Biography MonaLisa

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Our life career ...

Since we're only 17 years old and have just begun our musical career we don't have a 100-page anthology yet but here we're going to give an overview of our lives so far.

Our Childhood
We were both born in Austria, Vienna, on the 16th June 1994. In Austria you speak German so that is our first language. We grew up a little outside of Vienna where we're still living. We had a beautiful childhood and a caring family.

When we were younger our Dad was producing a lot of (mainly Austrian) bands and singers in his studio and we always have been around those people and their music. We remember enjoying pressing all those colorful buttons on the mixer and we got to see all kinds of instruments.

For a long time now the studio (that our Dad built himself by the way) is not public anymore and we only use it to make our own music. When we were little we recorded birthday tracks for relatives or sang some children songs we made up right on the spot. We're extremely lucky to have our own professional studio at home so we can work at any time night or day and don't have to pay for studio time. For some years we're already producing our CDs and albums here.

Music Lessons and first Shows
We went to Kindergarden and Primary School as usual. Later we attended a high school in Vienna where we began to take music lessons and had our first small school performances. In 2004 Lisa started playing the guitar and Mona the drums but about a year later we both did both anyways.

Our American guitar teacher John Parschauer and we in action.

First it was more of a hobby but we soon found out that we would really like to do music on a more professional level. We slowly got better at singing and on our instruments. Our parents fully supported us and we were lucky to have had some great teachers.

Our first live concert (besides some little school gigs) was in 2007 when we covered 24 of our favorite songs together with our parents (who learned to play the bass and sax for just that purpose) and played in front of about 140 people. So originally we started off as a family band.

The Band and Cover Songs
That was when it got going. We made our first CD (and videos) with those songs, created our own website and began to put our music and videos on pages like Youtube and Myspace where we slowly built up a nice fan base. MonaLisa Twins started to exist as a band.

CD "California Dreaming"

Live-CD

From then on we have been working on increasing our musical skills and did some more recordings of cover songs over the years. In 2007 and 2008 we have spent our holidays in California where we played a few small live shows and worked on a project which we called "California Dreaming". We covered three of the most popular California related songs, recorded them at home and filmed the music videos during our trip to Los Angeles and San Francisco. At the beginning of 2009 we released them on our second album (EP).

Music as a profession
During that time we also started to define where we want to go with our music. We've always loved the 60ies and got influenced a lot by bands and artists like the Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel, The Who, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, The Everly Brothers and Elvis, just to name a few. We knew that music was our greatest passion and with the background, know-how and support of our parents we could relatively safely and realistically decide to become singer/songwriters and earn a living with it.

MonaLisa live from Ayers Rock, Australia

To Ayers Rock Videos

We started to write some original songs which first didn't go extremely well. To enhance our English skills in order to get better at writing lyrics and to get set up for the music business we went on a six months student exchange to Adelaide, Australia in the beginning of 2009. We got to know quite a different "live style" there and improved our English to a point where we didn't just "translate" our German thoughts to have a conversation but rather thought and acted "English".

To Liverpool Videos

When we came back from Australia in the middle of 2009 we dropped out of school (after Year 9) so we could concentrate more on our musical career. In fall 2009 we went for a quick trip to Liverpool for the "Beatles Festival". We visited all the interesting and relevant places that had to do with the lives and the music of the "Fab Four", our greatest heroes regarding music. Like with the "Californian Dreaming" clips we had recorded some Beatles songs back home in the studio and then shot the videos for them in Liverpool.

A career with own music
Since then we have been writing and recording own songs which will be released on an album later this year (2011). In the meantime we've slowly increased our fan base as we are still doing various cover songs and videos from time to time to stay in contact with our fans and to keep people up-to date on our musical development. We've also learned a lot about composition, arrangement, recording, video cutting and the use of various hard- and software.

Together with our parents we write, record and merchandize all the music by ourselves, which is quite a lot of work but this way we can stay independent from record deals and labels which lets us do what we want and what we think is right. Plus working together as a team towards the same goal is lots of fun and very efficient.

We've gained quite a lot of stage experience throughout the last years, had some amazing musical adventures and got to meet a lot of great people at many different places.

We just keep going with what we do: writing and recording songs and planning live gigs for the future.

It has been awesome so far and we thank everyone for their support and love! The journey continues!

Mona & Lisa