Category: Photoshoots

Check out Aly & AJ’s feature for Imagista. Read the interview below and check out gorgeous pictures from the photoshoot.

It is one thing to be touring the globe; it is another thing to be doing it with your best friend and sister. Aly and AJ have found success both on screen as individuals and on stage as a music duo. Their kind and lovable disposition combined with their raw and undeniable talent is what makes these sisters so special. We had the chance to catch up with them and learn a little more about what pushes them as well as what makes them such positive role models.

Imagista: Where did u guys grow up?

AJ: We grew up in Southern California, we were born and raised in LA for most of our lives. We did spend a chunk of our childhood in Seattle Washington for seven years as kids. My family wanted to be closer to the rest of our family but due to our fathers business, which was located in LA, we ended up back in California.

Imagista: Do you feel like growing up in LA had an impact on your choice of career?

Aly: It was our love for entertaining and performing together in church and school that really sparked that fire in us. It wasn’t because we lived in LA. We started out pretty young. We were about six and eight years old when we started taking acting classes.

Imagista: Who is older?
Aly: Me, I am two years older.

Imagista: Did you start performing at the same time?
Aly & AJ: Yeah!
AJ: I think Aly being the older sister really inspired me because as the younger sister I would want to do what she was doing. It became a clear passion for both of us at a young age and we knew this is what we wanted to do but we didn’t know we would be doing it as a profession.

Imagista: You guys have had so much success as together and also individually, how does that work? How do you balance your individual careers and your duo?

Aly: It can be. A lot of the time we need to talk about it together and decide what we can do and what we can’t do. For us, we manage it, because we are really close and we feel like we could make those tough decisions together. When Aj is filming a TV show I am at the mercy of her when it comes to music but that’s okay because I know that and we work around it. Continue reading Aly & AJ: Imagista Feature – Photoshoot + Interview

Check out Aly & AJ’s new interview and photoshoot with Interview Magazine below!

How Aly & AJ avoided the child star curse and invented a new sound
Aly and AJ Michalka (born Alyson and Amanda Michalka), a.k.a. the Y2K teen idols Aly & AJ, have journeyed from L.A. for their first New York fashion week. Aly, in particular, is a style maniac, although both arrived for this photo shoot in stunning outfits; AJ wore black patent leather pants that squeak when she walks. Despite busy days in press junkets and playing shows (they recently performed for Ferragamo at a party launching the brand’s new scent), the sisters seemed chipper, posing like professionals.

The occasion for their trip? After ten years spent focusing on acting projects—Aly stars on Veronica Mars-creator Rob Thomas’s iZombie, AJ on hit family sitcom The Goldbergs—the sisters Michalka have released an EP, appropriately titled Ten Years. The four-song EP, led by single “Take Me,” is a floaty wisp of confectionary dream-pop. The siblings call their music “nostalgic,” but it also smacks of the now, with an ’80s synth style re-popularized by producers like Dev Hynes and Ariel Rechtshaid.

“To me it feels a little bit like a soundtrack to life, and I think that’s the most interesting part about the production,” says AJ. “I tend to lean towards songs that almost feel like they’re the score to a film, and I feel like this record really does that.”

In adulthood, the Michalkas have much more control over their work (the production of Ten Years was self-funded). Though they have always written their own songs, these are the tracks with which outside hands have interfered the least. “I think the most important thing is that we’ve really grown from being these 16- and 14-year-old songwriters that were writing about experiences that we [hadn’t had yet], like having a boyfriend or losing someone important in your life,” says Aly. “We were just writing those assuming what you would feel like if that happened to you.” Continue reading Interview Magazine