By Lyndsey Parker, Yahoo Music | “This is the whole journey. If you’ve ever wondered what you were missing, because you didn’t see past ‘Milli Vanilla,’ you need to listen to this.” So speaks Gunnar Nelson, sitting with his twin brother and Nelson bandmate Matthew Nelson, as they discuss their cheekily titled new best-of compilation, Greatest Hits (And Near Misses). The blond brothers — grandsons of ‘50s sitcom pioneers Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and sons of teen idol-turned-Americana troubadour Ricky Nelson — have a vast, 30-plus-year catalog that spans pop, folk, country, and even experimental hard rock. But they self-deprecatingly acknowledge that most casual listeners will best know them from their smash debut album, 1990’s After the Rain.
Gunnar and Matthew became massive stars in the early ‘90s due to support from MTV, during a pre-grunge era when bands like Motley Crue, Poison, and Ratt still ruled the airwaves. But with harmony-laden powerpop sound, they never really fit in with that “hair-metal” scene — other than the fact that they had, well, really amazing hair.
“Everybody put us in this category of the hair-metal thing. But the fact was, none of those bands liked us. None of those bands would take us on tour,” notes Matthew. “Gunnar and I kind of came up in the whole Laurel Canyon sound era in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. So, you heard that music… it was more folky, almost.”
“I think what you got with Nelson, with the sound that eventually became Nelson, was the influences from our dad’s Stone Canyon Band being around,” says Gunnar. “Growing up with our dad, putting the Stone Canyon Band together in our house, you had people like everyone from Dylan to Linda Ronstadt to the Byrds and Jackson Browne stopping by the house all the time.”
However, Gunnar adds, “I don’t blame anybody back in the day [for stereotyping us], because our image was designed to promote a response. It wasn’t a record company fabrication. Everything that was done, Matthew and I did. We wrote all the songs, produced all the records, put the look together.”
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“Boy, you know, we could do an entire interview on that. Narcissism is just this rabbit hole we could go down forever,” sighs Gunnar. “But it’s taken us kind of a lifetime to kind of wrap our brains around the fact that…”
“…that it wasn’t us, and you can’t cure it,” Matthew interjects.
“It’s like our dad said in his song ‘Garden Party,’ you can’t please everyone. So you gotta please yourself,” Gunnar continues. “And I think there are a lot of kids who spend way too much time trying to get that approval that they’ll never get. But it’s not their fault. And it’s not their problem. It’s just the person they’re trying to get approval from is broken.”
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Read the whole story here:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/nelson-open-up-about-their-fraught-family-history-fathers-plane-crash-and-why-they-were-never-just-milli-vanilla-201207992.html
Photo: Matthew & Gunnar Nelson
https://www.facebook.com/NELSONtheband/photos
Nelson Open Up About Their Fraught Family History, Their Father’s Plane Crash, and more…
