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It’s 7:27 p.m. on a scathingly cold Thursday night in downtown Olyphant. Brand Rice, 27, briskly exits his car to join his younger brother, Kohner, 21, inside JL Studios to work on their album; his hands are stained with hair-dye from working a ten-hour shift at Style Tee, a Wilkes-Barre salon.
Inside, Kohner is working on an original track, “Summer Day,” a summer-anthem style pop song, before his brother arrives.
“I don’t know, are you sure that doesn’t sound too rapey? ‘Drop the top’ — I want it to sound like it’s the kind of song that would make you drop the convertible top, not tell someone to take their shirt off,” Kohner said, questioning his lyrics to his sound engineer Jay Preston. Preston is also a member of the locally renowned band, Esta Coda.
“No, you want that. It sounds good,” Preston assures. He and owner Joe Loftus have been engineering and producing this album with Kohn for nearly a year now.
Kohner continues to hone the verse until Brand enters the recording studio.
The brothers, from Dallas, both impeccably and stylishly dressed in head-to-toe black, are now ready to spend the next five hours propagating their take on an iconic pop song: “Don’t You Forget About Me” by Simple Minds, best known for being played during the opening and closing credits of “The Breakfast Club.”
This will be the only cover song on their 11-track album.
“A large part of the reason we chose to include a cover — and an older cover — is that we wanted to have something that not only younger people in our demographic could enjoy, but their parents could enjoy and relate to,” Kohner said.
No matter what you do in life, haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate; and few know that to be truer than this brotherly duo with their eyes on the prize of being the next big act in the pop music genre.
Kohn has yet to make noise in the local music scene, but has found indisputable success when you look at the numbers: their YouTube channel has more than a million views, thousands of fans follow them on Instagram and Twitter and they’re hundreds of hours deep into recording their first album. Still, naysayers —including friends —question the legitimacy of their following since they cease a strong connection with the local music scene.
“Originally, when we started, we understood we weren’t going to have too much of a local fan base because pop isn’t ultra-relevant around here. But, with that being said, we said if we are going to do this, and we are doing to do this right, we aren’t going to let that limit us,” Kohner said.
Brand added: “Locally, I feel like you have to be an ’80s cover band to be taken seriously.”
The brothers decided to jump the hurdles of working their way through the local music circuit by executing thoroughly thought-out and seemingly brilliant marketing strategies.
“We hired internet celebrities with a big following on social media to be in our music videos. For example, Andrea Russett, who has a social media following of more than, like, 5 million followers. Now when you type in Andrea Russett, which people do every day, we’ll come up, too,” Kohner said.
Russett, a well-known YouTuber, helped introduce more than 436,000 views to Kohn’s 2014 music video, “La La La.”
Kohn went the same route by hiring Chantel Jeffries as the female lead in their next music video, “Back to You.” Jeffries was the blond beauty by Justin Bieber’s side — his rumored girlfriend at the time — when he was arrested for drag racing a Lamborghini under the influence in Miami early last year. The video with Jeffries racked up nearly 750,000 views, introducing Kohn’s music to people all over the globe.
“We put thought into that. We thought, how are are we going to get views? How are we going to reach a lot of people? And that’s what we came up with. When people assumed we bought or paid for views, it kind of took the excitement away. But that’s how people are when someone is successful at something and they’re not. At the end of the day, they’re still real. Now we have people in other countries doing covers of our songs, and it’s the coolest thing in the world to have people who don’t even speak English to try and do covers of your songs,” Brand said.
Hiring internet celebrities and reserving studio time is expensive. Though Kohn abstained from disclosing the amount of money it cost to convince Russett and Jeffries to appear in their videos, they did reveal it would cost somewhere around $10,000 to record their album.
They aren’t scrimping and saving to afford studio time, either. They have the opportunity to work with high-profile investors, who the brothers chose not to disclose, who believe in their talent — something the brothers conceded to be both a blessing and a burden.
“We both have had to work on recording without investors, so we know how it is having to pay on our own,” Brand said.
“This last year, our investors have paid for us to record our music videos and to be able to be here as much as we are. Now we have the time to really focus on making each song we record sound the best it possibly can, because we don’t have to worry about keeping up with a limited amount of time,” Kohner said.
Their appreciation unquestioned, they know they have an obligation to their investors.
“We definitely feel pressure to make them proud at the same time,” Kohner said. “They’re trusting us to make them money when all is said and done, and that’s a lot of pressure, but it’s also an honor that they trust our talent in that way.”
One of those investors helped connect them with a spot performing on network television. Kohn was featured performing “La La La” on the Jan. 26 episode of NBC’s “The Celebrity Apprentice.”
“Johnny Damon was a contestant this season on the show and he is friends with one of the investors on our album. We got a call the day before the shoot saying they need an acoustic act to perform on an event they were having for a challenge in New York City and that’s all we knew. So we threw something together really quickly,” Brand said.
“Yeah, these challenges on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ are all last minute. A day after we got the call, we were on a yacht playing our original music for people like Ian Ziering, Brandi Glanville and Donald Trump, Jr.,” Kohner added.
As they watched their network television performance debut, Kohn couldn’t help but laugh at the irony that they almost never collaborated in the first place.
“I didn’t want to perform with Kohner at first. He was my annoying younger brother that was playing music that wasn’t my style,” said Brand, who originally performed in a band called Evolve 180 with his sister, Brittany.
Brand performed rock music and Kohner was into rap and pop music.
Though contrasting, the entire Rice clan shared an interest in music. They come from a family with six musical siblings: Brand, the oldest, sings and plays guitar, bass and piano; Brittany, 25, sings; Tyler, 23, plays bass, Kohner sings, raps and plays the guitar and piano; Arden, 17, plays piano; Larson, 15, plays the guitar and sings. Their father, Mark, plays the guitar and sings while their mother, Doreen, is the family’s No. 1 fan.
In 2012, Brand overheard Kohner messing around with a beat on his laptop. The brothers felt the beat would make for an epic song, and Kohn was born.
Three years, and a sufficiency of international success later, Kohn is looking to the future with their first full-length album and aspirations to change the game. That includes making a mark in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
“We actually have our first local show as Kohn, with a full band, coming up on April 25, at the Jazz Cafe in Wilkes-Barre. It’s a Friday night. We don’t know the exact time yet, but we have a date, and we’re excited for that, because it’s been hard for us to figure out where we belong as far as playing out. I think listening wise, everybody loves listening to some pop music, but the local scene doesn’t support indie pop acts,” Brand said.
“We don’t know who to open up for or what venues to really perform around here because local bars and music venues don’t have pop acts perform,” Kohner said. “I mean, if One Direction wasn’t famous and the were trying to play at places that require you to be 21 and older, would they be taken seriously?”
By the time Kohn makes their debut performance in NEPA, their album, “Pop Star,” will be nearly complete. As of now, six tracks are completed — three of which are now exclusively available on www.theweekender.com — and their album cover is ready to go.
The title “Pop Star” may sound pretentious, but it’s all in good spirit, Kohn said.
“The title teases the genre and is really a play on the way the industry views a pop star,” Brand said.
Their cover art features black bars covering their eyes, with the words “pop” and “star” replacing their eyes, showing how the industry views a pop star as a manufactured product as opposed to people — which is quite different from their views of a pop star.
“I think some of the greatest pop stars have been people that have changed things for the better; whether it be their style of music or their commitment to the music, like Freddie Mercury, Michael Jackson, Prince. Those people have changed things forever. Nothing going forward was ever the same. A true pop star has the ability to change music and people’s feelings toward music,” Brand said.
Kohn aspires to show the world their definition of a pop star and change music with the release of their album later this year.