Continued from page 22
of Us, in the summer of 2006. The record
would combine the group's penchant for
dreamy romanticism with their predilection for pop hooks on songs like "Black
Poison Blood" and "The Collapse."
After years of heavy touring, Kill
Hannah's official full length swan song
would come in 2009's Wake Up The Sleepers.
The band found a heightened maturity in
its songwriting, evident on the especially
heartfelt "Snowblinded" and the notably
somber "Why I Have My Grandma's Sad
Eyes." Not to go quietly into the night,
however, the band just released its one
final song, the full-on Christmas-infused
"This Is Our December" – available exclusively on Amazon Music. It's a soaring,
sentimental send off that sounds like
Christmas in Chicago, all jingle bells and
imagery about snow. Meaning it may be
the most Kill Hannah thing the group has
ever produced.
scale up when we signed – we stepped to
the plate as a real seasoned band in al
aspects. We knew ourselves and we knew
our fans, because everything had been DIY
we'd been so successful. Every fan was
earned one by one. We were experts on
ourselves. We knew ourselves better than
anyone in an office in LA or New York pos
sibly could. That thread carried. That was a
through line of our entire career."
With the clock ticking before the band's
final shows, Corner and Devine are under
standably reflective on what the journey
has meant. "I hope that our songs have
been the soundtrack to some really cine
matic moments in people's lives," Devine
expresses. "I hope we're associated with
transformative periods in people's lives.
want the whole trajectory of the thing
from the very germ of it until now. I wan
it to be a thing of beauty. I want the story o
what we've done to be a rich, beautiful
funny, twisted tale. I feel proud when
think that we have mattered and given a
sense of...not just to think that maybe
someone out there is making out to our
song or fucking to our song or driving
Kill Hannah
circa 2009
For all the changes to the band's music
and lineup, one constant has been their
DIY approach to their entire career, from
marketing and promotion to merch and
distribution. "We always did everything
ourselves,"Corner confirms. "Mat always
designed all the CD covers and the artwork and everything, and I was always
running the merch store and a lot of the
business and accounting and all that kind
of stuff behind the band. When the collapse happened for the music industry,
and really the entire country, in 2008, a lot
of bands didn't know how to be self-sufficient. For us, it was like business as usual."
"It was born of a necessity," Devine
affirms of the group's overall DIY model.
"It came from art school, I guess. I got just
as geeked about designing our first CD
and coming up with the logos and T-shirt
designs and video concepts as I did making the music. It felt like a whole. DIY is
right. You have no choice. It's not sexy. It's
not sexy to go to Kinkos for eight hours
and print out fliers that ninety-nine percent of the people you give it to are just
gonna scowl and throw it on the garbage.
It's not sexy to walk into a shop and ask the
owner if it's okay if you can put a stack of
tickets on the counter and make your own
T-shirts with some janky screen printer
that you stole from the art department in
college."
"Every step along the way we became
de facto experts in promotion, in marketing, in design – you really had no choice
but to go DIY," the frontman continues.
"It's cool, because that's the same ten thousand hours principle that applies when
you get that shot, when we had a chance to
28 illinoisentertainer.com december 2015
recklessly to one of our songs, which is
awesome, but maybe beyond that we've
given people also a sense of community
We built a world around the band. I love
thinking about how many people have
been a part of that world."
For Corne