The New York Post 

You probably didn’t expect to find the meaning of life in “MMMBop,” but Hanson’s No. 1 smash hit — which had everybody bopping 25 years ago — is deeper than you might think.

“The song [is] all about the passage of time and how very few things will last,” Zac Hanson told The Post. “‘In an mmmbop, they’re gone/In an mmmbop, they’re not there.’ And so it’s really saying, ‘Life comes and goes … so you better be conscious, you better dive into what you really want from it, because it’s just gonna be gone.’”

But a quarter-century after the signature single from this band of brothers was released on April 15, 1997, Hanson and “MMMBop” are still jangling along, continuing their steady output of music with a new album, “Red Green Blue,” out May 20. And drummer Zac, keyboardist Taylor and guitarist Isaac Hanson — who were only 11, 14 and 16, respectively, when the bouncy ditty catapulted them to pop stardom — are still bonded together by, as the song goes, the “secret no one knows.”

“It’s wild to see ‘MMMBop’ have that much longevity,” said Zac, who is now 36. “To sit here and have people still care about that song, it’s kind of this crazy inward spiral of the song’s meaning.”

“At the very beginning of our career, we had such a sense of wanting to … be an artist that could have that history,” added Taylor, now 39. “It feels good to just have reached some milestone and still at least be kicking and making some noise.”

Growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the classically trained Hanson brothers began making music together around their family home when other boys were going to soccer practice. “We began transitioning into being a real garage band — or a living-room band, actually,” said Taylor.

Indeed, the singing siblings had racked up professional experience before “MMMBop” even dropped, having made their debut as a band in May 1992. Written by the threesome, the tune — inspired by old-school groups such as the Beach Boys and the Jackson 5 — came together in their living room as a kind of “campfire” song. It originally appeared on Hanson’s 1996 independent album “MMMBop,” but then the producer-duo Dust Brothers punched it up for the fair-haired trio’s major-label debut LP, 1997’s “Middle of Nowhere.”

“The big difference really is the tempo,” said Zac. “‘MMMBop’ originally started off slow.”

“MMMBop” shot to the top of the charts in 1997 while also winning critical acclaim: The song was voted best single of the year by the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics poll while further earning Hanson three Grammy nominations, including for Record of the Year. But the brothers were laying the foundation for a career that could be about more than just one song.

“We were lucky that for all of the challenges, I think the most kind of redeeming quality for us was we were experienced-enough writers, we were able to write a lot of the songs that were on that [‘Middle of Nowhere’] record. We were able to write all of them,” said Isaac, 41. “We had a lot of confidence in the fact that it was our voice and that we knew who we were.”

Not that it’s always been easy navigating their musical aspirations as both bandmates and brothers — especially after finding success so early in their lives. “I think what we found was that we could, in a way, write our way through the difficulties,” said Zac. “You begin to write … about what you’re going through, and that becomes a form of therapy, and you have to share it with each other.”

Now, they’ve also had plenty of experience sharing fatherhood together, raising 15 kids between them — Isaac has three children, Taylor has seven and Zac has five — while each has been married for at least 16 years (Isaac and Zac got hitched in 2006, four years after Taylor).

So can we expect Hanson: The Next Generation? “I would be really surprised if one of them didn’t do something in this sort of a creative space,” said Zac.

“But we’ll discourage them at every turn,” added Isaac with a laugh.

In celebration of their 30th anniversary as a band, Hanson is busy gearing up for the release of “Red Green Blue” and a tour that’s scheduled to hit the Upper West Side’s Beacon Theatre on July 31. The LP — featuring each brother taking the lead for one-third of the tracks — gets its title from the colors their mother would dress them in as the three oldest siblings out of seven children.

“If you’re part of a big family, you’re constantly trying to identify your stuff versus other people’s stuff,” said Zac. “From an early age, I was blue, Isaac was green, Taylor was red … It was sort of fortuitous that they picked the right colors, but it does kind of fit with our style.”

Independent

Twenty-five years ago this week, a band of blond brothers from Oklahoma released a single that took the planet by storm. They tell Kevin E G Perry about scary fans, collaborating with punk rockers, and how the iconic ‘MMMBop’ is actually a ‘really depressing’ song

When “MMMBop” first bounded onto the airwaves a quarter of a century ago, it sounded like nothing else around. Released on 15 April 1997, it arrived at the tail-end of grunge and with Britpop in full swing, a blast of irresistibly catchy pop rock influenced by classic R&B and soul and sung by a band of brothers too young to have a drink to toast their success. The song soared to the top of the charts in a dozen countries, including Britain and the US, making the long-haired Hanson siblings international sensations overnight.

The trio had formed five years earlier in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after the family arrived back in the States after a stint in South America, where the boys’ accountant father was auditing operations in the oil and gas industry. As they travelled they listened religiously to a compilation of hits from the late Fifties, featuring golden oldies “Good Golly, Miss Molly” by Little Richard, “Splish Splash” by Bobby Darin and “Rockin’ Robin” by Bobby Day.

“It was rock’n’roll in its absolute essence,” remembers lyricist and middle brother Taylor Hanson. “That music became really ingrained in our psyche as our connection to America.”

The power of that influence would become clear when the young brothers went ahead and crafted a perfect pop hit of their very own.

The story of “MMMBop” begins in the Hanson family garage in 1994, when guitarist Isaac was 14, keyboardist Taylor was 11 and drummer Zac was nine.

The foundations of ‘MMMBop’ were formed while the brothers were brushing their teeth, and almost by accident. The trio then expanded it, albeit with lyrics they only later realised were slightly bleak…

Taylor Hanson: We were working on a song we made called “Boomerang”, which is incredibly hooky in itself. We were looking for a counterpoint background part and started singing: “Mmmbop, ba duba dop”. You have to remember we’d learnt to sing listening to doo-wop and early rock’n’roll, so we were thinking about songs like [sings Barry Mann’s 1961 hit “Who Put the Bomp”:] “Who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?”. We started singing and that little pattern formed, but it was too hooky to be a counterpoint so it went on the shelf.

Isaac Hanson: In the early Nineties you had the grunge and rock stuff coming out of Seattle, and you also had more straight-down-the-middle guitar pop like Gin Blossoms and Hootie & the Blowfish. We were trying to figure out where we fit in.

Taylor: I distinctly remember a regular morning, just brushing our teeth and getting ready for school, singing: “Mmmbop, ba duba dop” and Isaac harmonising with me. That idea was in our brains and in our household. It was around then that the verses began to be born. It’s a campfire song, a reflective, earnest, heartfelt little story. “MMMBop” is kind of “C’est la vie”.

Zac Hanson: I’m surprised more people weren’t worried about us when you look at the things we were writing at that age. Obviously it was packaged in a very upbeat way with harmonies and catchy guitar lines, but “MMMBop” is really about getting old, losing friends and the fact that most things won’t last.

Isaac: If we hadn’t already had that chorus, “MMMBop” would be a really depressing song.

Taylor: We recorded it locally, and “MMMBop” became the thing that we shopped to labels. Before that, they couldn’t really make any sense of these guys singing Motown and soul but looking like a 12-year-old Nirvana cover band.

Isaac: Except our hair was cleaner.

Taylor: The record got turned down by almost everyone in the business until we found the right label and it got us signed. We did not think of “MMMBop” as the ticket. It was an expression of who we were, but we didn’t think the day it was written that it would light the world on fire.

After moving to Los Angeles and getting signed, the brothers collided with professional – and adult – musicians, and sought out indie rock experts to hone their craft and their visual aesthetic.

Isaac: We drove out to LA before we were technically signed. We signed the contract with Mercury Records in the parking lot of the Beverly Garland Hotel in Studio City, California.

Taylor: They teased me about this, but I was genuinely frustrated that I was 13 when we got signed and Michael Jackson was only about eight when The Jackson 5 got signed.

udiscovermusic

It topped charts everywhere and made the brothers instant superstars. But its success was anything but assured.

Upon its April 1997 release, Hanson’s debut single “MMMBop” was inescapable. The song dominated the airwaves worldwide, a daisy-fresh burst of melody that was even more irresistible thanks to the beaming blonde teenagers behind it. While “MMMBop” was soaring up the international charts, Isaac Hanson was 16, Taylor was 14, and Zac was just 11 years old. Comparisons with family groups The Jackson 5 and The Osmonds were inevitable but, while Hanson evoked the grin-inducing exuberance of the young Jacksons in particular, there was a crucial difference – from the beginning, Hanson wrote their own material and were a working band, despite their tender years.

“MMMBop” was written a couple of years earlier, as Isaac told The Guardian in 2018, “I was 14, and my brothers Taylor and Zac were 12 and 10 respectively. We listened to a lot of doo-wop, which influenced the chorus of ‘MMMBop.’ We were trying to write a part for another song and came up with this catchy hook, but it didn’t really fit. Much, much later, I said to the guys: ‘Remember that hook? It really sticks in your head. We need to find a way to use it.’ Then, as we were getting ready for bed, we all sang it together in the bathroom.”

That hook proved vital to the success of “MMMBop,” a chorus so catchy that the existential doubts of the lyrics flew under the radar for most listeners. Isaac later recalled the inspiration for the song, “A few days later, Taylor was sitting at the keyboard with an intense look on his face. ‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘We can make this song about life – and all the rejection we’re feeling.’ The lyrics were wise beyond the Hanson brothers’ years, considering the importance of maintaining relationships that endure to old age and reflecting on transient friendships (“In an mmm bop they’re gone/In an mmm bop they’re not there.”)

The brothers recorded the song in late 1995 and it became the title track of their second self-released album, which they sold at local gigs. This first recorded version of “MMMBop” was markedly slower than the one that would become an international hit, drawing more attention to the mature lyrics. Considering their age and the resources at their disposal (Isaac would later say it was recorded in a “one-car garage”), this “MMMBop” is impressive, yet it lacks the pop pizzazz that would make them stars.

Mercury Records’ Head Of A&R, Steve Greenberg, heard enough in that demo to drive to a county fair in Coffeyville, Kansas, and sign Hanson on the spot. Greenberg set about making “MMMBop” a hit and called on the hot production duo of the time, The Dust Brothers. Before work on the song could be finished, though, Odelay by Beck was released and The Dust Brothers’ stock rose exponentially. “MMMBop” fell by the wayside, with only the instrumental framework completed.

Greenberg brought in Black Grape producer Steve Lironi and Mark Hudson (who’d worked with Aerosmith and Ringo Starr) to finish the track. There were also some new issues to deal with: “As we were recording, Taylor’s voice was breaking,” Greenberg told The Guardian in 2018. “He could barely sing ‘MMMBop’ in the original key, which I really wanted to keep because it had sounded so exciting.”

Nonetheless, the final track bounced where the original had dragged its heels; it was peppy and bittersweet while the original had felt slightly labored. Despite the teething problems, it had enough of The Dust Brothers’ fingerprints on it (turntable scratches, drily funky beats) for its pop-country stylings to sound contemporary. The brothers’ ebullient vocals were the cherry on top.

“MMMBop” sold in staggering amounts worldwide – the single sold 1.5 million copies in the US, over 750,000 in the UK. It topped charts everywhere and made the brothers instant superstars. Decades later, they’re still going strong, even if the key in which they perform “MMMBop” had to be dropped long ago.

Hanson’s “MMMBop” appeared on 1999’s Now That’s What I Call Music! 1, alongside other 90s classics like Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’s “Zoot Suit Riot.” Looking for more stories behind music’s biggest hits? Check out the Now! That’s What I Call Music page.

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