Imagine Dragons: 'I was very fearful about being honest and vulnerable'

Dan Reynolds and legendary producer Rick Rubin join Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 to discuss working together on Imagine Dragons’ new album ‘Mercury - Act 1’.

Dan tells Zane how the band’s music has evolved over the years and discusses the uncomfortable but productive experience of working with Rick Rubin, growing up in a religious family, and his transformative experience during a recent guided Ayahuasca trip. He also discusses how Rick helped him tap into honesty, attending group therapy as a band, being a “radio band”, and reveals that the first concert he ever attended was his own.

Rick Rubin Tells Apple Music What Drew Him To Working With Imagine Dragons…
It really was the songs. It started with a conversation. The band had reached out to me. I said, "Let's just talk." I was in Hawaii at the time. We got on a group Zoom and we just talked for a while and they were in a place where they were looking for some outside help. They are very much of a self-contained unit. Everybody in the band writes, everybody in the band produces, everybody in the band plays. They're wildly sophisticated in their production ability, in their playing and in their writing. And with this glut of greatness, it was helpful to have someone from the outside who wasn't attached to anything say, "This part's really good. Maybe we can focus on more of this. And this part is not as good. Is there any way we can make it stronger or maybe we shift to a different direction?” So it was really looking at the material that was there, which was a ton. I mean, before we even started, they sent me, I don't know, 80 songs, something like 80 songs. And by the way, those 80 songs sounded like finished records. Those were not demos, were like a freestyle over a beat. Those were completed, what other artists would release as finished records. So I listened to those and gave comments on, again, strengths and weaknesses, any themes that I saw through the process, any places where I thought, "Oh, this is an interesting area where it's really good and the band hadn't gone there before. And maybe that was something interesting to look at." And so really was rooted in a combination of the material and then talking to the guys and just seeing that they were very open to finding the future of the band. And that's what the goal was.

Dan Reynolds Tells Apple Music About Working with Rick Rubin…
One thing that really Rick pushed me on was, first of all, we sat down and went over every lyric of every song. I've never done that with anybody. It's an uncomfortable process for me, especially when you're writing about vulnerable things. And first of all, he pushed me, just the aura of Rick is a very honest energy. So everything he wants to be a part of, he's at a point in his life where, and I mean, again, he could speak to this better, but from what I saw, if it's not honest, he doesn't care about it. He's not interested in it. It's like, oh cool. Yeah. But if it feels vulnerable, then he cares. So I already was in that existence and I needed someone to push me like that, which is why we thought, look, Rick Rubin will be a good match I think for this record. And, and it did, it really pushed me to go to kind of uncomfortable places. As a lyricist, one of my biggest flaws I think, as I look through our years together is really overly metaphorical because I was very fearful about being honest and vulnerable. And that started with, from a young age when I was afraid of my mum, understanding what I was talking about when I was like 12 and 13 writing songs.

Dan Reynolds Tells Apple Music How Rick Rubin Helped Him Tap Into Honesty…
My goal, especially as I get older, my first goal with creating art is putting out something that is honest. And Rick, from the little I knew of him before and the research that I had done on the records he had done always felt on it as far as just the output of the art that he was involved with. And so, I think when we met, Rick was challenging for me in a lot of ways that I needed. It's really easy for me to get stuck in a box. It's really easy for me to kind of see two choices and take the easier choice. It's one of my weaknesses. And I think Rick immediately, the thing that I saw is he wanted to go over every lyric. Nobody ever made me do that. Nobody ever sat me down and said, "Hey, let's go over every lyric." That was hard for me. It was really uncomfortable for me. I have a hard enough time knowing that people are going to hear what I'm talking about. And another of my weaknesses that I talked with you about a minute ago, Zane, was that I really feel like I'd be overly metaphorical out of fear of people knowing what I was talking about. Rick made me feel comfortable in my... Made me feel accepted in the environment, especially once we got into a human-human level. And that's really what I was looking for. And he challenged me. I never felt like you did it, Rick, in a way that was purposefully challenging. I felt like it always was just, you were just looking for honesty. And one of the things I always talked about that you would say that stuck with me is you would say, "I don't know that I believe that.”

Dan Reynolds Tells Apple Music Being a “Radio Band” and That The First Concert He Ever Attended Was His Own...
Dan Reynolds: I was thinking about this the other day, trying to understand, have perspective on these 10 years and why I write the way I write, and stuff like that. Because I still haven't figured it out fully, but the consensus that I came to, because I write every lyric. I write every melody. We write these songs. Nobody's writing these songs for us. And I understand from the outside how it is so radio driven. I think I was thinking about this. I thought, you know what? I never really listened to an artist's discography growing up. I didn't. I sat by the radio, first of all, because there was nine kids in my family. I did not grow up in a wealthy family, and you have nine kids. You can just do the math. Money was not easy to come by. I never went to a show. The first show I ever went to, I played. I played at.

Zane Lowe: Hang on. Hold up. I had to drop on, on that. Sometimes, people just make the most simple observations about their life, and yet, looking the way Rick just reacted and I'm reacting, that is mind blowing. The first show you ever went to, you are on the stage looking out at the crowd?

Dan Reynolds: Yeah. But the point that I want to come to is that I didn't buy albums. I listened to the radio. I listened to singles only. That's it. I would sit in the room next to Mix 94.1, which in Las Vegas is the alternative station, and I would record songs of the '90s, because I'm a child of the '90s, that I loved. And it was like Alanis Morissette. It was all the powerful women of the '90s. I loved that. Nirvana, I loved it. Hip hop. It was just hip hop and '90s rock. That's it. And all the singles. So, for me, an honest output is big pop songs. I would be a liar if I tried to write, I don't know, some other way. That's how I write. That's what I want to listen to. I like to listen to big songs that are poppy and melodic.

Dan Reynolds Tells Apple Music About The Transformative Experience of His Guided Ayahuasca Trip And Feeling Like He 'Died' Spiritually...
I'm building new ground. I'm on something. I don't know what it is. I've had a lot of really spiritual, like the most spiritual experience of my life happened in the last two years. And that's a story for another day. I think I brought up to you before about ayahuasca, but super transformative to me. It was like a glimpse at believing in something again, which was so exciting for me. All I want in this life is to believe in something. I want to believe in something more grand. Some people don't care about those things and they just live their life. And then some people really care about it and it's like, they're obsessed with it. And for me, I fall into that category of like, I think about it every day, it's all I want to talk about. It happened prior to even working with Rick. And I think it led me to Rick in some weird universal way because my biggest fear in life, and I didn't know this until recently, is lack of control. I really am super terrified of… super fearful. That is my greatest fear by far. And anybody who has kind of taken the journey of ayahuasca, and again, it sounds so ... I hate even bringing it up in a mainstream way because I feel like I don't want it to sound trite. I had to give up control completely. And I died. Spiritually, I felt physically like I died. It was like, I was dying, I was dying, I was dying. And this is like, again, this is a story for a long, like there's so much more to this. I saw so many things in my life from a bird's eye view. And it gave me so much deeper understanding of it. But I ended up holding on, holding on, and I was dying, I was dying, I was dying, really felt the most convincing version of dying until I finally was like, you know what? Okay, I'm going to die. And then I died. And I died and it was like nothingness. And then it was like, then I heard like the bell and this incredible shaman came over and kind of like was. So this incredible Shaman came over and kind of like was helping me come alive again. And it felt like a rebirth. It felt like everything that I had been told that religion would give to me, it was like the whole born again stuff.

Dan Reynolds Tells Apple Music About Doing Group Therapy With His Bandmates...
Any band dynamic is really difficult. And this was another thing that Rick was really strong at, is just dealing with band dynamics. I think he's done it for so long. He probably just understands how to maneuver and fill in the gaps. It's a real thing. Band dynamics are hard, especially after a decade together, especially after rises, falls, being unsigned together, being signed, and then, fame, and all the things... There's so many things at play, and egos, and it has been a challenge. We did band therapy. We sat in a room as a band two years ago with two therapists and had to go through stuff that you don't want to go through. But we do that because I hate it when bands break up. I hate it. I loved so many bands that broke up when I was younger. I became a musician because I was such a fan of music. I would sit by the radio, and I would just record any song that came on that I loved on my little tape deck. And I started doing that when I was 11. I invested in these bands. And then, when they broke up, it felt like your parents getting divorced almost. And I didn't believe anything they did after that. I was like, "I don't believe it." Even if it was one person doing all the writing, it just killed it for me. So, it's like a relationship. It's like a marriage. It's like, you have to work, to work. And Rick really helped with that process. I'm sure Rick felt tension that he probably didn't acknowledge or I don't know. I can't speak for him. But it's hard. But we're in a better place now than we've ever been, and that's because we've worked.

Dan Reynolds Tells Apple Music How He’s Feeling Following The Release of ‘Mercury - Act 1’…
Man, I'm felling really good. I didn't know how I'd feel this week, because this was three years in the making to make this record. I've never sat on music for this long. I don't know, you lose a lot of perspective and you don't really know as much as I knew with other records what I was putting out. So I listened to it for the first time this last week and its entirety, well, for the first time in months, I took a break from it and I felt really good. I felt like, okay, this is an honest output. And that's all I care about is this point in my career. It's just honesty. And I feel really excited to get it out there.

Dan Reynolds Tells Apple Music About Imagine Dragons Records Evolve Over Time...
I never fully comprehend thematically what the record is even about. Sometimes it takes me years. I just was re-listening to some of our old records, like 'Smoke and Mirrors' and even 'Night Visions' and finally understanding what those records were about. And it's taken me years. And I thought I knew it was about at the time, but it's like, I'm not that deliberate for better or for worse, when I'm writing. And I'm really just ... it just comes. It's almost like word vomit. When I'm writing a song, I just write exactly how I'm feeling in that moment. And then the next day I'm writing exactly how I feel in that moment. So thematically, I don't really understand or comprehend, oh wait, I was going through a huge spiritual crisis. Or I was dealing with like whatever it was, addiction or something that, for me at the time, I was like, oh, this is about this. But it really was about something entirely different.

Dan Reynolds Tells Apple Music About Growing Up in a Religious Family…
I grew up in a super religious family and religion just didn't sit well with me from a young age. You know, some people, it works. At least from my opinion, I look and I think, wow, this really works for some people and they're like happy and it gives them kind of a core foundation. For me, it really shook my core foundation completely over and over because I was always grasping for something that I wasn't finding. I wasn't finding solid ground in it. And I didn't want my mum to know that because it's my mum's everything. It's her core existence. And it's like, it means everything to her and she wants to live with her kids forever in that, which I understand, especially as a parent now.