Haim On Their Musical Upbringing And Yearning For The Stage

"It's almost past my bedtime! I'm the grandma of the family; I go to sleep around 9pm. We need our beauty rest!" chatters Alana Haim, the youngest of the family.

Sisters Alana (guitars and keys), Danielle (guitars, drums and vocals) and Este (bass) are all seated around the speakerphone tonight, sometimes speaking in perfect unison, sometimes calling out from a little farther away, but on the whole in a chipper, talkative mood as they divulge the details of their upcoming second effort, Something To Tell You. It's a slog to tell them apart sometimes so we get the ladies to identify themselves when they're speaking, but in their eagerness to speak, sometimes they forget and their voices blur into a collage of Californian accents. 

And it's their upbringing in Los Angeles, California - and one key component of it - that has subconsciously coloured their euphoric '90s jam of a single, Want You Back. Like the lovechild of Hanson's Mmbop and maybe a Spice Girls hit, the one-shot video for the track features the siblings cheesily sauntering, grooving and fingerclickin' their way through the LA suburb of Sherman Oaks. The band boil the '90s vibes down to one thing: the radio.

"I was born IN the '90s and I am a '91 baby. The '90s WERE my life," admits Alana. "I think we were just really inspired by the music that we grew up with. We're from LA, so all we do is listen to the radio. We have so many different radio stations - we have the pop stations, the oldies stations... [the '90s influence] must be subconscious at this point because we grew up in the area."

 "Back in the day our family car was this van and we didn't have a tape deck or CD player or an aux cable for that matter, way before aux cables existed in cars, so we could just listen to the radio," Este describes. "So there were a lot of singalongs in the car, like your typical road-trippin' family. That's just what you did. Instead of I Spy, it'd be Let's Listen To Donna Summer For A Minute."

Growing up in the back of said family van, the sisters travelled around LA to play a slew of charity shows with their mother and father in their family band, Rockinhaim. Their father Mordechai 'Moti' Haim was on drum duties while mother Donna took on vocals, the five playing charity shows, fairs and malls before the girls started a band of their own. Often they played charity gigs for people suffering diabetes - like Este, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at 14.

"I think we grew up thinking that everyone's family had a family band! So I just assumed - it was one of those things where my friends and I would be talking and they'd be like, 'oh yeah, I'm going to the mall on Saturday,' and I'd be like, 'well, when are you fitting in family band practice?'" Este describes in hilarious detail. "They'd be like, 'what... what do you mean family band practice?' And I'd be like, ''Cause my family band practices on Saturdays.' It was the most casual thing like, 'of course, of course I have family band practice on the weekends.' Then I quickly realised, I had a rude awakening, that no - just my family has a family band."

Led by eldest sister Este, middle child Danielle and "baby" Alana found their musical footing - and sisterly bond - going to gigs all around LA as soon as Este got her driver's licence at 16.

"Este was the oldest so we all kind of looked up to her music taste. Pretty much whatever Este liked, me and Danielle thought was really cool," Alana remembers. "So when Este was 16, we would go to venues and we'd have to go to venues that were all ages and there was like, two, but we would go every weekend and see live music and it was kind of a huge part of our growth as sisters."

One of the others calls from the back, "Oh my gosh, now you're taking me back!"

"I think the first concert we all went to was a Rilo Kiley concert, which is Jenny Lewis' band. I remember seeing Jenny and being like, 'whooooa!' Like, jaw to the ground, in awe of this powerhouse woman playing music," Alana details. This early introduction to Jenny Lewis would see Danielle start her musical career touring with Lewis and later Julian Casablancas as a guitarist.

When the sisters finally decided to try writing a song together, they pulled the guitar their mum had been given at 13 into the living room. "This is not a story where we wrote our first song and it was the best song ever and it went straight on our playlist," Alana warns. "It was a fucking awful song, it was not a good song.

"When I think about the songs that we wrote, they weren't good songs but we really just wanted to play live and see what it felt like just being a band. We played in LA for five years before we went to our first SXSW and in those five years we played every venue we could, any time; it didn't matter if it was a square of concrete, or a stage, or a petting zoo, or playing at 2pm. It didn't matter what show it was; if there was a stage, if there was an amp, we'd play."

Haim's DIY attitude was pervasive - they ended up demoing their debut, Days Are Gone, on GarageBand, much of it going onto the final product. Danielle says they "love the way that it sounds" on GarageBand. "Some [GarageBand demos are] on this [new] record too," she says.

In contrast to the glistening Want You Back, Right Now is a slow-burner, which the girls released as a live video in late April. Featuring dueling drum solos from Este and Alana, Danielle says, "We wanted a song to build ... keep adding layer to layer to layer, then have this big moment. The concept was to have this big moment in the second verse then come down. We just wanted to write a really dynamic song." Meanwhile, jazz-pop second single Little Of Your Love was created with help from Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij, a friend and producer on the album. "He was our biggest cheerleader," Danielle tells.

This July, Haim will return to Australia for Splendour In The Grass, the sisters name-checking The xx and Pond as bands they're stoked to see. "We went on tour with Cameron Avery for a while and he is so talented. That was honestly the party tour," Alana laughs. We joke that we're glad we made a good enough impression for the girls to return, and one of them chirps, "The best impression! The best, best impression!" Who said that? They yell, "All of us! United!"