Jigar Patel, life and arts reporter, sits down with “Two,” a duo of communication junior Graham Thompson and business sophomore Tara Schickedanz as they wait for their first single, “Kinda Love You,” to launch on iTunes on New Year’s Day.
The Battalion: What is the process like of finding a way to showcase your music on iTunes?
THOMPSON: I think it all starts where we met. The funny part about this particular song is that I had been sending her a lot of my songs when we were independent artists. But the interesting thing about the one she chose is that the day we met, we randomly sat next to each other in class. Right after the class, I had gone back to my dorm and wrote ‘Kinda Love You’ about Tara. And almost a year later, she picked the song I wrote about her. There is something special about being able to play a song that I wrote about her, with her. People keep asking us how we come up with our music and lines, and it all comes down to the fact that Tara inspires the music and I write it. And that’s kind of how iTunes happened.
The Battalion: What kind of music is it? And what was the creation process like?
THOMPSON: It is acoustic pop, or singer-songwriter, as iTunes classifies it. The title of the song is “Kinda Love You.”
SCHICKEDANZ: We met last fall semester, where we sat together in a geography class. Graham is a songwriter and I am not. He is a lyricist and he sent one of his songs to me just because I had been asking him to since I was curious. It ended up being my favorite song, of all those he has ever sent. I listened to the song and learned it. We happened to sing that song together once spontaneously and it turned out to be really nice. And so from there we decided to make it duet song. And everything just fell into place.
The Battalion: How are your feelings about the way things are right now with so much happening?
THOMPSON: The main thing about “two,” the duo — it’s not focused solely on the music. Music is an aspect of it but the main thing behind it is the relationship, what Tara and I have. The only thing the music is, is that it is a soundtrack for the relationship. A lot of couples have songs that mean a lot to them, it reminds them of a certain event or times in their lives. But we have had the ability to be able to actually create our soundtrack for our relationship.
Schickedanz: A lot of couples might have the problem of clearly expressing themselves, and Graham and I feel that music is our way of expressing ourselves to each other.
The Battalion: What kinds of plans do you have for your music? Where will it go and what will you do with it?
THOMPSON: It is simple. We met randomly sitting next to each other in class. I wrote a song about Tara and a year later played the song together and that kind of inspired this journey. We are looking forward to the future but we are also enjoying this moment, with the release and playing shows wherever we can.
SCHICKEDANZ: We definitely want to keep this going during college now that we have time to do it. We are not quite sure what the future holds but we definitely want to do more recordings from the songs that Graham writes.
The “two” will be performing around College Station area before the release and the URL for their iTunes release is https://itun.es/us/V9DH4.