Enter the Dragons

THE WORD “bombast” has been attached more than once to Imagine Dragons, the Las Vegas band that blew up the airwaves in 2013 with the apocalyptic hit “Radioactive”.

Why Imagine Dragons sounded like an arena-rock band from the get-go is a combination of influences and environment.

“I’m a huge, huge Boston fan,” says guitarist Wayne Sermon. “We’re all classic rock fans, so that might have something to do with it.”

The other thing was the luck of the draw, honing its sound in Sin City.

“We would be in a casino in Las Vegas, at O’Shea’s at 3 in the morning,” the guitarist says, “and there’s bikini blackjack dealers and it’s the cheapest beer on the Strip and no one is there to see you, no one cares, and there’s a new crowd every two or three hours, and slot machines dinging all over the place. You have to grab people. You can’t be passive, you can’t be subtle in that setting. You have to draw attention.”

Imagine Dragons made its name in Vegas, but the roots are spread much further. Singer Dan Reynolds, a Vegas native, attended Brigham Young University in Utah, home state of Sermon. Before hooking up with the frontman, Sermon developed his chops at the Berklee School of Music in Boston with the current core of the band, bassist Ben McKee and drummer Daniel Platzman, playing in the avant-garde jazz fusion group The Eclectic Electrics.

“Whether you like jazz or not as an art form,” he says, “whether you appreciate it, it really makes you listen to each other. You have to listen. In rock bands, people sometimes just sort of plunk away at their instruments and play as loud as they can, and there’s not a tradition of listening.. In jazz, you have to pay attention to dynamic. There’s so much possibility harmonically that you have to be paying attention. I’ve been playing with those guys for almost a decade, so I think we have pretty good chemistry at this point that I don’t think I would have had with anyone else.”

The band assembled in Provo, Utah, starting in 2008 (with some different personnel), and moved to Vegas to work the casinos and release a series of EPs.

“For the first three or four years,” Sermon says, “it was pretty much a grind, saying yes to everything including birthdays and weddings. We did that kind of stuff for quite a while.”

Thanks to circumstances like Train’s singer getting sick, allowing them to fill in at the Bite of Las Vegas Festival 2009 in front of 26,000 people, the band’s reputation grew and it was signed to Interscope to record 2012’s “Night Visions”.

The first single, “It’s Time,” was a modest No 15 hit, and then came “Radioactive,” another song that had been on the prior EP “Continued Silence”. Given its dark, sci-fi-movie sound, “Radioactive” was an unlikely radio single and a slow grower.

“It’s pretty bold and out of the box, very self-empowering in a way,” the guitarist says. “There were a few stations in the States and a few in Europe that didn’t understand the song at all.

“Radioactive” slowly worked its way to No 3 and hung around on the Billboard Hot 100 for 87 weeks, breaking a record and becoming ubiquitous, to a fault.

“We knew that we liked it and it was cool, and we wanted to put it first on the album for a reason, to make a statement,” the guitarist says. “But hell, there’s no way of knowing a song like that could do what it did, stay in the Top 100 that long.” 

The success of “Night Visions,” which continued with the single “Demons,” quickly bumped Imagine Dragons up from clubs to theatres to arenas, and earned it a number of awards, including a best rock performance Grammy for “Radioactive”.

Going in to record the follow-up, “Smoke + Mirrors”, which topped the charts in February, the band still had a lot of older material to draw upon.

“I think for the first album we had like 120 demos or something, and we took 15 to work on,” Sermon says. “It was the same for this one. We had a lot of songs left over but we didn’t use them because it wasn’t really fresh to us, it wasn’t relevant. We’re in such a different place now, sonically. Our head space, the way Dan lyrics now, it didn’t match anymore.”

He acknowledges that, lyrically, the singer’s Mormon background, and to some extent his own, seeps into the message.

“Lyrically, for Dan, I think there’s a lot of searching going on. He grew up in a very religious home, and when something is presented to you so strictly it also makes you question things. I think that’s where he was at when he made the record. For us, it’s not like rejecting it or turning away from anything, Mormonism. It’s questioning it, wondering which parts resonated with you and which don’t. It’s been spiritual journey for us. We’re still trying to figuring things out, and if you listen to the music, you can hear that.”

 

BOX

 

One night only

 

Imagine Dragons will be Impact Arena, Muang Thong Thani on August 29 as part of their “Smoke + Mirrors” tour.

 

Tickets costing from Bt1,500 to Bt4,000 are now on sale at Thai Ticket Major outlets and online at www.ThaiTicketMajor.com,