View From the Top

Onstage at a Tulsa, Okla., nightclub in March, hometown singer Taylor Hanson shimmies to the beat of a dozen catchy rave-ups. Dressed in toothpick jeans, horizontal stripes and skinny ties, he and his cohorts—known collectively as Tinted Windows—plow through a cover of the Buzzcocks's "I Don't Mind" before ending their first-ever gig with a jangly original called "The Dirt." Save for the squeals of a few eager young ladies in the crowd, the performance contains none of the earnest balladeering and jammy grooves the 26-year-old Hanson and his brothers proffer in their own concerts. For this moment, at least, Taylor Hanson is a different kind of rock star. And with guitarist James Iha (41, formerly of Smashing Pumpkins), bassist Adam Schlesinger (also 41, from Fountains of Wayne) and Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos (57) as his new bandmates, it's no wonder.

If this assemblage of would-be music royalty seems a bit skewed, the members of Tinted Windows are in on the joke: just two weeks before their Oklahoma show and subsequent appearances at SXSW in Austin, the band leaked its first single, "Kind of a Girl," to YouTube in the form of a promo spot from a fictional early-1980s TV show, “Rock After Dark." In the clip, Taylor Hanson manhandles his mike in a manner not unlike Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, while transitioning between a soul-tinged rasp and a well-controlled falsetto with all the effortlessness of an early-1960s matinee idol. Iha and Schlesinger chime in on the "whoah-whoahs," and an image of Carlos behind his drum kit flashes across the screen. It's a stylized stunt that works on more levels than one: now introducing pop-rock thrills for teens, their moms and their grandpas! From the cheekily ridiculous name to the quartet's facetious debates about whether to call themselves a "supergoup," a "megagroup" or an "ultragroup," Tinted Windows will no doubt make some music fans ask the question, is this for real? But anyone familiar with the back catalogs of the band's members knows that the collaboration makes good sense—and makes for good fun.

 

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It all started when Schlesinger and Hanson met in the mid-'90s. Schlesinger was approaching 30; Hanson was 14. "Adam and I met in 1996 when we were both making our first records," Hanson says. "Over the years, we would just keep in touch and hang out periodically. We always talked about doing something together, and eventually the stars just aligned."

Schlesinger and Iha had already worked together on several projects, including coproducing a 2006 album for the band America, and Iha played guitar on Fountains of Wayne's 2007 song "Seatbacks and Traytables." When Schlesinger joined Hanson and his brothers at a songwriting retreat in Oklahoma, the concept for Tinted Windows was born. Together, Hanson, Schlesinger and Iha approached Bun E. Carlos, who, to their surprise, said yes.

"We were all fans of each other's records," Hanson says. "There are so many kinships between the music we've all done, and so few degrees of separation: Smashing Pumpkins had played with Cheap Trick, members of Cheap Trick had come to Hanson concerts; we'd all connected. It really came back to the idea of something we could have a good time with that turns heads in terms of what it actually is, musically."