Meet Lisa Harriton and Joshua Bartholomew of littleDNGR in Frogtown / Elysian Valley

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa Harriton and Joshua Bartholomew.

Lisa and Joshua, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Joshua: littleDNGR has been an idea occupying the “one day we have to do this!” portion of our future plans for a long time. We’ve been making music together since shortly after we met back in 2012. Our bands at the time played a ton of shows together and we collaborated on each other’s projects too. We were such big fans of each other’s music and always talked about starting a band together. While our career as a songwriting/production team started to grow, we kept the idea close enough to the surface that we would be writing songs for our hypothetical band in-between other projects.

Lisa: One fateful night while out at a random bar with friends, we stumbled across what would become our band name on a drink menu. We had a couple of potential names floating around, but nothing we felt 100% about. When we saw the words “Little Danger” on that drink menu, we immediately knew we had it. And now that the project had a name, it felt so much more real! It definitely escalated our desire to make it more of a focus. We mentioned to our management team at the time that we wanted to start exploring it and once again, fate intervened. It was about a week and a half out from SXSW and one of their other artists had to back out of the label’s showcase. They gave us the slot for what would be our first official show as littleDNGR. Fast forward to July of this year, we released our first single, “Brand New World” and we’re currently working on a music video for it!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Joshua: There’s so much trial and error involved in figuring out how to survive as a full-time creative. And early on, it’s mostly error and ramen noodles. We’ve definitely both had our share of classic music industry obstacles. From having to spend rent money on attorney fees to take on a major film studio to countless hours of work gone unpaid and just about every other clichéd struggling artist stereotype in between. On the flip side, we’ve had our share of lucky breaks too. I think it’s that delicate balance that keeps us going. And it always feels a little bit unfair to complain about the struggles when, at the end of the day, we’re so grateful to be doing what we love for a living.

Can you give our readers some background on your music?
Lisa: We’ve been making music together for a long time as a songwriting and production team under the moniker JoLi. In the TV world, we’ve written theme songs for major network shows (The Masked Singer, I Can See Your Voice) and in the film world, we were fortunate enough to have one of our songs nominated for both a Grammy and an Oscar (Everything Is Awesome from The LEGO Movie).

As the daughter of a film composer, I grew up watching my Dad marry music to picture so, I’m naturally inclined to hear music in a cinematic way. Joshua is truly my match in this regard. He has a gift for writing anthems and intuitively knows how to elevate my ideas to something even better than I could’ve imagined. littleDNGR is our musical lovechild, a cinematic love affair and the soundtrack to the movies in our heads. We feel so lucky to be partners in life, love and music.

Joshua: Seriously, I feel like I won some kind of musical lottery getting to be in a band with Lisa. I was always such a fan of her solo project and now littleDNGR really has become a natural extension of who we both are as artists. We both come from such different musical upbringings, but at the same time, we love pretty much all the same music. I think that’s what makes littleDNGR so special. Somewhere in the middle of all our individual musical quirks and similarities, we’ve found a magic combination of sounds and melodies that just makes sense to us. Like Lisa said, it truly is our musical lovechild and we are beyond excited to keep creating this soundtrack.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
Lisa: My favorite childhood memories were anytime my family would make music together. My Mom was a studio singer and would sing on movie soundtracks, at the Oscars, with John Williams, etc. She’s a total badass. She was also a voice teacher and had an insane ear, perfect pitch and was a beast of a musician. She could play anything she heard on the piano. Anything. And she could sightread anything too. She created songbooks of her special Christmas music arrangements and numbered each piece of music. When the family got together at Christmas, everyone was given a songbook to sightread from. My Mom would lead us in the singing and take our requests. “Number 38! Christmastime is Here!!” She would turn the page to number 38 and off we would go. Everyone had a part to sing. I was always the Alto with my Grandma (My Mom’s Mom) who used to sing with Ralph Carmichael. Grandpa would always sing bass. Harmonizing together was such a gift and I don’t think I really realized at the time how special it was.

Joshua: If I had to pick one, I think it would be the first time I sat behind a drum set. I grew up in Canada and like all good Canadians, I grew up playing hockey. Every winter, our neighbor at the end of the street would flood the empty lot beside his house to make an outdoor rink for his kids and all the other kids in the neighborhood to skate on. One day, after what I’m sure was hours of skating, I went inside to take my skates off and noticed there was a kit setup. I should mention that I was already very fascinated with drums as a result of a family Christmas trip to Disney World where six years old me got picked to keep time on the hi-hats during the brass band’s rendition of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.” That’s a true story. Anyhow, I asked if I could try playing them and the neighbor was so nice to indulge me. I’m sure it sounded like a bag of rocks being dumped on a tin roof, but I felt like the coolest kid alive! I immediately went home and asked my Mom if I could get a drum set. The drums ended up being the first instrument I got serious about and also promptly ended my aspirations of being a goalie in the NHL. They were a gateway drug of sorts, eventually leading me down the perilous path of teaching myself how to play guitar, bass, piano and basically any instrument I could get my hands on.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.littledngr.com
• Instagram: @littledngr
• Facebook: @littledngr
• Twitter: @littledngr

Image Credit:
Langston Carter, Kristin Burns, Fernando Darin, Kristin Burns

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