Us the Duo: So staying in touch with our families on the road is definitely a difficult thing because you're busy. It's just one task after another and suddenly you forget that you have parents and people that love you around you. But there are some tips and tricks that can keep you involved with your loved ones. We've found that the occasional selfie is always a good touch. Boom. How long does that take? Maybe 10 seconds? Send, another 10 seconds. Your family can see your beautiful face just like that. And number two is the simple FaceTime. Just say, "Hey, how are you doing?"

That face-to-face interaction makes them feel extremely loved and it is almost rejuvenating for us as artists to uh be filled up with that love from the people we love when we're on the road. And the third thing is to drop them a voicemail of us singing out of tune. It's always fun. Young Hollywood: Hey, it's us the duo. Thanks for coming to our show tonight at the Fonda in LA. You're watching Young Hollywood's Backstage Diaries. We're just about to go show you our stage setup uh before the show begins, so why don't you come with us? Come along. Us the Duo: So as you can see, we basically have brought our living room onto the stage.

Mainly because we want to feel comfortable, but we also want the fans to feel as if they are in our house, like it's an intimate setting. So we're going to show you every piece that's on the stage, so you know exactly what we're working with. So if you can imagine a white guy from North Carolina stumbling his way to LA through a vacation, ending up as a music video extra at a house. And then there's this beautiful little Filipino girl standing across the room, just catches my eye. I'm overtaken with love and I'm just bewildered. And it was literally love at first sight. I knew that very night that I was going to marry her.

So uh it was only a matter of time before I packed my bags and moved to LA, asked her to marry me, she said yes, we get married, and then we started playing music together. And it just made sense to create the duo, AKA us the duo. So we have to start with this piano bench. We actually bought this off of Craigslist from this old lady in our town. And we rented a U-Haul just to pick it up and put it in our house. It came with the piano, of course. It wasn't It wasn't just a bench. It was We got a U-Haul just for the bench, you know. And uh, you know, it's it's been sitting in our house. There's a couple broken legs, we screwed them back on. Yeah.

And we were about to go on tour and we were like, this is where all of our vine success happened was on this piano bench. We have to bring it with us and put it on stage. So both of us don't even fit on this, and we sit on it on stage. Half of my right butt cheek is just hanging out, because I got that Latin booty, you know what I'm saying? But we make it work. Social media has been such a big deal for us in our career. I our lives pretty much consist of nothing but social media. And with this generation today, I think it's super important for any artist that's trying to break out and make it in this industry. They need to be really active on social media.

We love to do it all because we just want to make sure that all of our bases are covered and that every network knows that we are relevant still on each thing, and yeah, it's a lot of fun for us. It's more fun than work. So this guy right here, is my melodica. It comes with a cool little case, and I can like wear it on my back. But yeah, this, like I was saying earlier, um, it's pretty new. Like I just learned how to use it. And like, I totally screwed it up at one show, but Won't you give it a little taste? Okay. Hopefully it didn't come off. We'll see. Ready? One, two, three, four. Yay. So that's that. I use that during the set. It's so well.

We feel the VIP for the fans is super important because it allows us to get away from the digital screen of social media and actually reach out, hug, touch these people and have real conversations. Um, so we love offering the VIP option for anybody who buys tickets, but we're just having the people actually come, and we get to meet so many cool people, and we end up sometimes making life long friends. It's it's an incredible experience for both of us, I think. And they come in as fans and they leave as friends, which is really cool. friends. So this is a a notebook that we actually write our songs in.

So we decided to print out a bunch of them and give them to our VIP guests in hopes that it'll inspire them to write. So it's just a blank journal, empty pages, whatever happens when they open the book is what happens. Hopefully the same thing for us. Maybe for them it's doodles or or recipes or just love letters, journal entries, whatever it may be. Um, but we wanted to give them a place to be inspired. So we got to tell you about this drum right here, which is really just a set piece. But this is the drum that we played at our very wedding. And no matter where you are is our favorite song to play.

She's beating it with her wedding dress on, and it became a viral video and just an essential part of our life. We had to bring it, put it on stage here just to remind us of the best day of our lives. This lamp is actually from our tour manager's house. He's selling his house. And I was like, I got to have that lamp, how much is it? And he was like, "Well, it's free for you." So I bought the lamp, it sat in our garage for a year, just trying to figure out where to put it in the house. Then we're going on tour. We're bringing our living room with us. Let's bring the lamp. So our tour manager was very happy, Mark, that his lamp made the cut.

We basically brought all this stuff so it just feels like a homey vibe, you know? Um, with the the rug and everything. Also Billy Jean, funny story about the rug. Billy Jean, our dog, she came on tour with us. And the crowd wanted to see her, so we brought her out, and a fan was holding her for a little bit, and then she got scared, and she ran off and peed on the rug. We cleaned it up, of course, so don't be afraid to step on it, but it was so hilarious because we were doing our last song and then she felt like she was at home, I guess, and decided to go pee on the rug. So, that was a funny moment. And the crowds loved it, so it's true. We have some pre-show rituals at the show.

Sometimes we uh do vocal exercises, we'll massage each other. Um, we like to say a little prayer before we go on. A lot of times we have a dance party. And this lasts for about 10 minutes right before we go on stage. So we pull out our jam box, turn it up high volume, and play our most exciting favorite song at that time, and we just go nuts. Tonight, during our set, we're going to tell our story, and we're going to basically do that through our music and our songs. We'll walk you through from the beginning to up until now. And it'll start off a little um quiet and and softer and then slowly build up throughout the whole set. It's gonna be fun. I'm really excited. It's gonna be fun.

It's gonna be a good crowd tonight. LA, I feel it. You feel it. Let's do it. And it's cool to share the story of us on stage and people will actually listen to it. I mean, we just like telling the story of our lives. Like, "Hey, this is how we met. This is when we got married. These are all the greatest moments of us." And people listen. It's really an honor. And uh, we're excited to do that tonight. Are you ready? I'm ready. Let's bring the heat. Can we kiss this out? Okay. Us the duo, if we were a bag of chips, I would say that we would be salt and vinegar. Sea salt chips. Mainly one because we love sea salt classic chips. Because that is a duo and we are thou a duo.

And Carissa is kind of stingy like vinegar like. The classic potato chip with a little bit of something different, a little thing, a little fun aspect, which would be the sea salt. And then I'm like salt, you know, I'm just that little addition on the food that really brings up the flavor. So I'm just there hanging out, just where I need to be, and the vinegar's the stand out loving, beautiful aspect, just like my wife, Carissa. Thank you so much, Young Hollywood for coming out to our show at the Fonda tonight. This is our backstage diary. I hope you enjoyed the show.