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Just released Imagine Dragons’ Cutthroat is by far the most daring single of the band’s career. This song, and the more dynamic “Follow You”, are the first teasers of a new album from the group, still unannounced, which will be their first release since 2018. Frontman Dan Reynolds explains how the producer of the new album, Rick Rubin, with experience with ayahuasca, helped him reshape his band and his life.
“Cutthroat” is really different for you guys.
Rick dug really hard with us on this particular song. Rick was like no one else I have ever worked with. With the legend of Rick Rubin, you don’t really know what to expect. Other than the photos you see of him lying on the couch while working with Kanye West or something. But he was so different from what I expected.
How? ‘Or’ What?
I always thought of him as that lord overseer, or as a man of few words, I suppose. And he wasn’t that. He was very practical, very committed. I guess the part that met my expectations was, he was very blunt. This is what I liked the most. Most of the time, we self-produce our music. And sometimes it’s good for us, and sometimes it makes it difficult, because you have four guys who are all going in different directions. But Rick was really good at running the ship and being very direct and not cutting words. If he loved something, he loved it. And if he didn’t like it, he told you it was terrible. I think we needed it.
During Covid, I sent him 100 songs that I had worked on in the previous three years. And he wrote comments on each song in an email. That’s when we were just talking about whether or not to work together and get to know each other. I did not expect that. I felt like he was going to say, “It’s too much for me to listen,” or not really dig into it. But he looked at each one and gave me very direct comments.
How did you two connect in the first place?
Well, I really knew his work because I grew up with a lot of hip-hop. He worked on records that really marked me, whether it was Kanye or the Beastie Boys. I saw Rick, you know, still there. Especially with Kanye, I heard him push almost uncomfortably. And I think Imagine Dragons needed it. I feel like one of our biggest flaws as a group is the comfort. With “Cutthroat,” for example, he embraced the parts of Imagine Dragons that were a little uncomfortable for me, which I usually hid. I would never have released this song, or explored this demo, because it’s too weird for Imagine Dragons or anything like that. But he helped me embrace it and love it about myself. And it really helped the process.
Given the references to Wellbutrin and Serotonin on this song, I’m assuming you’re talking about your experiences with depression.
Yeah, this song is really an exorcism of self-loathing. I feel like I’ve spent a lot of years of my life somehow [feeling] “Poor me.” I don’t know if depression is a genetic thing for me or if it stems from a religious crisis. I was brought up in Mormonism, and it wasn’t really for me. It was hard for me to accept in my brain. But for some reason, around my teenage years, I really started dealing with mental illness, seeing a therapist, and trying different medications.
It was the center of all my music, and [there was] a great concentration on oneself. And this song is kind of about exorcising, trying to cut, feel sorry for yourself, embrace life and everything that I’ve been given. A great theme of “Cutthroat” and a lot of songs on the record is the end of life. I lost my sister-in-law to cancer last year. I was actually in the room with my brother when she passed away. They have seven children. It was my first time in the room with a deceased person, and it really hit me in a different way, making me think differently about each day and how I spend my time. The year before, one of my best friends committed suicide. It just makes you grateful for your health, grateful for each day. People will hear it and think the song is mad at someone else. But he’s really angry with himself.
How did you get to this place?
Something that I have explored that has really changed my life is that I did ayahuasca. It’s been really transformative for me, helping me see things that don’t matter, letting go of those things and seeing things that matter and accepting them. It really transformed this whole record for me. Obviously, I’m not trying to go out and be, like Mr. Ayahuasca or anything like that. But it was really transformative for me. It has helped me take giant leaps in my mental health.
What were the circumstances? Did you go to the jungle or just sit in your living room?
In fact, my wife and I had been separated for seven months. We were going to get a divorce. It was during To evolve, our last record, and I was on the road, and we hadn’t spoken for seven months. We’re just going through a lawyer at this point. And I come home, and we were going to meet to sign the papers in a room with our lawyers. And we just looked at each other from across the table. She’d texted me right before the reunion all of these things that were so revealing and really hit me on a deep level and were places we had never explored together that really healed me.
So we put our hands up. We’re like, “This is not where we have to be, we have to go to lunch or something like that.” So we left and went to lunch. She told me that she had done ayahuasca and that it had changed her life. She said, “Hey, I’m gonna do it next weekend, if you want to do it with me.” So I did a little research on my own and then we went together and it really changed my life, man. In a way so deep that it’s hard to put it into words without it sounding out of date.
It brought us closer together, and we’ve been married for years and have a 16 month old child. It brought me to really healthy ground and a self esteem that I hadn’t been able to achieve.
I have heard good stories about ayahuasca, but this is perhaps the most positive. I’m still too terrified to try it personally, but …
It is so terrifying. The last thing I do is tell people, “Hey, you should do this.” Because it is such a business. And I don’t think it’s for everyone. But it made me see religiosity in this way that was so tiny.
Tell me about the actual writing of “Cutthroat” and what Rick brought to it.
I didn’t know what he was going to think, because it’s such a strange song. When we showed him that in a demo format, it was still very aggressive. But it was perhaps also a hindrance in some respects. It could have been more manic, I guess. I’ve definitely dealt with a bit of mania throughout my life, and I think I was in a pretty manic space when I wrote this song. And Rick, one of the things he emphasized from the start was, “You have to embrace those parts of the song.” Like, the song sounds like she wants to be manic, but she isn’t. And he wants to be angry, but it’s not angry enough.
So we took the whole song apart. We brought in Cory Henry, who is an amazing gospel organist, and a multi-instrumentalist, just a complete genius. Rick told us about him, and he came into the studio, we built the song with an organ, which seems so strange to me. But that was Rick’s idea. And it brought that almost religious fervor of anger. It was so fulfilling for me as an artist, because this song needed to be angry – anger and darkness can be a really fantastic thing sometimes.
How do you generally write your music?
The DAW that I have used for many years now is Ableton. I usually sit here where I am right now, with a keyboard and percussion instruments and stuff. And I will generally write a demo almost every day. I’ve been doing this since I was about 12 or 13 years old. I have thousands of these demos. Many of them are completely terrible, but the process has been very therapeutic. Either Wayne [Sermon], our guitarist, will send me something he’s working on, or [Daniel] Platzman, our drummer, will send me something he’s working on, or I’ll start here.
What has changed the most with Rick?
With Rick, we came in with about 40 songs, and then we just tried to figure out the theme of what exactly was going on, which in the past has been very difficult for me. One of my biggest weaknesses is being too metaphorical out of fear. I have had a great fear of honesty in my life, afraid to be honest about things in a very public way that would hurt my family or the people I care about most. And because of that, I wrote songs that were too metaphorical.
A lot of the songs on our discography, the ones that I don’t like or that haven’t aged well for me, are the ones where I was trying to bury what I was actually saying. My favorite songwriters, like Bob Dylan or Cat Stevens or Paul Simon, are really on the nose. Harry Nilsson, very on the nose. So I really tried to figure that out on this album, and Rick also pushed me really hard to be more direct.
How about the other new song, “Follow You”?
“Follow You” is the opposite sound side of the record. The record, at least in my head, is sort of split into two sides. Part is turned towards the outside, part towards the inside, a little more organic, sometimes more aggressive, chaotic. And the part of the disc that looks inward is “Cutthroat”.
Whereas “Follow You” is very elaborate. It’s a love song, which we usually don’t write, because it just feels redundant or squeaky to me. I’m not good at writing love songs. But when I got back to Aja and we came together through ayahuasca, of all things it was such a heartbreaking experience for me that I was so grateful for my grounding and loyalty to people that I love. So “Follow You” is about loyalty. It’s about me and Aja getting back together.
It’s inspired by the Beach Boys, which I grew up on, and it was a very playful and fun song. Once again, Rick really pushed me to embrace our sonic versatility, to embrace the extremes.
Is the album finished?
Yeah, yeah, the record is full. These two singles are in a way to guide fans in what to expect with this record, which is both sides of it, and the extremes of it. In addition, the name of the record type is correlated to it. I don’t think I’m supposed to say what the name of the disc is yet. But that says a lot.
You recently donated your childhood home in Las Vegas to Encircle, a group that works with LGBTQ + youth. What was behind this choice?
I grew up in a house filled with love and laughter. When my parents told me that they were selling their house this year, after more than 30 years of raising nine children there, the idea occurred to me that it would be a perfect house to provide a place of love and refuge. to LGBTQ youth in Las Vegas. I have always felt loved and celebrated in this house, so my only hope is that it will bring joy to many more people for years to come.
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