Category: News

Read the news related to the musical life and career of the MonaLisa Twins. Be part of their journey as they’re writing and recording songs, releasing new albums, filming music videos, playing live shows, going on tour, working with other musicians, meeting new people appearing on radio and TV or sharing their 2 cents on whatever they think their fans and friends would be interested in.

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You Really Got Me – New Video

Greetings!

Today we crank up the volume to 11 and upload a cover from our Cavern Club days!

You Really Got Me by the Kinks, who also played at the Cavern Club back in 1964, only months before they had their big breakthrough with this song.

It’s such a beautifully rough, messy early British Rock ‘n’ Roll staple. The kind of song that is the most fun to play in crowded, intimate, small places like the Cavern Club. We think it shows 😉 …

Click the image above to watch the video!

First sneak-peek of new original music

In other news, our new original album is coming along nicely.

So nicely, that we have just released the first song off it over at the MLT Club as a sneak peek to the album!

It’s available in full there and we will continue to pre-release original content in the MLT Club while the album production is in progress.

We have been going back and forth on song selection and the overall direction of the album quite a lot this past year but finally feel that everything is lining up and we are working in overdrive!

Some tunes we wrote prior to 2020 didn’t feel like they belonged there anymore, new ideas were born and some topics and emotions became so much more important and dearer to us.

If you want to stay closer connected to the creation and creative progress of original album #3 (it’s about time we pick a name) then we warmly invite you to become an MLT Club member and join the community there!

Member or not – you’ll see us again with a new YouTube release very soon!

Our 27th birthday is coming up on June 16 and we like to treat ourselves with a new channel upload 😉

Until then, take care, take risks and most of all …

Stay groovy!

Mona & Lisa

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Both Sides Now – New Video

Moons and Junes and Ferris Wheels …

We caught the Joni Mitchell bug a few years ago, and her music has been part of our lives’ soundtrack ever since.

When it came to these stripped back “Duo Session” recordings that we do regularly over at the MLT Club we knew we wanted to try some of her material for one of them. It’s hard not to fall in love with this woman, her music and fearless, poetic, honest song-writing. The song and its words speak for themselves ♥

It is also the first time we recorded something with an open guitar tuning, one of Joni’s trademark sounds.

We hope we did the song justice and that you’ll enjoy this little clip, filmed in our Duo Session corner. It is available on our album “The Duo Sessions” on CD or as a download.

Stay groovy,
Mona & Lisa

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Sunshine Superman – New Video

Cause I can make like a turtle …

Donovan’s music and lyrics to us are the perfect combination of weird and wonderful.

“Sunshine Superman” has been part of our set list ever since our “Austria” days, when we were just starting out as a band and performing in venues around Vienna. The song has evolved quite a lot for us over the years and is one of those songs that never sounds the same twice.

Today we are sharing with you the recording of our final show at the Cavern Club in Liverpool a few years ago. It is available on our album “Live at the Cavern Club” but so far, the video version has only been available to MLT Club members. We are excited that it is now on our official YouTube channel as well!

Luckily, Lisa had her slide with her that day. She’d often use a blues harp, glass or even the backside of her capo as a makeshift slide when she had left her proper ones at home. It still worked ????

As always, we have the great Callum Williams and Charlie Skeggs on bass and drums.

♥

Mona & Lisa

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Nowhere Man – New Video

Nowhere Man, please listen …

We have a special video to share with you today. It’s amongst the most requested Beatles covers we’ve gotten over the years.

We are keeping up the tradition of posting a video in honour of our dear friend Steve, whose birthday would be today. We sadly lost a very special friend and our greatest supporter at that time, in October 2019, right before the madness set in. He loved the Beatles and intricate harmonies as much as we do, and we recorded this song for him.

So this is for you, Steve, and everyone who has been feeling a little lost lately.

We’ve been mumbling the words to Nowhere Man only too often while reading the news these past 12 months …

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Close To You – New Video

Close To You (Original) – Duo Session

As we’re writing this, thick snowflakes are drifting by our window. That doesn’t happen a lot here in England and it reminds us of the winters at home in Austria. Everything is quiet and making us feel a little melancholic. It kind of fits with the song we are sharing with you today, so we are embracing the sentimental feelings as we’re sipping on our hot cup of tea and typing up this Newsletter (well, it’s me Mona typing right now while Lisa is preparing the Social Media posts that will go out later :-)).

How are you all feeling? How has the start of 2021 been for you? Are you happy and doing alright?
These past few weeks we have been busy preparing for some new Duo Session videos. As you might know, they are a series of stripped-back videos that we are releasing regularly over at the MLT Club.
We also upload them on YouTube sometimes, and today we want to share with you a Duo Session of our original “Close To You”.
It is a song we initially released on our album ORANGE as a full studio production, but this more “minimal” version with just the two of us is part of our first “The Duo Sessions” compilation album (that you can find here).


Get “The Duo Sessions” Album

We will start posting the first new exclusive Duo Sessions of the year over at the MLT Club next month, and of course we warmly invite you to stop by there if you are able to do so and support our creative endeavours.

We are about to do a big relaunch of the MLT Club with a lot of upgraded features but we will let you know about that in more detail soon! The weekly videos there will remain a constant, and last Friday we just posted a brand new 20-minute Q&A video all about “Live Performing”. We talk about our future plans, our biggest mess ups and the time we performed with Rod Stewart in the audience. 😉

On the coming Friday we will be drawing the winners of a give-away for a signed drum head and t-shirt (there is still time to enter)! 

We hope you’re having a lovely Sunday and send big virtual hugs to you all,

Mona & Lisa

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My Generation – New Video

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

We’re definitely not alone when we say that we cannot wait for this year to be over. While we are very aware that bad things can always get worse, we are still hopeful and optimistic for what the next year will hold in store for us all.

We thought it appropriate to send you over to the new year with some good ole’ music. Here is us performing “My Generation” by one of our favourites, The Who. It was recorded at the Cavern Club in Liverpool and is available on your new album Live at the Cavern Club that came out only a few weeks ago.

We cannot wait to one day be back on a sweaty stage with people focusing on the music and atmosphere, not the space that is or isn’t between them. But until then, we will keep sharing our favourite moments from being on stage (a lot more videos can be found in the MLT Club), more music and videos, new covers and original songs and a whole lot more that we have planned for 2021!

So bring it on, we’ll see you on the flip side!

Grab a 2021 Wall Calendar!

We have a limited number of wall calendars for 2021 available at our webstore!

It contains 12 pictures as well as little notes of important MLT related days – like when our albums were released, our 1st YouTube video, etc.

During the holidays we were holding an Advent Calendar challenge at the MLT Club with the chance to win/earn a free calendar at the end. We have printed more than we knew we were going to need so we’d have a few extra left to sell for those that would like one.

So, you can grab one now until stock lasts! Once they are gone they are gone, at least until 2022. 🙂


Get the 2021 Wall Calendar

Thanks for spending the past year with us and for all your support. Have an extra groovy 2021 and talk soon!

Mona & Lisa

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Sweet Lorraine – New Video

Sweet Lorraine (Original) – Duo Session

Howdy people!

We hope everyone is doing well and getting ready for Christmas!

We have spent the last month working on new music, creating content for the MLT Club Advent Calendar, preparing for an upcoming live stream (more on that later) and baking and eating our bodyweight in Christmas cookies. 

But today we want to share a video with you that we had recorded earlier this year. If you own our The Duo Sessions album you will know this stripped-back duo version already and if you own our ORANGE album you will know it in its original fully-produced form!

So far, only MLT Club Members will have seen the video for it as it was originally recorded as a Club exclusive. Today we want to share it with you all!

It’s a sweet and nasty song … enjoy! 😉

MLT Club Live Stream tomorrow

If you’re an MLT Club member you’ll be seeing us as soon as tomorrow when we will be able to tick off one more thing from the bucket list: Our first MLT Club live stream! 

It will be a great way to say thank you to all members who have been absolutely amazing this year. We’ve been having lots of fun this past month with the virtual MLT Club Advent Calendar and we feel all the wonderful interactions strengthened the sense of community within the MLT Club further.

As a Christmas surprise we decided that we will conclude the festive Advent Calendar celebrations with an MLT Club exlusive Christmas live stream.

We will be playing a couple of songs, answering fan questions, opening Christmas fan mail, eating even more cookies and just hanging out with everybody. We’re really excited and hope to see many of your there!

You will find the streaming link in the MLT Club tomorrow and we’ll also send out another remind email to all Members.

We’ll start tomorrow, 23rd December at 10 pm GMT, here are some useful time conversions:

London – 10 pm
Los Angeles – 2 pm
New York – 5 pm
Berlin – 11 pm
Moscow – 1 am
Sydney – 9 am

And if you aren’t a member yet, your can of course still change that 🙂


Join the MLT Club to watch the Live Stream tomorrow

That concludes all the news of the day from us 🙂

We send much love across the globe, want to wish you a Merry Christmas and will see you all soon.

Big hugs,

Mona & Lisa

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Walking In The Air – New Video

Our annual Christmas Video is here!

Our video for “Walking In The Air”, released on our CHRISTMAS album is ready to see the light of today!

It has become a tradition for us to release an annual Christmas video to ring in the holidays (find the full playlist here) and this year we chose ‘Walking In The Air’, the song from the animated movie of the children’s book ‘The Snowman’.

You can argue whether it’s strictly a Christmas song (in the same vain as the old argument, is ‘Die Hard’ a Christmas movie?) but for us it captures the magical feeling of the season perfectly and we love putting it on during the holidays.

We ventured more into the abstract realms with the video-editing which was a nice change from cutting the live Cavern Club videos and Duo Sessions recently, which are all very much “based in reality” 😉

Have a look, hopefully it will make your day a slight bit brighter!

We’ll leave you for now and hope you are enjoying the rest of your day to the fullest. Happy 2nd Advent!

Big hugs,
Mona & Lisa

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Unboxing our YouTube Play Button + Q&A Video

Unboxing our YouTube Play Button + Q&A!

We just uploaded a new video to out channel where we catch up with everyone and give a little update on our year so far. As well as finally unboxing our YouTube Play Button which we got sent to celebrate 100k subscribers that we reached at the start of the year.

Who knew we’d get emotional over a plaque but for us, more than anything else, it symbolises the community that has grown around our music and the support from all of you groovy folks. So once again, thanks for making YouTube send us the Play Button in the mail by clicking “subscribe” 😉

At the end of the video we also included a Q&A video that we recently recorded for the MLT Club. It’s all about our musical influences and inspirations and gives you a little idea of some of the extra content we have been uploading at the Club recently. 🙂

MLT Club Advent Calendar

With the start of December we will begin our annual MLT Club Advent Calendar! What that means is daily Club exclusive posts from now until Christmas with a big surprise at the end!

The Advent Calendar has become an annual tradition over at the MLT Club and each year we switch it up a little and try a new concept to make every day leading up to Christmas fun and different.

This year we will be doing daily challenges and will ask you all to do them along with us. Every completed day will give you points and at the end there will be lots of prizes for everyone that took part! If you go all out and collect a lot of points you’ll be able to get a prize, worth more than the monthly subscription – a free, signed MLT 2021 Calendar sent in the mail! If you’ve ever thought about checking out the MLT Club, December is the month to do it. 😉 If you take advantage of the current Cyber Monday offer, your first subscription month will be 20% off!

We wish you all a peaceful start to December and we’ll see you very soon with a new video and Newsletter! We send you one last big Thank You and hope you’re all staying groovy. 🙂

Mona & Lisa

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‘Live at the Cavern Club’ Out Now

It’s Release Day!

​If you’ve pre-ordered the album, we hope that Mr. Postman will drop it off at your doorstep soon! We have received the CDs on Thursday and are working shifts to get your orders out as quickly as possible 🙂

To celebrate today, we are releasing a new video from that same live performance at the Cavern Club: A mash-up of “Please Mr. Postman” and the instrumental “Wipe Out”.

We remember singing “Please Mr. Postman” with our equally Beatles obsessed high-school-best-friend ALL THE TIME. We knew it wasn’t a Beatles original but we first heard it performed by the Fab Four and were hooked by their version. John’s raspy voice, the tight backing vocals, and a subject matter every teenager could relate to. Only that we weren’t waiting for a letter but rather the next text message 🙂

When said best friend came visiting us in Liverpool a few years ago we spent hours reminiscing about that time and remembered all the songs we used to sing during lunch break – ‘Please Mr. Postman’ of course being one of them! So off we went to our rehearsal room, grabbed a guitar and had a little go at it. It was a beautiful moment!

A few weeks later we decided to add the song to our Cavern setlist and started performing it with the guys. It was so much fun every time. We can’t quite remember how on earth we came up with the idea to inject a bit of “Wipe Out” into the arrangement but it worked :-D. It quickly became one of our favourites to perform!On this note we want to give a big shout out to Callum Williams (bass and backing vocals) and Charlie Skeggs (drums) for not just their badass playing but for making our time on and off stage so fun and memorable!And of course to Papa Rudi and Michaela for filming, editing, mixing, producing and releasing this bad boy. True team work as always ♥

The last few months have been dreary to say the least, so to be able to create and share music with such an enthusiastic and loving audience has been one of the things that kept us sane this year. We hope our music was and is able to give you some happy moments, too.

We are already back in the studio, recording new original music, filming new videos and preparing a whole lot of things we can’t wait to share with you in 2021. With this live album we are able to end 2020 on a really positive note, and we can’t thank you enough for the many pre-orders and the reception it has already gotten from those who listened early in the MLT Club.

We hope this album brings you as much joy as it does for us.

Take heart, take care, and stay groovy!

Big hugs,

Mona & Lisa