[Mona Wagner]

Hi Rick,

Yes, that was a snippet from when we recorded the song in the studio. He was so cool about it and did such a great job, so that the whole thing was done and dusted in just a few takes.

I managed to snap a few pictures while he and Dad were at work 🙂

Good memories!

[Mona Wagner]

I would say your assessment is correct! We do love our Ricky and Gretsch and wouldn’t trade them for the world! 🙂

As for acoustic guitars … I like a couple! In terms of sentimental value I will always treasure my EJ 160E the most. It’s nothing fancy, cheap and battered beyond belief but it has been with me to so many places and gigs and is a true workhorse. My second most used acoustic guitar is probably a custom Martin that we got gifted many years ago. Lisa has one too (one dreadnought and one jumbo) and they both sound terrific and don’t look half bad either 🙂

You can see them in a lot of live photos:

 

There are many wonderful acoustic guitars and some work better in the studio than on stage but the two I mentioned would be my immediate go-to picks.

Loved the question!

All the best,
Mona

[Mona Wagner]

His name is Snoop.

He came to us many years ago probably around 2008, during school holidays and we proceeded to take him anywhere for the next 12 months straight. Those were our bonding months and he has refused to leave ever since. He even made it into English class at some point and is extremely sociable and talkative (he squeaks).

These days he just likes hanging out near cameras and creeping around film sets. We think he’s trying to become a movie star but he’s very sneaky about it.

Snoop is a cool cat.

❤

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Mike

There are absolutely songs we prefer to play live more than others. There are the ones that are exciting in the beginning and start to feel a bit old after a while vs some that develop and get more fun over months of playing them live.

Whether or not we particularly enjoy playing a song over a long period of time can depend on the day, the atmosphere, the stage sound, setting etc … Also I’d say the tighter we played and the more prepared we were the more enjoyable the whole setlist would be, regardless of those other factors, so that’s always what we were aiming for.

By the last gig of the day we might have already run through “Johnny B. Goode” twice during this morning’s band rehearsal and once at a show around the corner. Whether you then switch to “autopilot” or keep engaged in what you’re doing I think has a lot to do with why it is you are making music in the first place.

The amount of miserable cover and function bands (or sometimes even well-known acts, in which case it’s even sadder) who just seem to go through the motions each night attest to the fact that even the best job in the world (like playing rock’n’roll to an excited audience ;-)) can become dreadful if you’re doing it for a paycheck alone.

Thanks to our parents we could take a different approach. Even though we usually play a lot of covers we’ve never been a “cover band” and while we did our fair bit of grinding and collecting hours on sweaty, small stages we’ve always done it to hone our craft and experience the dynamics of live playing rather than for the money.

Because of that we have never not been excited about a gig. Whenever we feel like we’ve overplayed a song or we had a harder time getting excited about it we’d drop it after a while or look into how we can make it fun again.

That was a long winded answer to a simple question but I thought it would be worth going into a bit more detail about the subject 🙂

You probably wanted to hear some examples so if I’d have to pick a song I’ve always enjoyed, it was “Revolution”, even though we played it literally hundreds of times. We always added little things over the years and I’ll always love that tune.

The same goes for pretty much all of our originals, though “I Don’t Know Birds That Well” might be one of my favourites to do live.

Thanks for the lovely question and have a good day!

Mona

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Mike!

Personally, I am not a huge believer in talent. By that I mean that I think most “talented” people out there have earned that description by working hard on whatever they are good at and interested in and, most importantly, kept up the interest and discipline to go through the tough patches that no doubt occur when learning or creating new things 🙂 Obviously with things like sport, genetics can play a huge rule (I don’t think a basketball career was ever in the cards for me) but personally I try avoiding the word “talent” for that reason.

In our case specifically with singing harmonies I think it was a natural, slow learning curve that came from repetition over many years. Like many other young kids we used to be pretty bad at singing but we always sang at home and in the car and it’s something our parents always encouraged. When we were on car journeys our dad would show us how to sing harmonies to our favourite songs or sing triad chords with us (each one of us took one note).

It was something we did for fun to make car journeys go by quicker and really enjoyed it, so by the time we were teenagers it came quite naturally to us and we had a basic idea on how to find the harmony to a melody by listening alone. These days it comes easy and natural but I don’t think it would have if it wasn’t for those hours of singing with Lisa as little kids and Dad. It didn’t seem like work or effort at all but looking back it definitely was a big part of us being kids. I don’t think we had much talent from the get go. We just sang a lot and got better and stuck to it 🙂

The fact that we are twins and have similar voices I think helps with making our harmonies sounds more … harmonic 😉 Sometimes voices just don’t work together even if everyone is singing in tune, so whenever we sing with someone else it’s a hit or miss whether or not it’s a nice blend of voices. All the sibling bands you mention have that bonus. It’s nearly like singing harmonies with yourself.

I don’t know if we would sound much different if we were merely sisters, not twins, but it would probably be at least similar I’d guess 🙂

Also, I’m sure if someone explained to you the basics of harmonies, and maybe showed you on a keyboard and pointed it out in songs your ears would soon get used to it and you’d have a much easier time with it. It probably wouldn’t even take very long!

Anyway, thanks for the questions! All the best from snowy Liverpool,

Mona

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Rick!

My Ricky is a 350v63 which is like the legendary 325 that Lennon played (same toaster pickups, wood, controls etc.) only “long scale” so the neck is a regular length. I absolutely love it and wouldn’t swap it for any other guitar as my main electric.

I occasionally put flat wound strings on it which give it more of a thuddy sound which get balanced out by the bright, jingly tone that those good old toaster pickups produce. It made it a bit harder to play since they’re usually a bit heavier but during our intensive live playing phase I didn’t play too many solos on it so it worked fine. At the moment I’ve got regular round wounds on, medium gage.

I’ve not really messed around with it in terms of changing pickups, different bridges etc. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it 😉

The only thing we did was that Dad cut out a little carbon plate that goes over the pickup switch and keeps it in place because I used to accidentally knock it while playing all the time which switched the sound midway through a song and would ruin live recordings on a regular basis 😉 Now I control the sound with the dial only which still allows the whole range.

There’s not much else to say, I mainly play it through my AC30 with a tiny bit of reverb and slightly cut treble, depending on the song.

I love the sound, feel, sturdiness, and look and can’t imagine ever giving away that guitar! 🙂

I hope you’re staying very groovy too! All the best to you,

Mona

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Mike!

The “Early Access” page is for all content that we pre-release to MLT Club Members earlier than to the rest of the internet world. So for example, when we plan on publishing a new YouTube video to our channel it will probably be there earlier for members only to watch.

The “Duo Sessions” page is a collection for all music videos (usually acoustic, live or on-the-go) that we exclusively recorded for the MLT Club. With the exception of “Getting Better” which we uploaded to YouTube a few weeks later, all videos there will stay exclusive for now and are recorded with the MLT Club in mind only.

We plan to do a lot more of these “simpler & quicker” videos for the Club that focus more on the music and live playing rather than a high-budget video or a studio arrangement, so we decided to create its own section to collect them all.

Hope that clears it up! 🙂

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the questions and for posting your answers along with them!

I read or watch movies nowhere near as much as I used to when I was younger, as I never find or take the time to do either. Ever since I’ve found podcasts I pretty much get all my “entertainment” of that kind from audio alone, so it mostly replaced both books and movies for me.

I’ll still try to answer your questions as accurately as possible!

1. What kind of books do you like to read?  Fiction or Non-Fiction? Favorite author and genre.
Our bookshelf is pretty much only filled with biographies (lots of Beatles books and various musicians) and thick, long science-fiction/fantasy based novels with the occasional thriller and some other odd ones like books by Carlos Ruiz Zafón which I love. I don’t read enough to have a qualified opinion on different authors and their legacies but the classics like Stephen King or James Patterson I’ve never had a bad read with.
Generally (and I think I’m speaking for Lisa here as well) I prefer longer, elaborate books that create a whole world and complex people with a variety of relationships over shorter books that are just based on a single story line.

2. What kind of movies do you enjoy watching?  Preferred genre? Favorite movie?
With the roughly 3 movies I watch a year these days, I again find it hard to answer that question in a meaningful way. Maybe one day I’ll get around to catch up on the long list of movie classics I should have seen but I usually gravitate towards interesting, character based movies, comedies or documentaries and again – fantasy / science fiction always peaks my interest (if we’re talking TV series I love Game Of Thrones).

3. If you knew nothing about music and had no interest in it other than maybe listening, what do you think you’d be doing instead?

I’ve been sitting here for several minutes trying to figure out a realistic answer to this question. It’s hard to imagine not having an interest in something your whole life is based on but I appreciate the brain exercise!

My first instinct was to say “probably still something in the creative entertainment world” but the more I thought about it the more I realised that that’s highly unlikely. I love the way we do things with this band, because the approach we have is often deliberately not aligned with many of the regular sides of the “entertainment business”. Without that aspect, I don’t think I’d be drawn much to the regular entertainment world.

Maybe I would choose to work with animals & people or find a way to use my creativity and time to do something beneficial in the social sector? It’s really a tricky question and not something I have a clear answer to but I couldn’t imagine doing something for a living that wasn’t in some way meaningful, beneficial for society, social and creative. Thankfully I feel music ticks all of those boxes! 😉

Hope you’re having a good weekend!
Mona

[Mona Wagner]

We love trying to incorporate new instruments and using different sounds in a tasteful way whenever it suits our vision for an arrangement. There are times when nothing beats the sound of a good old Rickenbacker played through a VOX amp or a properly mic’d nylon string guitar, but from time to time we try replacing those with some more unconventional instruments as you’ve mentioned.

On the last few covers we recorded quite a few “unusual” instruments like a washboard on “Baby Mine”, a flute on “I’ll Follow The Sun”, the Cello on “Yesterday” etc.

I’d say that on the ORANGE album we easily used twice the amount of instruments than we used on our debut album “When We’re Together” and we definitely want to continue venturing out into new territories exploring the endless variety of instruments us crazy humans have managed to invent over thousands of years. Or sometimes keep it super basic, it all depends on what each song asks for of course.

We are in the middle of recording a new cover too, which we rearranged with a slightly unusual instrumentation but we don’t want to spoil the surprise yet 😉

Thanks to one of our fans and supporters we actually own an autoharp (not a zither though) but we have not been able to use it yet since it unfortunately broke in transit. Maybe we’ll fix it up and use it for the new album! … first, we’ve got to write a song for it 😉

What was the movie you were watching? Was it “The Third Man” where Anton Karas plays his famous Harry Lime theme? 😉

Thank you for the lovely question!

Stay groovy,

Mona

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Martin,

A big Hello from all of us, thanks for saying hi and for joining the Club! It’s always so good to finally hear from people who have been following what we do for a few years already! It’s time we get a chance to talk 🙂

Thanks for the kind words about ORANGE in particular! We are just about to start working on original album #3 so we are equally excited to see what comes next 😉

Have a lovely day,
Mona

[Mona Wagner]

Thank you so much, Janne … ummm we mean Santa!

We loved the parcel and will work our way through the vinyl, DVDs and books over the weeks ahead! How thoughtful to send us such a “musical”, groovy Christmas parcel and we’re glad you wrote us so we can say our proper Thanks.

Truly appreciated! Big hugs,
Mona & Lisa

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Howard!

We can’t promise for sure but we’d certainly love to do something similar next year! As we’ve said before, we thoroughly enjoyed putting the Christmas calendar together and reading your comments every day, and as long as we find enough things to post – we don’t see why not 🙂

Both performances from that video (the one in the church and in school) were filmed in December 2001, just eleven days apart. Either the snowflake costumes accentuated our baby faces or we had a growth spurt in between 😉

Flying to Downunder – as amazing as that would be – is too costly and time consuming but we will make sure to take enough “time off” in the weeks ahead to get at least most of the song writing for the new album done. For now, we just send groovy greetings to Australia!

[Mona Wagner]

Gosh, Salzburg is such a gorgeous city! It’s about a 4 hours’ drive from where we lived. Our grandparents had a holiday house in a village in the county of Salzburg (it’s the name of both the county and the capital city) that we spent some time almost every Winter to go skiing in the surrounding mountains (see photos below). Salzburg is beautiful, and we have very fond memories of our daily activities out in the snow and tranquil hours lazing on the top of the tiled stove like cats.

[Mona Wagner]

Now that the Advent Calendar is done and the busy holidays are over we’ll have time to work on things like the chords booklet again. There are still a few other bits and pieces we want to get done in the weeks ahead but it’s definitely on the agenda for the not too distant future 🙂

Hope this will also result in some great covers from you guys!!

[Mona Wagner]

Hi Jacob!

Sorry for the late hello back!

A fellow twin AND fellow drummer – that’s awesome, welcome to the MLT Club! We hope you’ve made yourself at home already and thank you for joining and supporting us.

We’ve never been to Florida or the East Coast in general but would love to visit (and play) there one day. 😉

Groovy greetings,
Mona