Lloyd: I think we have the Internet age to thank for that - and the specific age that we’re in right now. And we always worked when we were back home on Thanksgiving or spring break or over the summer.Ĭool that the music ultimately reconnected you. I spent a lot of time working at Sam’s apartment when I was in New York. Yale and NYU are a lot closer than say, UCLA and NYU. Where: Observatory North Park, 2891 University Ave, North Park We first started talking about writing songs and then collaborated more and more. It wasn’t until I was in college and heard AlunaGeorge and starting thinking, “Oh, s**t, do I have any singer friends that I could do something like that with?” I’d known Sam forever and knew she had an incredible voice. We were both working, but not collaborating. So, I was thinking, “Damn, if this is going to happen for me, it’s going to happen here.” But Sam and I were parallels at that time. And, at the time, the bands I was interested in all met early on when they were in high school. Recently, I remembered this process I had when I must’ve been in early high school starting to think about making my own music - what that would be how cool it would to be in a band. But, sometimes, things just have a way of working out. Your paths went in literal different directions after high school. Lloyd: (laughs) When I sit down to make music, I don’t necessarily think about making a flytrap. Good to build the best flytrap that you can. My favorite thing about festivals is watching the crowd grow over the course of a set. There are those hometown crowds and then there are festivals, where you’re strutting your stuff for the world at large and hoping to bring in some new people. They are two completely different things. And then you also get club dates with real fans there just to see you.
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It has to be nice to get both - big festivals filled with those who might only know “Down” and stop to watch the set. After that, it’s off to Europe in October. We’re only out for about three-and-a-half weeks and then we have a bunch of festivals. SAMANTHA GONGOL: And this one is not sustained. JEREMY LLOYD: Our last tour was actually longer. PACIFIC: You guys tired yet? Seems like this is an extensive tour. PACIFIC recently spoke with the pair about it all from their adopted home base of Brooklyn.
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Since then, Lloyd and Gongol have spent their time on the road, catching up with the almost instant popularity that commercial brought them, and deciding where Marian Hill is headed next. It came in the form of a 2017 AirPods commercial that used the song “Down” from the band’s 2016 debut LP, “Act One.” Marian Hill released a pair of EPs, 2013’s “Play” and 2015’s “Sway,” before getting their first big break. With Lloyd handling production duties and Gongol on vocals, the duo started writing together and decided to call themselves Marian Hill, a mash-up of names from Broadway musical The Music Man’s two main characters. That is, until they came back home on college breaks - Lloyd from Yale and Gongol from NYU. Although both were already making music at the time, and HHS happens to run the oldest FM broadcast high school radio station in the U.S., the pair never collaborated. Jeremy Lloyd and Samantha Gongol first met at Haverford High School just outside of Philadelphia.