Overcoats

Music doesn’t always have to tell a specific story; songs can invoke moods as much as memories. But electro-folk duo Overcoats makes music that insists on taking the listener on a narrative journey. We’re lucky they do.

We’re colleagues, we’re sisters now. It’s an evolving and somewhat confusing relationship, but it’s all good nonetheless.

It’s only days after Halloween when Overcoats takes the stage at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater. But for band members JJ Mitchell and Hana Elion, they never needed the excuse of a holiday to don a costume. The duo is buoyant and rippling in their performance uniform of slouchy suits, moving in charming asynchronicity to a body of work whose content might belie their jubilant live presence.

Overcoats — a moniker inspired by a print by Austrian painter Egon Schiele — began as a tight-knit collaboration between the two, who met and formed the group at Wesleyan College. Over the course of two releases, 2015’s Overcoats EP and their 2017 debut album YOUNG, the band’s sound has grown and ripened into an expansive electro-folk amalgam that somehow still manages to sound lovingly worn in. Their music centers on intricately and oftentimes hair-raisingly precise harmonies. When I first listen through YOUNG, I’m reminded of the idea of Greek choruses of old, though Overcoats’ version of this kind of meta-narration covers decidedly modern subject matter.

Over the phone, Mitchell, who appears to be the more animated conversationalist of the two, divulges more of their narrative process, confirming, “We’re very conscious of the storytelling aspect of music.” Overcoats crafted YOUNG with an explicit journey in mind “about how we each relate to our families and others and who we wanna be in the world, and how we wanna be women in society.” It’s a coming of age tale that begins with the familiar archetype of “daddy’s girls” on the track “Father,” but which concludes with an understanding of their mothers’ devotions on the track named, well, “Mother.”

Part of the reason Mitchell and Elion landed on the name Overcoats was because of its androgynous coding. Their performance suits are another interpretation of the band name, as Mitchell explains, “The suits act as a protective layer in the same way that Overcoats as a name does. So we can sing this vulnerable music.”

Though Elion adds, “A lot of our music deals with relationships and being a woman in relationships,” both members insist that they’re not inherently conflating femininity with vulnerability. Some of the current Overcoats merch bears the slogan “WOMEN RULE,” to which Elion succinctly underlines, “Women do rule.” And in the act of performing these vulnerabilities for an audience that doesn’t know the particular details, Mitchell describes a metamorphosis, both of themselves and the experiences that have shaped the songs: “At the beginning of touring, the songs, all of them felt very poignant, because we had so recently experienced what we were singing about. It was actually kind of helpful to sing through them every night, and to use that time to think and process and heal.”

“More recently, we have the same exact emotions that we were feeling at the time, but they take on new meaning that, in a way, sometimes describes more recent and sometimes very different events. But the lyrics are vague enough that they can be applied to different [things]. It’s nice to use them as a tool to heal every night.”

It helps that despite the pain and uncertainty threaded through songs like “The Fog” and “Smaller Than My Mother,” Overcoats knows how to perform. Both Mitchell and Elion partake in other artistic mediums, namely visual art, and they clearly care about fashion as a way to make a visual and aesthetic statement. But they have a sense of play that comes alive when they’re on stage. When I ask them if they did anything for Halloween, Mitchell deadpans, “We played a show in celebration,” before adding laughingly, “We tried to wear costumes. We made it through like, two songs before we had to take our wigs off … Any time Hana and I looked at each other while singing, we would start hysterically laughing because of [them].”

During their Warfield set, they are positively ebullient, smiling and dancing along and, even during a cover of “Imagine,” seemingly beaming radiance into the audience, but also between each other. Their harmonies are so interwoven that I have no idea if/when they switch vocal lines, outside of watching the movement of their mouths. They play through two new songs toward the end of the set; one of them evokes Arcade Fire, and I marvel at how much range, sonically and stylistically, the two of them are able to evoke in their music.

Their camaraderie is easily the most important relationship in all of Overcoats. When I ask them how their friendship has changed through the years, Mitchell’s kneejerk response is, “We are still friends.” But she elaborates, “We’ve had to figure out new dynamics and hats to wear. We’re business owners together, of Overcoats LLC. We’re colleagues, we’re sisters now. It’s an evolving and somewhat confusing relationship, but it’s all good nonetheless.”

Both women look out for their most important performing tools: Their voices. So much of their singing has a tiny margin of error; Elion jokes, “We’ll write songs and be like, ‘We can’t sing this.’ We have to learn how to sing it.” But their technical ability too has evolved. For YOUNG, they enlisted outside producers like Arthur Ashin, who performs as Autre Ne Veut, and Elion reflects that Overcoats’ sound is likely to keep growing: “Our writing has pushed our vocal abilities a lot. When we listen to older recordings, our voices sound so different because we developed so much and have gotten more ambitious about writing.”

That ambition doesn’t come without a learning curve though. Mitchell shares, “There’ve been moments on tour previously where one of us has lost our voice, badly.” But now the duo knows “to split up the high notes so that we’re able to share the burden of the screaming cat parts.” “At this point, we know the songs well enough where we can just swap, which has been kind of fun. There’s a lot of room to accommodate each other.”

So much of YOUNG’s allure lies simply in the deceptively simple one-ness of Elion and Mitchell’s timbres. It is difficult, both during our interview and on the record, to pick them apart for sure. Perhaps it’s that certainty, obvious even through a recording, that they’re stronger together that makes even the saddest songs on the record sound hopeful. And when you watch them on stage, you get the feeling that no matter what comes their way, they’ll find a way to laugh and dance through it.

PHOTOGRAPHY JERMAINE ULINWA WORDS LILIAN MIN