Overcoats is an indie pop duo consisting of friends Hana Elion and JJ Mitchell. They met in college and instantly connected through their love of music and the arts. Since the COVID pandemic brought live entertainment to a halt, they have recently been making their return to performing live for audiences again. Overcoats’ new album, Winner, is an organic collection of songs surrounding heartbreak, rejection, and how to come back from them. Overcoats are working hard to share their music and positively affect as many listeners as possible.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you two met?
Hana: “Yeah, we met in college on our very first day. And we quickly started singing together, just kind of in a casual way, you know just like churches and little bathrooms and anywhere that we could find on campus that had nice acoustics. Then four years into school, so our last year, we wrote our first song together, and kind of went from there.”
Do you think that your friendship would have been different without the musical connection?
JJ: “That's a good question. I think our friendship would have looked really similar, but I think our music would have looked really different/wouldn't exist without the friendship. So I feel like basically we started writing together because we were kind of like going through stuff and we would share those experiences with one another and then try to channel it into music. So I think without the friendship there was no band and I feel like that's something that is interesting to think about.”
How did you decide on the name, Overcoats, for your band?
Hana: “We were trying to find a name that was going to be like, sort of mysterious, a bit androgynous, something that you know if you saw the name you wouldn't necessarily know what you were going to listen to when you pressed play. So that was kind of a piece of it when we were thinking about stuff. And both JJ and I were really into visual art in college as well, and so there was this artist we both loved and still love, Egon Schiele, and he has a print that is like two people under a coat and we always loved that print, and would talk about it. And it kind of inspired the name as two people sort of finding protection and connection under this big overcoat.”
What was your experience like performing at the SXSW festival?
JJ: “That festival is always really chaotic. I don't know if you've experienced it, but it's just like a million shows all happening at once all over Austin, Texas. We really had one of those crazy schedules. So we played like five shows in two days or something like that and it was very fun. It was a crazy way to get back into playing live. It was like really throwing ourselves into the deep end, but also kind of like get the training wheels off quickly because we just had to play five shows in such quick succession. But it was really fun because, I mean, we haven't really gotten to play live together for a couple of years. So mainly it was just exciting to be back up there singing together and connecting with audiences. The last couple of years has been just a lot of me and Hana singing to each other and no one else. So it was fun in that sense.”
Can you tell me a little bit about your new album, Winner?
JJ: “Yeah, so we started writing it in 2021. We recorded it in Nashville in 2022. It's basically a group of songs about coming back from rejection and what one does in the face of rejection and falling off the horse. And we tried in this album to like really lean into a more organic sound, kind of going back to our singer-songwriter folky roots a little bit. We recorded in Nashville so there's a bunch of Americana elements, country elements that made their way in. But yeah, it's our third full length record. And I would say the only other thing that's exciting to add about the project as a whole is that we released it ourselves independently with distribution through Thirty Tigers. So this was a new experience for us because previously we put our first two records out with different labels and this is us striking out on our own. And hopefully winning!”
How does Winner differ from your previous albums?
Hana: “You know, we've always been really interested in production and electronic music and programming and all of that stuff, and that features heavily in the sonics on our first two records. Our first one’s quite electronic, our second one's still got a fair amount of electronic but it's more kind of rock and roll, and I think for this one we wanted to do something that didn't have any like bells and whistles. We used primarily organic instrumentation, we didn't do a whole lot of programming, we wanted something that felt like, you know, kind of pure in terms of the writing process, really starting from just like the song on a guitar and adding to it but not including anything that was really programmed. So yeah, I think we tried to go sort of back to our roots, as JJ said, in that sense and make something that anyone could make with just a guitar and a drum kit and a bass.”
