EXCLUSIVE: Jack & Jack Talk Meeting, New Music, Vine and More
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If you've been on any social media account in the last six months, chances are you're familiar with these two stars. With millions of followers on Vine, Twitter and more, Jack Gilinsky and Jack Johnson (a.k.a Jack & Jack) are charting their way to a successful career in the music industry and beyond. Only in their late teens, Jack & Jack finished off 2014 big, attending the American Music Awards and performing for a sold out crowd at an arena in their home town of Omaha, Nebraska.
Jack & Jack called into Roman's Rap-Up to discuss their HUGE plans for 2015, along with revealing to us something that none of their fans know about them and more. Read/listen to the interview below:
Roman's Rap-Up: You had an absolutely insane 2014, between going to the iHeartRadio Music Festival, American Music Awards, having a sold out show in your home town, not to mention having millions of followers on every social media account. What’s all this huge success been like?
Jack J: 2014 was just unexplainable, it was definitely the best year of my life so far.
Jack G: It was totally unexpected. It just started on an app called “Vine” and we were making funny videos to show our friends and what not, and it just kind of caught on... we never expected any of this. We’re just really grateful for all of this.
Roman's Rap-Up: How did you guys get started making Vines?
Jack J: It was just out of boredom one summer day in Summer 2013. It was the [time] between our Junior and Senior year in High School. We were just totally bored and doing the same old stuff every day. We’re from Omaha, Nebraska so there aren't a lot of extracurricular things to do necessarily during the summertime for kids. It was a way for us to express our humor and you know, a few people in our city started laughing at our videos. It just started spreading. We didn’t expect it to be what it was, we weren’t trying to necessarily become “Vine Famous” when we started, but, I mean that ended up happening which is pretty cool. We couldn't be more grateful for all the support we’ve gotten from everybody.
Roman's Rap-Up: How did you guys meet? Have you always known each other?
Jack J: Yeah we’ve known each other since before the summer before Kindergarten.
Jack G: I was 4 and Jack J was 5 and I mean immediately when you meet someone with your same name and your 4 and 5 years old, that’s a reason right there to become best friends. That’s exactly what happened and we actually happened to be wearing the same shirt with different colors on and it just happened so quick. I don’t know, it’s just amazing to see us being 4 and 5 and being best friends over having the same name and now nothing has changed really.
Roman's Rap-Up: How did you both get into music?
Jack G: We’ve always been into music, listening to every genre, finding out sounds we liked best, and you know we like every genre and stuff, but I would say Jack J influenced me in the music I listen to today because he is always on the internet, you know searching for new stuff, looking for what’s hot, who’s not really been heard of yet and he always shows me all these things that I remember back in 4th grade when we originally had this idea to start making music together and he showed me this rap that he wrote and he's like, “Man I want you to sing the chorus,” and I was like “what’s a chorus?” and he was like “It’s the thing that comes after every verse and it gets repeated after every verse." You know the song “Sexy Can I” by Ray J, well we made a parody of that song.
Jack J: So we’ve always been writing music, I mean it used to be more for like comedic purposes because that’s all we really knew as kids, being funny and goofy as 4th and 5th graders so I mean thats when we started writing song parodies to Top 40 songs at the time and putting them up on Youtube. You know, that was all fun, but when we started expanding this fan base we were like, “Why not share the music we know we can make with the world?” Now we have people to market to. We’ve always been really musical people. I mean, getting a following on Vine just gave us an opportunity to share it with the world.