Artist Profile: Million Dollar Weekend
Million Dollar Weekend, the infectious pop rock duo of Joe Mason and Flynn Hase Spence, formed through pure circumstance. However, as their collaboration has come into fuller form, their creative affinities have aligned in a way that few, if any, can ever achieve.
Mason, an electronic music producer, and Spence, a guitarist and composer of film scores, originally met in LA, a place that Mason “didn’t really like” at the time.
“I didn't really like L.A. that much at the time. I probably like it more now, but at the time I did not like it. At least in the circles I was in, there wasn’t much interest in working on holistic, conceptual albums.”
Nevertheless, Mason needed a session guitarist for a project he was working on, and Spence happened to be around the corner. He quickly realized that Spence was immensely talented, and they made tentative plans to work together again in the future.
However, their work together did not truly begin until the COVID-19 Pandemic, when both Mason and Spence were stuck in London. While Spence was working at Abbey Road, they began recording demos and doing sessions together, and they quickly realized that they had something tenable on their hands. According to Mason, their output so quickly reached a polished level that they knew their work together could be special.
“And then we were like, oh, f*ck it. Let's just start a band. Because consistently every demo we were doing was somewhat releasable somewhere.”
Their three singles released on streaming, “Rickshaw”, “McCartney”, “Alarm” are both abundantly more than “somewhat releasable”. “McCartney”, which currently has over 170,000 streams on Spotify, is a certified ear worm, incorporating irresistible layers of vocal harmonies and pop-like guitar loops.
I spoke to Mason and Spence as they met up at a rented beach house in Australia to begin work on their first full-fledged project. Most of their work, to this point, has been conducted online. While this is a common occurrence for Mason, who works over Zoom with a multitude of artists, Spence’s comfort zone lies more in working personally, feeling out the vibe of a room and contributing through his innate sense of what fits musically.
Spence says that their recent output has an especially distinctive feel to it, as they are pursuing each song individually with an eye towards deeply polished production and feeling.
“It feels unique, this project,” said Spence, “It's because we're coming at it from a recorded standpoint, not a performative standpoint.”
By a “recorded standpoint”, Spence means that each song is at its fullest as a result of the duo’s production skills. As they pursue a more rock-infused sound, they are ultimately chasing what sounds most “weird” or “fun” to them, focusing on the final product rather than a stripped-down, live version.
Ultimately, this is the manner through which the duo’s talents come across most clearly: their complex and impressive skills of elevating a song from its first manifestations.
In consideration of the talent displayed by their first trio of singles, Spence and Mason’s continued work together should be ample cause for excitement.
