Three Years Younger

Sisters Charlie and Megan Simpson are Three Years Younger - in both age and name. The duo talk to us about the TV show that inspired them to form a band and how their music is always evolving.

When did you begin performing together?

Megan: I think we first became interested, we first started thinking about it after watching a TV show called Nashville - this was a few years ago, we must've been about 12 and 15 at the time. On the show there were two two sisters, Lennon and Maisy Stella, who are musicians in real life, and I think we liked the idea of doing that ourselves. We wrote a few songs together, and we enjoyed it, but our music is definitely quite different now to what we started doing!

Do people always "get" where your name comes from?

Charlie: No, we actually have people asking a lot! I think most of the time people don't realise the age difference between us, and when we explain it they always go "Ah, yeah!".

Do you have designated roles in the band, or do you both get involved in everything?

Charlie: We generally both do everything, really! Like, if I have an idea for a song, something I want to write about, I'll go to Megan and tell her and we start putting something together.

Megan: Although Charlie does mainly handle the communications for the band herself.

Charlie: Ha, yeah, the fun stuff! I tend to also be very involved in the production side of things as well.

Are there any musicians you find yourselves influenced by - aside from the Stella sisters?

Megan: At first we drew a lot from who we were listening to at the time, I guess the obvious people like Taylor Swift, and more recently we're really into artists like Maisie Peters and Holly Humberstone.

Have you been playing live much recently?

Charlie: We have, actually, we've been doing a lot over the last few months. Even between the lockdowns, which a lot of musicians say was sort of a "dead zone" for them, we were having quite a productive time, so we've had a good year!

Megan: A lot of our gigs have been in Suffolk. We're based between Suffolk, Cambridge and Norwich - we've done the circuit in Cambridge too, which has treated us really well.

How do you spend your time when you aren't working on music?

Charlie: We're both at uni at the moment, so we're having to balance that with our music. I'm in the acapella society and Megan is very busy with rowing.

Megan: Yes, rowing is quite a commitment! We do sessions sometimes eight times a week! The team is amazing and I'm having lots of fun with them.

Charlie: I also do a lot of writing in my free time. I'm hoping to write a book at some point in the near future!

What do you have in the pipeline at the moment?

Megan: We hopefully have quite an exciting your ahead in 2022! We've been working on a music video for our track Close The Door with Digital Saint at West Suffolk College, which is really exciting.

Charlie: We were played on Radio 1 by Angelle recently, so we're looking to get some new music out soon to support that. We're working with Dan Wilde on producing a few of our old tracks, and working on some new ones in the background as well.

Megan: Oh, and we've got a few gigs already planned for next year, supporting some really cool musicians.

Words: Scott Bates