many, many generations to come.

Thanks for sharing the article and your thoughts here. Best, Lisa

[Lisa Wagner]

Danke dir, Frank! Wir hoffen, du hattest ebenfalls einen super Rutsch und 11 angenehme erste Tage im neuen Jahr. Auf ein erfolgreiches 2019 und stay natürlich groovy 😉 !!

[Lisa Wagner]

Thanks for letting us know how much you enjoyed the Advent Calendar! It surely was a lot of work but we want the Club to be well worth joining and you all to have a great time 🙂 And it was honestly real fun to put together!

To answer your question. There are many pros and cons about living in Liverpool like there would be anywhere in the world. Obviously we’re not speaking about each and every person we’ve met here but in general we really like the humour and openness about the people here. If you ride the train, people chat with one another, people tend to be really polite and not take themselves too serious. Not as many grumpy, snobby waiters as in Vienna (though they know how to play one 😉 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCANQRkzKtY )

After playing Saturday nights for two years and fighting our way through the nightlife scene for every gig, that is something we got to dislike a little bit about the city. Not at all when we were on stage playing for what always was an amazing audience but the whole drinking and nightlife culture that surrounds the inner parts of the city. We don’t believe it to be much different to most cities in the UK, but Liverpool specifically attracts a lot of “Hen parties” and “Stag does” (aka British bachelor/ette parties) that for some reason seem to get out of hand quite often. So going home or out after a gig resembled more of wading through a battlefield 😉

But other than that, there isn’t much we could point out that we don’t like about the city as a city. It’s clean, fairly save, with a diverse music, art and entertainment scene (yep, we have checked out, played or at least visited most of the music venues around town), rich history, loads of galleries, museums, shops, restaurants and the like. It’s pretty, not too crowded and fairly spacious and green. Super happy here 🙂

And yes, of course we had Scouse before, We’ve been given the title of Scoustrians after all 😛

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Rick,
My Gretsch Duo Jet is still in perfectly good shape but I wanted to go for more of a smooth, jazzy sound so I picked the Country Gentleman that we’ve luckily owned for a while now (thanks to the one and only Steve from Miami 🙂 ). Now that you say it, I don’t think it has ever made it into any videos yet, but I played it on a few recordings and sometimes used it at band practise when going for different tones or to mix things up a bit. It sounds, plays and looks gorgeous. Wouldn’t trade it for my Duo Jet as an all-round live performance weapon but it’s fantastic to have in the studio.

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Charles,
The royalties we pay for our Beatles covers are the same as for covering any other artist and they aren’t more or less expensive, at least when it comes to CDs. There is a big difference of using songs on a TV show or movies though as royalties for film are a lot more complicated and expensive, and they are to be negotiated with the respective publishers. We don’t know if $10,000 for the Tonight Show is exaggerated but we wouldn’t be surprised by that number.

When it comes to the our liner notes for our original albums there is a lot less to say than with most other bands who have a lot more people involved like producers, arrangers, composers, lyricists, sound engineers, other musicians and the list goes on. As all our songs are all written, recorded, produced and published by ourselves (MonaLisa Twins/Woolgoose Records) there isn’t really much else to say other than … well, exactly that 😉
Orange: “© 2017 Original sound recording by Woolgoose Records. All songs wirtten and played by MonaLisa Twins featuring John Sebastian on blues harp on tracks 3 & 6”

However, whenever other musicians were playing on our recordings, we always list them as well as the venue where the song got recorded to give proper credits to everyone and for them to get their share of sales revenue.

Hope that answers your questions 🙂
Best,

Lisa

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Mike,

Good questions…

1) Well, it really depends on the situation. Whenever it’s a particularly important or big show, an unusual crowd, a new setlist or a more out-of-the-ordinary gig, yes, there are nearly always some nerves involved. People normally say that they couldn’t tell but of course you will know yourself.

The hot face, the heavy fingers and that 😉 Normally that feeling quickly goes away after a few minutes of being on stage but there have been times when things didn’t go smoothly, like a messed up stage sound or some other technical difficulties that make it harder to get into the zone leaving you feel on edge for bigger parts of the show. Not a fan of those kind of nerves as I then get upset with myself for feeling anxious which normally only makes me feel even more anxious.
So yes, stage fright happens, but rarely lasts longer than a few minutes into the set 🙂

2) Yes, and it’s probably one of the most addictive things about being a musician. But it’s nearly always a group effort that seems to elevate everyone in the room. If the band plays well, if the audience is loving it, if you are giving your best and it all falls into place. It’s a type of energy you can’t reproduce in a rehearsal room, at least not in its entirety but it’s a great experience to then take that off stage and hopefully into the recording studio later. You learn a lot from pushing and transcending your boundaries on stage.

[Lisa Wagner]

The better question would be if there has even been a performance where we didn’t forget the lyrics at some point 😉 It happens all the time but we tend to just repeat a different verse or line or make up some new lyrics to try and hide the fact we’ve got the memory of a goldfish.

Weirdly enough we’re both having less trouble with lengthy, wordy lyrics as they normally have a good storyline that you can follow and remember easily. It’s the repetitive ones where maybe only a few words or lines keep changing that always get us. Less obvious if you’re singing on your own but as we often sing harmonies … well, it’s quite obvious if two people try to make up new lyrics on the fly 🙂

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Rick,
Whenever we will expand the Club with new ideas, features, videos, etc. we will first post about it on the Clubhouse page and send out an MLT Club Wire 🙂

[Lisa Wagner]

We should have probably added the forum rule: Never ever, under no circumstances, life and death situations included, mention or god forbid SING “Rudolf the red nose reindeer” to Dad.
If you treasure your own life’s safety we suggest you pretend you never even had this idea …

PS: The same goes for “A Message To You Rudy” 😉

[Lisa Wagner]

Haha, believe it or not but we used this version to help us figure out some of the harmony parts as some things were easier to make out in this version than the original ;-D

[Lisa Wagner]

Howdy right back atcha, Jim!

Thanks for saying hi and telling us about yourself! That’s quite the awesome collection of professions, we bet that makes for an interesting life. If it keeps the banks happy too, even better 🙂

We’re glad you joined us here and say thank you!

Have a groovy day,
Lisa

[Lisa Wagner]

Who would have thought that I‘d actually get excited talking about working out one day ;-D

We didn’t use to be overly sporty people, especially during our teenage years where our physical activity was mainly constrained to “a little bit of running for 3 weeks after New Years Eve” or a week of skiing in Winter. So yes, we were definitely lucky to have had a high metabolism during those years 😉

However, about 3 years ago when we decided to turn our lifestyle around and take more care of ourselves in that way we started eating a lot healthier and that got us started off doing yoga, then picked up running (a lot!) and eventually weight lifting and more HIIT style training.

We decided to prioritise our health more which didn’t just have a huge physical but also SUCH a positive mental effect. It bleeds into so many aspects of life and helped me getting stronger, more confident and balanced, more creative, calmer, … Just by practicing self discipline and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable 😉

I do a bit more strength training compared to Mona (she‘s doing more yoga and flexibility work) so I’ll give you a rough workout routine for me (given things aren’t too busy to carve out the time).

We normally run about 4 times a week (typically a timed 5k race on Sat, a 10k race on Sun, and two more laid back runs during the week).

Then I do a mix of weight training, HIIT and sometimes Pilates about 4 times a week as well. I normally split the lifting workouts in different muscle groups. These  session hardly last longer than an hour, normally less, and we always work out at home (with dumbbells, bands, pull up bar, etc.) so there isn’t really much excuse not to do it and I always feel amazing afterwards. No gym fees and travels and more flexible with time are some more pluspoints.

It is so much fun seeing yourself improve, building muscle and getting faster and stronger.
I cut my 5k time by nearly ten minutes over the last 2 years 🙂
All that makes me ridiculously happy. Dad is running and working out too and is now in the best shape of his life.

I used to not really „get“ people that were active. I saw myself as only the „musician“ who didn’t really care about something seemingly rather „primal“ as working out. I think I was very wrong about that. Our bodies are meant to move, it‘s part of the „design“. Plus it can be really fun 🙂 And all the better if it gets you outside, if it connects you more to your body and maybe to other people that you’re running or working out with.

Thanks for the question 🙂

[Lisa Wagner]

I remember us being quite picky eaters growing up. Not sure what happened though because these days I don’t think there is much we wouldn’t eat ;-D

I cook a lot and always try to cook really healthy but when we dine out and I want to treat myself I’d probably order ribs and sticky toffee pudding for dessert! Gosh, I love sticky toffee pudding! As far as cuisines go I love Asian food, and Mexican, and Turkish, and Greek, … actually I could just keep going because there are yummy dishes from everywhere.

So I guess I make up for my quite specific taste in music by loving ALL the food 😛

[Lisa Wagner]

Oh yeah, we love doing that! I’d say “Baby Mine” from “MonaLisa Twins play Beatles & more Vol. 3” or our version of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” for example are pretty drastically different to their original arrangement. Or the song we posted today: https://test4.monalisa-twins.com/early-access-little-drummer-boy-audio/ And we had a hell of a lot of fun doing that 🙂

But the thing is that when we cover our absolute favourite songs (like many Beatles songs) they are already so perfect (in our opinion) that we don’t feel that changing them up too much would improve them in any way. So we just add our little touches and try to do them justice as much as we can.

One of my pet peeves is people changing melodies, chords and arrangements of already great songs ONLY for the sake of changing something but in the progress losing the essence of what makes the song great. We see this on YouTube all the time, and I think you can normally tell if someone understands the music well enough to keep its magic in tact (while making it their own) or if someone believes that changing things up a lot somehow makes it more interesting by default. Of course, there aren’t really any “hard rules”, a lot of it comes down to personal taste, and musicians should make music however they want. That’s just my personal opinion and taste when it comes to covering other people’s music.

So yeah, completely reinventing an arrangement can be super interesting if done skillfully 🙂 And it’s something we’ll definitely continue to play around with, depending on the song.

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Mike, that’s not really something we worry about to be honest. It’s actually rather hard to come by song titles that NOONE has ever used before, so we just write our songs, write the lyrics and then name the song, like the song wants to be named 🙂 It’s normally quite self evident due to its lyrics, and we definitely wouldn’t change the lyrics just to get a different title. Hope that makes sense 🙂