Haim have performed on The Tonight Show before. But Alana, Este and Danielle have never taken a trip to the couch to chat with host Jimmy Fallon, so on Tuesday night (June 17) the sibling trio made the most of their maiden voyage by doing all the things.
In addition to performing their single “Down to Be Wrong” with a full band from their forthcoming album I Quit (June 20), the trio popped in for the episode’s cold open to teach Fallon how to speak in perfect Haim-style harmony. Hanging out in their green room, the sisters answered everything Fallon said in a perfectly calibrated single voice. “I know you sing like this, but do you actually talk like this?” Fallon asked nervously.
“Yeah, we do Jimmy,” they said in a sing-song, robotic fashion. “It’s kind of like a special thing we do, Jimmy.” They invited Fallon to join them and when the beat kicked in they did a call-and-response until Este stopped the song to ask, for real, if there were any more snacks available.
A short time later they were on the couch, describing to Fallon how the moody cover of their album was shot by longtime collaborator and friend director Paul Thomas Anderson, with Este lamenting how her sisters are both in perfect focus, while she is a blurry figure in the foreground. “We’re lucky enough that he’s done 10 of our music videos, he did [the cover] of our last record, Women in Music, Part III,” she said.
What Fallon really wanted to know, though, was what inspired the title of their fourth album. Este explained that as children they were obsessed with the 1996 Tom Hanks musical comedy That Thing You Do!, the Oscar-winning actor’s writing and directorial debut and homage to the fictional Beatles-wannabe one-hit wonder band the Oneders.
“We watched it as kids like every weekend on VH1,” she said as the trio flawlessly broke into an impromptu round of the movie’s signature earworm title track. “So we loved that movie and there’s this pivotal moment in the movie at the end of the movie the lead singer is like, ‘Okay we have to do our second record,” and he wanted to do this really, like brooding, emotional song,” Este explained.
“And he comes up to the mic and he’s basically like, ‘Okay, I’m ready to record.’ And then Tom Hanks, the manager, is like, ‘Listen Jimmy, I want something peppy, something snappy.’ And then Jimmy goes [clears throat], ‘I quit, I quit, I quit,’” she sang as her sisters snapped along. So, she said, whenever they would do mic checks they would do so with a round of “I quit, I quit.” They did so during sessions for their fourth album as well, and after using the phrase as a placeholder to organize their musical files they decided to just keep it as the title for the album about breakups and romantic spin-outs.
“It stuck and we also realized that a lot of our songs are kind of about, like, quitting,” Este said. “Quitting the things that aren’t good for us anymore.” For the record, they are not quitting music. In fact, they proved how much they’re not quitting by revealing that as kids they were also constantly drumming on each other and everything in sight.
So when Fallon gave them a series of random objects, Este snagged a trash can for Danielle to bang on and some paper for Alana to tear while the host shook a box of Altoids and she tapped on a coffee mug for an impromptu, stripped-down version of their I Quit single “Relationships.”
Check out Haim on The Tonight Show below.
