AJR: The Writing Secrets Behind TikTok's Viral Sounds | How I Write

Summary

Podcast Summary:

How I Write – AJR: The Writing Secrets Behind TikTok's Viral Sounds
Host: David Perell
Guests: Jack and Ryan Met (AJR)
Date: September 10, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode of How I Write, David Perell dives deep with Jack and Ryan Met of the band AJR, exploring their unique approaches to songwriting, their journey from internet obscurity to viral stardom, and the evolving intersection of music creation with modern platforms like TikTok and AI. The conversation centers on the tension between authenticity and audience appeal, embracing vulnerability in songwriting, and how technological and cultural shifts shape both music and musicians. Rich with insights and tangible examples, the episode unpacks the “meta-mechanics” of AJR’s creative process, performance philosophy, and views on the ever-changing music industry.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Writing Authentically: Embracing Vulnerability and Character

• Emotional Barometer: AJR gauge the honesty and potential impact of their music by checking their own reactions during creation. If a song makes them laugh or cry, they're confident fans will connect too.
• From Character, Not Just Experience: AJR frequently write from the perspectives of unconventional characters (e.g., their dogs) to access a mix of humor and genuine feeling.
  • [02:23] Jack: “That’s the character we want to write from. I got you guys. I hear you’re going through this tough thing. I brought you this stick. Did that help?”
• Embarrassment as Inspiration: The band views personal embarrassment as the raw material for their best songs.
  • [05:55] Ryan: “Let’s go down that route—what’s the most embarrassing thing I could think about me? That has to be the next song.”

2. The Mechanics of Truthful Songwriting

• Pushing Past "The Brakes": True connection happens when a songwriter dares to cross the line of what they feel is "not supposed to be said."
  • [09:41] Interviewer: “There’s a moment...when you find that place you’re not supposed to go. And you can actually push beyond that. That’s when you get to the deep stuff.”
• Specificity over Generality: Rather than broad declarations, AJR zoom in on small, vivid details and unique angles (“zooming in on these tiny little vignettes” [11:46])—this leads to a universal emotional resonance.

3. The Influence of Musical Theater and Structure

• Broadway Roots: Musical theater is core to AJR's DNA—freedom, emotion, and structural innovation.
  • [13:24] Ryan: “It’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Change up times, talk about a random thing. And then there’s a new character that comes in...constantly changing.”
• Partnership Dynamic: Jack acts as the subconscious, raw creative force; Ryan is the conscious editor with a finger on the pulse of public taste.
  • [15:51] Jack: "So often I’m the subconscious and he’s the conscious."

4. Understanding Audience and Cultural Context

• Context Shapes Sound: Recognizing cultural trends allows for songs that feel "of their moment" without being derivative. Folk’s rise is credited to modern overstimulation and the need for soothing, stripped-down music.
  • [19:09] Jack: “If you’re doing this all day—video after video—you want some kind of calming music…You want to be able to hear the guy talk over the music.”
• Predicting Trends & Luck: While some artists seem “bellwethers” for shifts, often it’s a combination of intuition and cultural instinct—not just cold analysis.
  • [21:33] Ryan: “He feels that, so the rest of the public must feel it too.”

5. Live Shows as the Ultimate Creative Endpoint

• Reverse Engineering Albums: The live show isn't an afterthought—it’s the goal. Songs are written with staging and spectacle in mind.
  • [31:32] Jack: “The tour is the end goal piece of art...the album is the soundtrack to that.”
• Experimentation and Theatrics: AJR’s shows incorporate magic, illusions, narrative, and callbacks, reflecting their theatrical sensibility and dedication to surprise and delight.
  • [32:10] Jack: “We try to lean into our Broadway influence a lot...Let’s put stuff on stage that’s never been done before.”

6. TikTok, Attention, and the New Music Economy

• The Viral Game: Success has become less about traditional release strategies, more about creating music primed for viral moments.
  • [42:44] Jack: “Now you don’t really choose your own single...you make music and hope that something goes viral.”
• Pressure vs. Authenticity: The challenge is making attention-grabbing art without sacrificing truth or depth—a balance AJR believe they naturally strike.
• Evergreen Discovery: The new music economy allows older songs to find new life years after release through unexpected internet trends.
  • [62:22] Ryan: “Five years before it started getting big...now it’s huge because of TikTok.”

7. AI, Authenticity, and the Future of Music

• Skepticism About AI's Emotional Capacity: AJR don’t fear AI replacing true artists, because true connection—something you can “just believe”—is irreplicable.
  • [47:43] Jack: “I just believe the combination of his voice and the chords and the take he got...I can't describe why. I just believe him."
• AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement: Useful in iterative songwriting and demo production, but not for final, heartfelt art.
  • [51:02] Jack: “It actually helped in the writing process…no creativity was taken away from us.”
• Inevitable Shift Toward Idiosyncrasy: As AI music becomes widespread, “what’s cool” will become more personal, raw, and human.

8. Personal Growth, Critique, and Resilience

• Improvement Through Vulnerability: Their artistic journey has led them to value truth, unique perspective, and accepting criticism.
  • [58:25] Jack: “Keep saying your truth, and then you can’t possibly have regrets. Any kind of hate...just bounces off because you’re like, what do you mean? I was just being myself.”
• Advice for Aspiring Artists: Write a lot (including bad songs), accept influences, and focus on live performance for improvement and financial sustainability.
  • [67:28] Jack: “Write a million songs...tour a lot and play a lot of shows for people that don’t come for just a few.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Comedy, Embarrassment, and Authenticity:
  “[In comedy] if you write a joke and the joke makes you personally laugh, the joke’s going to kill it on stage. I think we think like that a lot.”
  — Jack [00:57]

• On Pixar, Empathy, and Self-Acceptance:
  “So much of what becomes your superpower started out as your weakness…We can’t be cool…Anytime we’ve tried to pretend we’re cool...we just look like we’re wearing a costume.”
  — Jack [04:03]

• On Writing Embarrassing Truths:
  “Odds are that person, the audience, is going to feel the exact same way.”
  — Ryan [06:48]

• On Musical Structure and Attention:
  “We're sort of bored by verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus...let's do a crazy outro with this weird thing...You're reacting better to that than a third chorus.”
  — Jack [34:50]

• On Artistic Ownership and Regret:
  “We have some songs that I...can't defend...But a lot of these other songs, if there was to be a trend about a dog song, how it's the worst song ever made, I could stand in front of a jury and go, ‘it's actually how I was feeling, so fuck all of you.’”
  — Jack [58:25]

• On AI Imitation vs. Human Feeling:
  “Music is natural…It’s not a jingle, it’s not 10 seconds that’ll capture people’s attention...it's writing about something embarrassing, thinking that maybe no one will hear it, and that’s okay.”
  — Ryan [46:08]

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:57] — Comedy, feedback, and using personal emotion as a creative compass
• [02:23] — Writing from a dog’s perspective, character as a songwriting tool
• [05:55] — Embarrassment as the key to honest songwriting
• [11:46] — Specificity in lyrics - "zooming in on vignettes"
• [13:24] — The influence of musical theater and structural freedom
• [15:51] — Jack and Ryan’s creative partnership dynamic
• [19:09] — Cultural context shaping the sound and style of pop music
• [31:32] — The live show as the “end goal” and centerpiece of AJR’s process
• [42:44] — The new dynamics of viral hits/TikTok’s role in breaking a song
• [47:43] — What makes a song “true”—why AI can’t replicate it
• [58:25] — Honest creation and dealing with criticism
• [62:22] — The delayed virality of songs in the new online ecosystem
• [67:28] — Advice for new artists: quantity, audience-building, and resilience

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Thematic Takeaways

• Truth is personal, often embarrassing, and rooted in detail.
• Successful art balances self-expression with audience experience—it’s a dialogue, not a broadcast.
• The line between “too experimental” and “too safe” is navigated best through collaboration and gut intuition.
• Modern music is shaped by broader cultural and technological streams, requiring artists to adapt without losing their essence.
• AJR’s resilience and growth come from embracing imperfection, change, and persistent creativity in a rapidly shifting landscape.

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This episode is a goldmine for anyone aspiring to understand the intersection of honesty, craft, culture, and commerce in modern songwriting. It’s also a candid look at how a viral band remains grounded, goofy, and fiercely committed to the art of being themselves.

Transcript

[Interviewer]

This interview is with Jack and Ryan from the band har. They have more than 5 billion streams on Spotify. More than 8 1/2 million people are listening to them on the platform every month. And the music video for their song World's Smallest Violin has more than 170 million views. The story of the band is the story of the Internet, from how they blew up on TikTok to how they think about marketing and distribution, YouTube, social media, and of course, now, AI. We talked about all those things. They told their story, shared their thinking. And you'll notice that the theme that runs through this conversation is how do you actually speak and communicate truth? Well, that's what we talk about in this episode. All right, welcome, guys.

[Jack]

Thank you.

[Interviewer]

Music is a funny thing because for some music, you have live feedback of the people in the audience when you're playing live, but sometimes now you're just making music. It's just the three of you, the two of you and your brother, and you don't have that feedback.

[Jack]

Yeah, I mean, we were just talking about comedy. I've seen. Said a lot about comedy, that if you're writing a joke thinking, oh, this'll make people laugh, the joke's gonna die. And if you write a joke and the joke makes you personally laugh, the joke's gonna kill it on stage. I think we think like that a lot. I know it sounds like, you know, cocky to say, but, like, a lot of the songs do make us cry as we're writing it. Like, a lot of the more emotional ones, we're having the exact reaction that we want fans to ultimately have. We're dancing or we're crying. And that's kind of our indicator of. Okay, I think we're gonna be on the same wavelength as the audience here. Hmm.

[Interviewer]

Like, what's an example of that?

[Ryan]

Ryan is the sort of emotional lyric writer, I'd say, between us. So it comes from him.

[Jack]

Yeah, I guess for the more emotional stuff, I'm thinking. I think a lot of what we try to do now, especially in the music, is write from character. We talk about that all the. We have a. We have a song on our EP that's coming out called a dog song. That's probably a good example of this that we. We knew we wanted to write. We both have dogs that we love, and they're like, the light of our life, and we knew we wanted to write a song from our dog's perspective. And exactly that reaction is like, this could be really funny and silly and. And so I laid down for A nap, you know, like, gimmicky and stupid. But there's gotta be an emotional way in to write from our dog's perspective. And it just hit us at a certain point. I'm trying to remember what it was. It was, oh, the naivety in which our dog views the things happening in our life. The way our dog thinks he's protecting us in reality. Like, if you zoom out, we're protecting him. That's the character we want to write from. I got you guys. I hear, like, you're going through this tough thing. I brought you this stick. Did that help? Like, there's the emotion, I think, that got us really excited about that story. Yeah.

[Ryan]

And the naivety of watching a human cry and not understanding why there's something so emotional to that.

[Jack]

Something I did. Yeah. Yeah.

[Ryan]

It's almost like a little kid. Like, what's really emotional about that? Like, I have no idea what's happening, but how can I help make it better, you know?

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

That's so funny. I love the laugh that you have because that's always been our process in writing. When I first met my girlfriend, I showed her some of our music and she, like, 10 seconds in, there's like, a funny line and she's, like, laughing a lot. And then it's a portion about how I feel so lonely because. And I want to call my dad. And then she's like, oh. And we're like, wait, maybe that's the style that we should.

[Jack]

What's the thing?

[Interviewer]

What's the song? Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty. You know, I was listening. I definitely got the melody wrong there, but I was listening to that.

[Jack]

That's what the melody should have been.

[Interviewer]

Okay, I'm gonna join the band. And then, yeah, you just start laughing. And that's what I love about you guys is you have preserved the goofiness among success. You know, generally people become a little more buttoned up and whatnot. But you guys are just goofy people. And that really shines through the music. And you don't often even think of music and goofiness as coming together.

[Jack]

Well, I think we love Pixar movies. That's probably our favorite type of art, possibly for exactly that reason. It's like, this is going to be a silly movie about fish in Australia. Oh, it's a movie about a dad learning to trust his kid for the first time. Yeah, you're laughing, then by the end, it hits you with a left turn and you're crying all of a sudden. I think I Think that we are. Like, so much of what becomes your superpower started out as your weakness. Right. Like, when you're a writer, that's like, sort of finding your perspective. Is I. We can't be cool. Like, you're saying goofy, which is kind of the opposite of cool. Anytime we've tried to pretend we're cool or wear sunglasses on stage, in a metaphorical sense, we just look like we're wearing a costume. Like, it just feels fake. You can. Audiences can smell that from a mile away. And I think we realized, if we can't be as cool as Drake and talk about the cool things Drake talks about, what's really our pov? What can we do that maybe Drake can't? And I think it's really empathizing, making you laugh, then cry, but just really letting you know what the very uncool experience of being a dog is or the very unsexy experience of being in a relationship could be. Like, I think we found that that's like sort of our voice, I guess.

[Interviewer]

And how conscious are you of this? And how do you have that consciousness help your work, rather than being so conscious of, like, who you are and what you're trying to do, that it's like, ah, now we're not really producing stuff from the soul anymore. It's sort of coming from our minds.

[Jack]

Yeah. It's just a dangerous thing to go down. To go, what would AJR do? Like, what's our. What's this character? What would they say in that? Right. That's almost the death of creativity. Creativity. Right.

[Ryan]

I feel like there's a few tricks that we've learned. One being, you know, to get away from that. What's ajr? What's the most embarrassing thing I could think of about me? You know, let's go down that route. I think that that's just the key to writing in general, or the kind of most writing. I would say, what's the thing that embarrasses. That would embarrass you most to say to a random person on the street or to your best friend? That has to be the next song concept that we write about.

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ryan]

I think there are tricks to get away from digging yourself into that hole of AJR's voice on top of AJR's.

[Jack]

Voice on top of a photocopy, and.

[Ryan]

Then it gets so diluted.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah. Let's follow that word, embarrassing. Because the thing about embarrass, you're like, ah, I shouldn't say that. You know, AJR can't say that, hey, you know, we're famous. Like, we can't say that. We don't want people to know that. But then at the same time, you're like, no, that's the thing that we're going for. So how do you navigate that?

[Ryan]

Well, I just. I mean, to start that, I think that there's a moment in every writer's kind of career where they do hit that point. We reached that. That wasn't what we were writing about from when we started. We were writing more, like party songs that we feel people could get on top of a desk in a dorm, too. And that's what good writing is. And that. And. And it did work for us in a little bit, you know, but then people stopped coming to show, or people didn't really show up to shows or anything like that. People didn't connect. They didn't really care who was saying that. And I don't really care personally who's saying that. I wouldn't have. And then we realized that people feel the same things as you, and it's this crazy realization that you come to in writing that, like, if I write about embarrassing, odds are that that person, the audience, is gonna feel the exact same way or really understand what you're saying. And then all of a sudden, people started showing up to shows as we.

[Jack]

Started writing, and that becomes really addicting. That's what we found, like, the little embarrassing. Like, maybe the first embarrassing thing was weak. Like, if you even want to call it embarrassing. We had a song like, I'm weak. And what's wrong with that? That's sort of giving into temptation, right? Yeah. I wouldn't even say embarrassing. It's more just like, here's a vulnerable thing. That's a personal, uncool thing to say. And then just, like, little by little. We wrote a song called Joe, about a kid I went to high school with, whose name was actually Joe, who I still think about to this day, even though I don't even, like, see him anymore. But it's like, joe, do you think I'm cool now I'm playing msg? Do you think I'm cool enough because I idolized him so much in high school? Pretty embarrassing thing to admit if you, like, listen to the song. But the reward of finding an audience by going, this is the truthful me is, like, so euphoric that it's, like, kind of the reason to be alive. It's like, I'm just fully connecting to you now. And so that actually, if, like, I could give a tip to Writers like lean into that because it's actually addicting. You're gonna want to go deeper and deeper and deeper until you can. You can't even write that stupid silly party song anymore because that feels like it would be written by somebody else. That's not something you really are scared to admit. We, on our last album I had a song called Turning Out Part three that was about just like a whole like it went into like sort of intimacy, intimacy issues that I had and like, and my version of love was like finding somebody where like that was okay to like admit. I'm being really vague here. I'm sure you know what I mean. And like just after putting that out and seeing so much response of like, I've been through that too. I've been there. And nobody writes songs about this shit. Like, like nothing makes you feel more accepted and connected and like one big organism with everybody else to just like be yourself no matter how embarrassing. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I'm thinking a lot about the moment in writing or speaking when you kind of find you get to a place where it's like, I'm not supposed to go there. I'm not supposed to say that. You know, it's like the brakes show up, you know, I'm talking, I'm talking. Then you find that place goes. And what I'm hearing you say is you can actually push beyond that. And then that's really when you get to the deep stuff. Because what everybody feels versus what they actually express, there's a big delta between those things. And the wrong takeaway here is ah, just like wax poetic about all these sorts of things. Like that can be really overbearing.

[Jack]

What's wax poetic?

[Interviewer]

Trauma dumping is probably a better way to put it. Right. Trauma dumping is a better way to put it. Thanks for the clarification. And. But there's a way of. You're talking about intimacy issues. I'm going to focus on this really specific thing.

[Jack]

Yeah, really specific.

[Interviewer]

And I'm just going to go down and down and down and down. Rather than the trauma dumping which tends to be a little bit more broad in scope.

[Jack]

Totally.

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[Jack]

And trauma dumping I feel like often comes from a self centered place of like my dad messed me up this much. Not making fun of that, but like I think a songwriter's job, a comedian's job, like it's like I have this thing that's really personal to me, but I just have this instinct that a lot of other people are quietly noticing or observing the same thing or went through it and it's gonna strike a nerve with them.

[Ryan]

It's like the idea of, like, the word love is not really interesting to us. You know, it's like, that is kind of what you're saying of what is love? What is this?

[Jack]

That.

[Ryan]

That doesn't really make us feel much. It's the moment of talking about intimacy. I think there was, like, a quote. I forgot who said it. But, like, when you're writing, it's not about, like, you don't write about the brutality of war. You write about, like, a child's burnt socks laying on the ground. I forgot who said it.

[Jack]

Right.

[Ryan]

But that's, like, one character, you know?

[Jack]

Yeah. Which is so much of what we try to do with character because we. We also, like. We're not always just writing about, like, the most specific thing that we went through right now, like, this most recent EP is probably more of that. We're more into that. But, like, even when we're like. We have a song called Inertia that is, like, turned into, like, a fan favorite. That's just. It's a list of examples, basically, of, like, Inertia just that we've observed. It's like our friend that keeps saying he's going to quit his bank job and he never does. Or the couple that we know that keeps saying they're going to break up, but they're together for the next 20 years. It's a huge concept, Inertia in society. But it's what you're saying. It's like zooming in on these tiny little vignettes that you just know it when you hear it. If it's phrased in the right way, with the right ten words in a row and the right melody, you're just like, I believe you. I know exactly what you're talking about. And I have a friend that went through that exact same thing. Zooming in on that character. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about musical theater and pulling from there. You definitely see it in the overture songs at the beginning of your albums. How else have you pulled from musical theater?

[Ryan]

That was like, our first love. I think before we even thought of forming a band, we were like, we're so uncool. But we were. We were, like, putting on Broadway shows in our living room and making up the lyrics and everything like that. So I think we couldn't not pull from it in some way. We feel like there's no limitations in musical theater, and there really aren't. You can just.

[Jack]

You can be as uncool as possible.

[Ryan]

It's Bohemian Rhapsody. It's Change up times, talk about a random thing. And then there's a new character that comes in, and it's just constantly changing.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

And we love that.

[Jack]

And it's also pure emotion, undiluted by, like, society, where music is at right now, or culture's at right now. Like, so many of our AJR demos, you would hear and you go, that's like, literally a Broadway song. And then usually it's Jack's job. He comes in and goes, this is. I can tell that my friends are not gonna think this is cool. Add in a trap style, add in this thing, the villain.

[Interviewer]

Wait, so how does that happen? So you come in, like, walk me through that.

[Ryan]

It's so hard to explain. It's become so much gut feeling at this point. It's. What am I feeling? It's. Is my brain. Is my attention going away now? Is it too far in the other direction?

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

I don't know if it's so much, like, uncool. It's just something that I'm just not quite feeling is music. You know, it's like, if we go too far in the musical theater of hold on now, we're even gonna start having dialogue in between, like, slides that it's too far.

[Jack]

And this is where the partnership of us two really, like, is everything and really works. Because, like, I. I think more often than not, I'm starting the songs like, I'm making the, like, raw clay. We have a song, World's Smallest Violin, that, like, turned into probably our biggest hit. Yeah. The first version I showed Jack is a perfect example of this, like, extremely Broadway sounding. There were no sort of 808s in IT production wise. But also, like, the lyrics, there's a part in the song that's like, oh, my God, that's so insane. Oh, my God, that's such a shame. The original lyric was like, that's the way it always is, and that's the way it's always been. The more. That was the original lyric that I wrote, which is. I don't know. What did you hear in that? That you were like, this lost my attention. It's like a stupid, like, teaching the.

[Ryan]

Audience, being sort of lectured at. Right. It feels very Broadway. Like, I need to see set pieces in order to really understand, you know, I need to see other characters. And sometimes you just need to feel. Oh, my God. That's so. Like, just. You need to just say something sort of simple.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

That was that moment.

[Jack]

Right. I think. But just. Yeah. Having that outside perspective is like, why there's so many, like Joel and Ethan Cohen.

[Interviewer]

Why?

[Jack]

There's so many partnerships that work well. It's like somebody's. Like Steve Martin says, like, your subconscious writes and your conscious edits.

[Interviewer]

Nice.

[Jack]

Right. I think so often I'm the subconscious and he's the conscious. It's just, I don't care what's cool. I don't care about anything. Just this is making me feel a lot. Then I bring you in as an out. Right. As an outside perspective, and you go. You don't even realize it's right in front of you. Ryan put this here and this here and change the. And then we have a song that people actually like. Yeah.

[Ryan]

I think I'm more in touch with the public than Ryan is. Obviously. I think that's what makes it a good combination. Like, I really observe what people like in music and what people don't like. I find it so fascinating.

[Interviewer]

How do you study that?

[Ryan]

Oh, in college, I just stared at people. Truly. I'm not even kidding.

[Jack]

Why did you think to do that?

[Ryan]

I thought it was so much fun. Two songs that sound almost exactly the same. One people are sitting on the table, the other people are talking through. And I was like, there's a DNA. There's something living within music that make people do that. That's so interesting to me. I kind of just fell in love with it, and it almost trained me to be very in touch.

[Interviewer]

Were there certain cultural songs where you got fascinated by why it resonates so much?

[Jack]

Well, so often you call hits before they become hits.

[Ryan]

Yeah. And, God, that's different, though. That's like, truly a gut feeling. Like, Benny Blanco described it perfectly when, like, he did an interview recently, and he was like, it's the feeling when you're about to kiss someone. And it's like that really good nervousness where you're, like, leaning in. And he just absolutely nailed it. That's exactly what I. It's the excitement of something new. Take me to church, Hosier. I'm like, oh, my God, Wait a sec. I haven't heard something like this in a while. This is so new. And I have a new energy in me, and that's kind of what I feel when I'm looking for hit songs or anything like that or what is a hit. I know it didn't fully answer the question. I think that's sort of a different kind of world.

[Jack]

I guess so. Yeah. What was your question?

[Interviewer]

If there was a song that you got really interested in and saying, why did this. Why did this hit so much I.

[Ryan]

Mean, it is songs like Take Me to Church. Those are the most interesting ones. When I forgot what the climate of music was like. But let's say it was like Soundcloud rap. That was the climate of music. And then Take Me to Church comes out. Or Ho hey by the Lumineers. That was the only song of its kind. Those are the ones that I've really become fascinated by because the whole tide of music is about to change. What in the culture makes people want to grab a guitar now and get up on a table in a bar with their friends as opposed to rage in the club? You know, that's the stuff that I really like to study.

[Interviewer]

Well, what you're saying that I hadn't really thought about is how much the context matters. That basically there is a time and place that the culture is in right now.

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And what you want to do is you want to speak to that time and place. But if you fully speak to it and give into it, then you're blending.

[Jack]

In with everybody else.

[Interviewer]

Blending in with everybody else. Yeah. Whereas if you're too different, then it's like, we're not this time and place right now.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

I think that kind of falls back into what you were saying about world's smallest violin, about the, like, don't go too far. You got to put it back in the setting. But also, still, World's smallest violin doesn't sound like anything else. It's sort of this silly blue grassy dance song. You know that?

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

I think that's the same kind of world that we're talking about.

[Jack]

Yeah. And you're right. Context. Like, I don't think it's a crazy miracle that folk has been so in. In the last, like, few years, because we're all just like, doing this all day and there's stimulation, stimulation. Like, what do you want? If you're doing this all day and see video after video, you want some kind of calming music. You want to. This sounds so cynical, but you want to be able to hear the guy talk over the music. So, like, of course it's going to be a little bit more stripped down, where it's like maybe just guitar and a voice. Because if it's a million instruments, you can't hear your favorite influencer talk over that. You're also hearing it through a phone speaker. A lot of. Unfortunately a lot of music now. So you want just like three or four instruments as opposed to 100 instruments to shine through. In retrospect, it's so easy to kind of look back and Be like, of course folk was coming, but it's a new kind of folk that speaks to Gen Z a little more 100%.

[Interviewer]

Because if you think of the rise of EDM, I think of sort of the glory days of that being 2011 to 2015. That was peak iPhone. That was when the iPhone was awesome. You would pull out the iPhone, you pulled out magic, you pulled out a portal to the cosmos and the universe, and now you pull out your iPhone, and it's like. It's like you're being zapped with distraction. And now it's sort of an enemy. So now what's more in. It's the nostalgia, it's the folk. Country music is booming because that's what I want for music, is I used to want, okay, let's plug into the matrix of smartphone electronification, and now I want to tune out and retreat to the golden age of nostalgia and simplicity.

[Ryan]

No, it's just totally the climate. And people, like, either can predict it or get lucky. Almost like. It almost seemed like Noah Kahn, who we know, and he's done such an amazing job at kind of wrapping up what people are feeling now. I feel like people are. Could be a little moving away from the phone, throw away the phone, leave home and go backpacking through, you know, Oregon or something like that. And he's really tapped into that. It's these moments, these predictors that are really impressive in music, I think.

[Jack]

Yeah. And how often do you feel like people are judging? People are. The general population is gonna be here by the time I put this music out. Or how often do you think people are just, like, getting lucky and it's just how they're feeling?

[Ryan]

Even though it's getting lucky, I think that there's some people who are just like. It kind of goes back to what we're saying. Like, he feels that, so the rest of the public must feel it too. This is something that he wants to describe. And odds are a lot of other people are gonna feel the same. Similar to talking about embarrassing things, a lot of people are gonna feel the same as well. Yeah. I think society more connected than people think.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Well, I have friends who I would say are bellwethers for the rest of culture. And then the question is, how far ahead are they of everybody else? The term bellwether, a bellwether is. It's almost. Almost like a canary in the coal mine. Like, the bellwether sort of reflects what's going on. The canary of the coal mine. What they do is sort of a leading indicator of what's going to happen? Our friend who's a designer and his taste is always a few years ahead of the culture. There's a guy who I follow named Balaji Srinivasan. He's a technologist. That's like sort of become a joke that, ah, Balaji was right. And it's just, how far ahead are these people? And I. I don't know the music world that well, but I guarantee there's gotta be musicians who are like that with sound and lyric and whatever else.

[Jack]

Yeah, Kanye's the shining. Sure, sure.

[Ryan]

Rick Rubin.

[Jack]

Rick Rubin. Absolutely.

[Ryan]

They just have it. Some of them are just.

[Jack]

Yeah. If you look back at every Kanye, like, disclaimer, Kanye has gone crazy and don't agree with anything he said. But that would be stupid to erase how he's the most transformative artist of the last 20 years. Right. Just because he went crazy after that. Anyway, if you look at every album, he's like two or three years ahead. And then you watch every other rapper sort of go, oh, I guess hip hop is leaning in more of like a gospel direction now, like two or three years later. And I think it's why everybody hears, at least for the last 20 years, everybody heard, what's the one before Beautiful Dark, Twisted Fantasy. What's that?

[Ryan]

Jesus. Oh, no, before.

[Jack]

Oh, 808s in heartbreaks.

[Ryan]

808S.

[Jack]

Everybody hears that and goes, what is this garbage? And then it takes everybody like six months to catch up and go, oh, now this is what hip hop is. And then suddenly Drake fully sounds like 808s and heartbreaks. It takes a certain guts to just go. It's like a version of just being embarrassing and telling your truth. It's just, this is where I think music going, slash. This is my truth, production wise. And if it fails horribly, I'm willing to die on that hill. It's way easier to just sort of follow the trend. So I think that's admirable.

[Interviewer]

When you're writing, do you feel. How would you describe the process of creating the wet clay? Is it. When is it frantic? When is it excitement? When does it come from? Sort of a slow drip.

[Jack]

My friends recognize it and call it work mode, like Ryan's in work mode. And I think they all notice that I'm way less social. I'm sort of a creature version of myself while I'm in that mode. And I've heard this from other sort of artists and directors while they're making a movie. It's like, there's no room in your Brain to, like, make small talk with anybody else. Like, it doesn't make you an asshole. It just makes you, like, sort of. I don't know, you're a robot and you switch into work mode. To me, I'm constantly a sponge, taking in things. I'm naked. I feel naked in terms of how vulnerable I am. For the last. While we were making this EP for the last six months, like, I found myself so many times, like, going to Jack or going to Friends, being like, when you said that, that was, like, really offensive. Or when I said this was. Was that joke taken wrong? I feel really bad about that. That's what I mean by, like, you're just kind of naked because you're just wearing your heart on your sleeve. Because you're constantly trying to mine from yourself, from your life, from your memories, from your therapy sessions of what's going to make good fodder for music. And so I guess when I sit down for the more emotional stuff, I have to start from somewhere. Like with a dog song. I have to start with. Okay, there's a character here that thinks he's protecting us. We're actually protecting him. What's this story? And I started writing a dog song about our life, and our dad got sick and passed away a few years ago. And the song kind of came about of our dog watching that happen and going. There's a verse that's like, I hope we don't move again. They lost half my shit. Those dumb moving men. And where did your dad go? Did they also lose him? Well, I brought you the stick. I hope that it helps. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, a little funny, a little duh. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you just did the real time. Like, exactly what I wanted.

[Interviewer]

The reaction, I was twerking everybody.

[Jack]

And I just found myself crying. I just saw myself from the dog's perspective. And I just. We have a thing where if I know I have something good, I text Jack the eye emojis that are, like, looking that way. And I know, let's go, we have something.

[Ryan]

It's time to write.

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know if I'm crying. I know, I know it's. If we get it right, it's gonna be truthful.

[Interviewer]

So that work mode, it sounds like it's a semi conscious transition that you make over the course of months. Work mode isn't Tuesday from 8am to.

[Jack]

12Pm oh, it's definitely not that. No, it's not a slow transition. It's a fast transition for us. Like, as soon as we Decided we're going to make an EP this year. And I knew we needed five songs and I just needed to buckle down. It took a day or so and it was then what you're saying, four months of me. Like, if I think back, I can't even remember most of the stuff that happened. All I was was just in this kind of really volatile emotional state.

[Interviewer]

Volatile, that's. That's an interesting word.

[Jack]

Yeah. I mean, I think you have to be. I think, like, some songs are criers, but you have to also be like, hyper attuned to yourself. Because if you're feeling like this beat I just made is actually like, more badass, you have to be so malleable that, like, okay, now I'm not crying anymore. I'm badass now. And that's like such an unnatural thing to. For a human to do. But you have to become a shell of yourself in order to be that nimble. We have a song on this EP called the Big Goodbye that is a perfect example of that where we. We had this track for a really long time that samples this, like, auctioneer guy. And we wrote the song over and over again. We wrote it as this kind of like, party bang kind of song. Didn't click. It didn't feel right. We wrote it as like a sillier. More like, did you ever notice this kind of thing in society? Kind of like inertia. What I was saying song, it became more emotional at the last second. We were like, it's emotional plus badass. Like, that whole process is such a mind fuck that you just have to be able to pivot, I suppose.

[Ryan]

Well, there becomes a moment where a song becomes three dimensional and it was two dimensional the entire time.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

So. And that's.

[Jack]

What was that shift? Um.

[Ryan]

I think it. I don't know. I've never thought about it before. It is a lot of feeling.

[Jack]

But we both felt it. We were both like, oh, this. Now I believe this song. They're trying to write a song for me.

[Ryan]

Or it's something that I don't normally think about and I try to put myself outside and the song is kind of teaching me something, you know? Maybe that's when it becomes three dimensional, huh? Yeah, I don't think we've ever really thought about this before of like, what is that feeling? Yeah, it really is.

[Jack]

Because we have tried to write a bunch of songs. They usually turn out like photocopies of photocopies of AJR songs. Like, we wrote a song about how it's great to be weak let's try writing a song about how it's great to be insecure or whatever.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Jack]

And that feels like we're just copying ourselves. And that feels very two dimensional. But then the second we either find like a real example or like a twist. Or a twist.

[Ryan]

Right.

[Jack]

Then we're like, this has to go on the album. And then we know, like, we have something great. Yeah.

[Ryan]

Because we want songs to go like this. Just like you want a movie to go like this. And if it's too long of a monologue about how happy someone is, you're probably gonna zone out or turn that off.

[Interviewer]

When you were talking about the two dimensional to three dimensional shift, I was thinking about how in many writing projects, when you start, you go from you or doing the writing, and towards the end, it's as if the piece has a drive, a momentum, and then you start listening to the thing that you're. That you've created and you are actually in service of that.

[Ryan]

Totally. It's the characters kind of develop a life of their own. Right. And they start telling you. Instead of you telling them what to do, they start telling you what they want to do next.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

I think that it's definitely a part in our music of we try to develop a good character and I'm weak and a dog song. And then eventually it's like, I kind of know what would happen next, what the location is.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

Create a bit of an arc for the character. I think that might be it. I think that's where the three dimension comes in, huh?

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

A lot of novelists say that towards the end, the character starts surprising them.

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And the story has taken off a life of its own. Taken on a life its own. And they're responding to the way that it's moving.

[Jack]

That must be the most fun feeling in the world.

[Interviewer]

That must be so surreal.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I can't even imagine that.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so I know you love making live shows. How does that process come together?

[Ryan]

Yeah, Live shows are something that we think about the entire time we're writing an album.

[Interviewer]

Oh, wow.

[Ryan]

The entire time. It's almost like the album is the Broadway soundtrack to the live show that we're doing.

[Jack]

The tour is the end goal. Piece of art. Yeah. Right. That's what you're saying. And the album is the soundtrack to that. Yeah. Yeah.

[Ryan]

Every single time we have a good song going, we know. And we're like, as soon as we have a song that's like, not so good, we definitely stop ourself. And we're like, we know this isn't going to go any further. There's nothing else we could do. We throw it away and it's a great feeling. Then we start over, and then we have a song we like. We immediately start talking about. And on stage, you're going to be walking on a treadmill and doing this with the background.

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah. Just for context. For anybody that doesn't know, we. We try to lean into our Broadway influence a lot, but for these tours, we. Our goal has developed to just be like, let's put stuff on stage that has never been done before. So we take influence from, like, our love of magic. We have a lot of, like, these sort of magic kind of illusions that work their way into the songs. Last tour, we had, like, a whole shadow puppet thing where then the shadows came to life and Jack was duetting himself on stage and sort of a narrative throughout that then ends with. Culminates with this, like, big speech where you think back and you go, oh, that thing that happened 45 minutes ago, that came back, that was an Easter egg to this thing. Like, that's what we mean by, like. That's the end goal piece of art. And so the songs, we have definitely, like, started reverse engineering the songs, knowing that the finale for this album, we need a little musical pause here so that we could go, thank you, Charlotte, and take our bow and then come back in with the music. Like, we're definitely aware. This is how we start the show. This is how we end the show. This is a great midpoint of the show for this one. I feel like Jack is falling, so we should have Jack, like, skydiving on stage. We did something last tour where, like, he's, like. Has these two 3D video walls, and he's in the middle hanging from a wire. And there's this illusion where he's, like, skydiving.

[Ryan]

There's, like clouds on both sides, like, rushing past me, so it looks like I'm falling.

[Jack]

And it's just become our favorite thing to do ever to make these tours.

[Interviewer]

And do you work with a choreographer now?

[Jack]

We really just do it ourselves. Yeah. Wow.

[Ryan]

It's such a fun process of the. What if? It's like two guys in their underwear at home just being like, what if he's this? And what if I'm doing this? It's like a weird drug trip.

[Jack]

Yeah. Yeah. And it also feels a lot like when we were young that we, like, we didn't have any video games or anything growing up, so I think we were just bored all the time. And so we were constantly just like, making up games or putting on plays for our parents or we went through a puppet phase where we loved puppets, and we went through a lightsaber phase and a magic phase.

[Ryan]

And like, we're still in the lightsaber.

[Jack]

Phase, but we're just like tapping into all of our cool loves when we were kids, but just making them on a grand scale now.

[Interviewer]

So what have you learned about making music from that live feedback?

[Ryan]

I think that it's to not be afraid to switch up time signature and to not be afraid to go in another direction. I think it's difficult these days to keep people entertained. And I think that doing a show where you don't know what's gonna come next is really a good road to go down. And then that also translates to. That also goes over to the music as well. Switch ups like this make you kind of lean in and go, wait, I didn't know that was gonna happen. Where's it gonna go next? So I think that there's a good parallel there.

[Jack]

Yeah. I think we're finding, like, more recently, we're sort of bored by verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, which is like the typical structure of a song. Every, like, no judgment to anybody that does that. But, like, I don't think any of the songs on this new EP adhere to that structure. And I think some of that has to do with what you're saying live. Like, we're like, you've already heard this chorus two times. You don't need to hear this chorus again. Let's do a crazy outro with this weird thing where we're playing on the sampler and, like, I'm seeing a human being and you're reacting better to that.

[Interviewer]

Than a third chorus, the iPhone ringtone remix.

[Jack]

Oh, throwback.

[Interviewer]

So good.

[Ryan]

That is a big throwback.

[Jack]

I love that.

[Interviewer]

That was so good.

[Jack]

Yeah. Thank you.

[Interviewer]

And I think that that was where you guys really nail it, which is. I'm laughing and I'm vibing to it at the same time.

[Jack]

Totally.

[Ryan]

And it's like it's someone's phone ringing on stage too. There's the start with the confusion too, you know?

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah. I think we're really. We're big fans of magic, but we're big fans of, like, Penn and Teller because they show you how they're doing the trick while they're doing the trick. Like, they're showing. They're deconstructing the art for you while giving you the dopamine. You need to say, that was great art. And I think so often that's what we want to do. Like, we have these making ofs that has now become, like, a staple that we do every tour where, like, we're breaking down how we made this song. And there's, like, all these visual elements, and we're like. And then we're in the library, and now there's, like, a set piece over here. And we're in the library, and a book falls, and we're like, let's sample that book. And we tell the story, basically, of how we made a song. While we're building out the song. And I just. We see people's reactions. It's really fun as an audience to be confused, to suspend your disbelief a little, to be like, oh, I'm starting to recognize that song. I hope it is the song that I think it's gonna be. And then to maybe throw them off or maybe explode to that song or.

[Ryan]

To predict it and be wrong. Cause audiences secretly love that. No one wants to be right. They think they want to be right, and then they want to be. No way. It wasn't the thing that I predicted. Right.

[Jack]

We're, like, transparently showing you the skeleton of the human while being like, isn't this the coolest human ever?

[Interviewer]

Well, one of the things that is very clear is that by looking at the way you guys have done things, it just reveals so much about the world that we live in, how the culture has changed. And it used to be that the relationships between fans and their favorite musicians, there was such a distance between them. And now we're talking. And even coming into this, it's. You guys allow yourselves to be known through interviews, through the live shows throughout. A bit more of an improvisational style, much less polished. And everything you're saying speaks to how much the modern world has changed. You're even talking about making of videos.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I don't think those were nearly as big of a deal 20 years ago compared to now.

[Jack]

I think you're right. Yeah.

[Ryan]

No, we were obsessed with the Lord of the Rings behind the scenes. I don't know if you've ever seen.

[Jack]

Those, but, like, we watched that more.

[Ryan]

Than actual, more than the movie, of how they made the miniatures and how they did the force perspective. And we were like, why is this not more popular?

[Jack]

This is because then we watch the movie and we like the movie ten times more because we're like, oh, that's miniature.

[Ryan]

Frodo is like 10ft behind him, actually. You know.

[Jack]

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's a middle line Like, I think that. Exactly our experience with Lord of the Rings, we like Lord of the Rings more after knowing that that castle was only this tall. But if I got that castle and I could play with it now and then I'm like, this is the same thing in the movie that. Now that's ruined the experience. I don't know how well this metaphor is working out, but.

[Ryan]

No, I get what you're saying, Right.

[Jack]

There's, like, a certain level where we. An artist should be up here and the audience should be down here because they want it that way. They want. We're not crowdfunding. What should our songs be about? Everybody. Like, then why do you come to us as artists? I think you're coming to us because we've worked for a really long time to try to have a unique pov. I don't think it should all be crowdsourced. I don't think it should all be fully transparent. But that's why I think the making of. The making of is art unto itself. Like, at the risk of sounding pretentious, right. It's like, I'm not just, like, showing you my Pro Tool session. I'm telling you a story that's fun, that's making maybe enhancing your like of the song.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Jack]

So I think that's what we try to keep doing. Let's have you listen to the song and notice these little details that we worked hard on, but not just give you the whole Pro Tools session.

[Interviewer]

Was there a moment when you were on stage and you heard people singing and you were just like, whoa, this is. We've. This is really a thing now?

[Ryan]

Yeah, it was 2005, was the moment we decided to be a band. And we were, like, street performing and, like, that kind of thing, playing shows around New York that no one was at.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

And then in 2017, we had our first. We started putting out that music that we were talking about before. The more vulnerable, embarrassing stuff. People started liking it. Then we got on stage in Orlando, Florida, for the first date of our, like, tour. Then after we put that out, and I think we were expecting an opening crowd, like. Cause we were so used to it, you know, people just like, let's show up and see what. What's good with us.

[Jack]

Yeah, we're gonna have to win them over.

[Ryan]

And we came out and there was only, like, 200 people there. And just every single lyric. And I remember just, like, being thrown back to the back wall. And I was like, there is no way this is happening right now. This is in 10 years this hasn't happened. That was the show at a place called the Social, I think in Orlando.

[Jack]

That's right.

[Ryan]

And it blew our mind, really.

[Interviewer]

Wow. I can't even imagine. That is one of the most unique things about music. You make it in silence. You work on it. You work on it. And then you get to go out and people sing back what you've written. Do you feel that same show?

[Jack]

Yeah. That was a moment where it was like, let's just do this forever. Like, definitely. Let's just hope that all the. We put on a good enough show that all these people tell one friend the next time we could play double and double and double and double. That's been really like our. The long game, like with ajr. I think it's really like Chris Martin from Coldplay said, like, the reason they've stuck around so long is that they've never been the coolest thing. They've always been something to be discovered.

[Interviewer]

Hmm.

[Jack]

And I love that. I don't think that we were meant to be Justin Bieber. Like, I just don't. Like, I don't think we're interested in it. Like, I think that we want to just. I think that can be really crippling to be that big. That's what I think we can be. And that's not who we are. We just yet. I think if we want to keep writing songs from dogs perspectives, we can't, like, get to that level of Ed Sheeran. And I think we're really proud of that. I think we're really proud of how slow it's been. And year after year just like slowly growing and having these core fans. Because it's a scary industry now especially. We could talk about like TikTok and all of that, but like, in the last, like four years, the industry has just like, is just totally different. Nobody knows what they're doing.

[Interviewer]

Talk to me about that.

[Jack]

No. Off limits. We watched it in 2020, just like before 2020 was. This is our single. We're gonna push our single to radio and see how it does. It just felt so much simpler. And now you don't really choose your own single. At least like in our camp now. It's like you make music that you want to make and hope that something goes viral. And it's. There's one weird avenue to having a hit song and it's social media. It's not. Man.

[Interviewer]

That's so strange.

[Jack]

It's so strange. Kind of cool. Cause it's happened to us a bunch of times and that's like, it's a great feeling. And then when it doesn't happen to you, you feel like the piece of shit and you're. And the. And embarrassed and a little embarrassed because it's all about self promotion. It's like I pushed this one so hard and it didn't work.

[Interviewer]

The image that came to mind for me was some sort of game of roulette where you're just playing game of roulette. You gotta hope that something works. And then the value of having an audience is it's like the NBA draft. You get more kind of balls that you can have for the game of roulette. But still, if nothing pops.

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ryan]

And it's especially weird coming from us because we started in the days where radio was like the thing. And you had to travel to every single radio station twice in America and shake the hands and meet their kids and do a million interviews. And that's what we really got used to. And then it was the streaming services, too. Going to Spotify and talk to them about it and have a hit on Spotify. And that felt a little more understandable to us. And then transitioning into this world where it's like radio is kind of less prevalent than it used to be. It's been very confusing for us.

[Jack]

And we're also now competing with Bill Maher and Trump and this. And like, suddenly our competition is totally not other musicians anymore. It's such a weird thing. You have to try to catch people's attention with a song while they're watching a visual of something.

[Interviewer]

Well, it's crazy that you would say that because the idea of a song being the point of it is to catch somebody's attention. I mean, besides a jingle from like a 1960s radio ad, that wasn't what artists were thinking.

[Ryan]

It's not what music is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jack]

It's a crazy, crazy thing that I just said. It's. It is just the industry now. I think it's like. I think we're there everywhere in society a little bit, where it's like the new Lilo and Stitch movie is sort of a commercial for the old Lilo and Stitch movie, right? You go going, I remember seeing that when I was a kid. It's like the TikTok is a commercial for the song, which is a commercial for the tour.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Jack]

It's very weird. And it's. In some ways it's not artistic. And we try to not let it affect us. I think we naturally, before TikTok were writing TikTok type of songs. For exactly the reason Jack is saying with the switch ups and with like. Because we like showing, deconstructing and showing one instrument at a time and making weird beats and stuff and writing relatable things. Like if those are the. If that's the agenda to make a TikToky song, we were already doing it anyway. So I don't feel like we're like selling out trying to write TikTok music at all. But you have to just be so you have to fight against that instinct of. All that matters is catching people's attention. And that's why it really helps that we have this fan base. I think if we didn't we'd be like falling and wondering who we can catch whose attention. But like for us a little bit, the TikTok stuff feels like the cherry on top of the. The fans and the tours and the community we've already built.

[Interviewer]

I want to go back to what you were saying about that's not what music is at all. Talking about that.

[Ryan]

Music is natural. Music is just you sit down and you're feeling something so you want to write it. It's not a jingle, it's not 10 seconds that'll capture people's attention. That's not the thought process that goes into writing in good music. It's what we said. It's writing about something embarrassing. It's writing something thinking that maybe no one will hear it and that's okay. And that's something that we get into a lot. And that's like often when we're the most happy too. Of like we write a really weird song and we're like if no one likes this, we're gonna be okay.

[Jack]

Yeah, we like it.

[Ryan]

We really like it and we're proud of it. We had a song called the Trick which was probably the least listened to song we've ever put out or something like that. Like fans did not seem to like it. We got a lot of like complaints about it. Of like. Cause there's like a weird high pitched voice and be like, I don't know about this one guys, but. But we just love that song so much. And I don't feel bad at all that the fans don't love it because we really, really liked it and we were really proud of it. I think that that's what music is and TikTok can really make you feel embarrassed and ashamed and it's not something that we want to feel. You know, talk to me about the.

[Interviewer]

Concept of truth because it's very core to what we've been talking about this conversation is speaking truthfully. But when we think of truth, we think of Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and making sure that the logic adds up and stuff like that. You're making a good rigorous argument, but there's deeper levels of truth that we've been talking about in this conversation. We've been talking about truth, of the truth of what you feel. And then as you were talking there, it was like you're sitting down and you're just making sounds and the sounds are somehow true to what you're feeling, what you're processing, what's going on.

[Jack]

I think. Well, one, I think it's constantly changing for us. We're writing totally different songs now that I'm in my 30s, Jack's about to be 30. It just. Our truth is just totally different from when we wrote week and we were in our early 20s. I think it's pretty subjective. I think that. So one of the reasons that we get asked about AI and music sometimes, and I'm not really worried about AI and music because of exactly what we're talking about. Because I think that when you believe when something about the way an artist's vocal cords are shaped. When Randy Newman goes I Will Go Sailing no More from Toy Story, like, I just believe the combination of his voice and the chords and the. And the. The take he got and the melody and the lyrics. And I can't describe why. Right. I just believe him. And if Josh Groban sang that and When I Will Go Sailing no More, whatever. I love Josh Groban, but I wouldn't believe that as much. I would believe he's performing that line because it doesn't quite fit with him and he didn't quite like, believe it in that moment. I feel that AI is only ever going to take Dua Lipa plus Billie Eilish plus Miley Cyrus and find some nebulous middle of the. All the artists that doesn't have a POV is just like sort of like a basic conglomerate of all of the artists. And I don't get me wrong, I think as AI gets better in music, I think music is going to sound more and more different. I think that's definitely going to happen. The way, like art now looks different. I'm scrolling and I see art that I know is like, has that AI too perfect thing to it. And maybe the first time I saw it, I was like, cool. AI ChatGPT can make that. And now I'm so bored by it because there's no feeling behind it. And like, while we were. While we were looking for an album cover for this ep, we often, like, find artists on Instagram, and I think we found ourselves going, oh, that one looks too AI. That one looks too AI. And we ended up going with an artist that created this. This picture of a. Of a reunion. That is how a family reunion feels, as opposed to how. Just here's how a family reunion looks. The way a computer could make it.

[Ryan]

And you couldn't Type that into ChatGPT of how does a reunion feel? What are the mixed emotions that come with a family reunion? Happy and sad, right? No, that's not. I want to feel something deeper than that.

[Jack]

I want to feel. And I can't describe why. And I think just as long as we can't describe why someone like you by Adele makes us cry, and then this one doesn't. Like, I. I don't know. I think music probably is gonna get better and better because it's gonna get more autouristic, if that's a word. Like, it's gonna become more and more from one person's point of view, as opposed to here's a general pop song that everybody can relate to that maybe ChatGPT could have written the way art is going in that.

[Interviewer]

Do you have musician friends who are excited about using AI and they're using it in their art, and they're like, hey, check this out. Check this out.

[Jack]

We used. So there's a program called Kitsai where you can basically, like, sing, and then you make it sound like this girl or. And you can input a lot of data of. We did it with Jack's voice, and we saw fans doing it. Like, here's Jack singing Hey there, Delilah. And, like, it's a cool party trick. But it actually helped in the writing process because I was writing a song. It might have been dog song. I think I was writing a dog song. And often when I'm writing it, I'll record me singing a demo with my voice. And I wanted Jack to sound. To hear what it sounds like with him singing it without him actually having to sing it so that he could go in and actually rerecord it. But, like, in that process of making a cool song, I basically, like, Jack was able to record it without actually recording it. No creativity was taken away from us. There's, like, just, like, a cool little tool to use.

[Ryan]

Yeah, that's a good use of it. I think so. But like, a fan putting out a Drake song, and I feel like that's kind of a mess.

[Jack]

Yeah. As soon as you're like replacing people. Like, that was our end goal with AI to replace musicians. Like, yeah, now have it do like the shitty work that no one wants to have to do. But I just, I really feel that historically, it's never like. The answer is never. Now anybody could make a professional sounding song. It's now the definition of a professional sounding song shifts. That's just with every new technology. When. When Photoshop first came out and you could put like a paint filter, I don't know, 2003, I showed my dad that and it was like, look, I. I acted like I painted this picture of me. It was cool for about a day. And then you move on and that effect is no longer cool. And I kind of think at an accelerated rate, that's going to be happening where art is probably going to get more and more personal and move faster, but probably get better and better and more human as it runs away from the computer.

[Ryan]

Yeah. What's going to be cool is I made this.

[Jack]

You can tell because it's exactly me as a person. There are off notes and it changes and it's not like anything you've heard before.

[Interviewer]

Well, the off notes thing is really interesting to think about how you don't want to have off notes for the sake of having off notes. But off notes are also a kind of proof of authenticity. It's the same thing in writing. When I read something with typos or there's some weird idiosyncrasies, I'm like, all right, you actually wrote that. You know what I mean? But also, I can't imagine anything more annoying than somebody putting typos and idiosyncrasies after having written with AI to be like, gotcha, dude. Like, that would be such a dystopia.

[Ryan]

It really would.

[Jack]

Yeah. I want to believe that you could see through that. I don't know, maybe I'm being optimistic.

[Ryan]

Maybe the typos thing is tough. Cause, you know, it's just in writing, in a book. But like, I think you'd be able to tell if a voice crack or.

[Jack]

Anything like that was on purpose verse. They were just feeling the emotion. I don't know, you could just tell, like in conversation, I could tell that I believe you and you really believe what you're saying. I want to believe that. That's the same with art. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And a major thing is when we're at your shows, we want to be connected with you guys. I mean, this is probably. Thank God I don't work in the music industry. I Better be canceled for what I'm about to say. But I do think that music serves a few different functions and sometimes the function is actually it's just purely functional, which is I'm working and there's some people sitting next to me at the co working space and I just need some sound so that I can't hear their dang conversation that doesn't distract me. And I go on YouTube and I'm like, focus piano. And actually I don't really care if it's AI generated. I just need to not hear them. Do you know what I mean?

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And then at the same time, there's artists who I really adore where part of why I love their music is because I feel a connection with them as people and for them to be making things with AI. I'm like, no, I've come to this for you, Jack and Ryan and now you're gonna outsource this to AI That's a complete betrayal of the implicit contract that we have going on here.

[Jack]

I totally agree. And for what purpose? So they could save a few days of time. Like, why is the goal of making a song I can make it this fast? Like this only took me five seconds to make with AI verse the two weeks. Like, that's the goal. That's where we're headed in the music industry. I don't think so. I totally agree with what you're saying about the betrayal. Like good music is like. It's a conversation. It's. It's passing on like wisdom. It's a cry for help. Like a computer doesn't know what any of those things are. It could replicate it by taking Randy Newman's cry for help and Brandy Carlisle's cry for help and combining it. But that's not my cry for help. Yeah.

[Ryan]

Yeah. It'll never perfect that. Maybe it'll get lucky once in a while, but it'll never perfect it. Just like it'll never predict trends too. Going back to Hozier, I with complete confidence that ChatGPT could not have written that song to be maybe by accident if you typed in a certain kind of thing. But it could never predict the next culture and what's coming next. That is just purely human. What human is feeling. They're only going to go by what was popular. Maybe it's a Beatles sounding thing. And that's not how songs, the new wave of songs happen.

[Jack]

Of real, like long lasting songs. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

How do you guys think about improving your craft and retrospectives when things you could have done better? And how do you think about those retrospectives I see and this general process of improving, you know, you. You're better artists now than you were 15 years ago. And part of that is subconscious. But I'm curious about the conscious part of what accounts for that improvement?

[Jack]

Wow.

[Ryan]

It's a good question. I think it. An uninteresting answer is that it just kind of comes naturally with growing as people, especially in the style of music that we make. We're going to keep being honest no matter what.

[Jack]

And.

[Ryan]

I think, number one, it's going to become natural because we're going to have new experiences that fans relate to. Number two, we become really obsessed with beating. What, not beating, but, like, doing something totally different than what we did last time.

[Jack]

Yeah. That's. You know, that becomes like, the death of creativity when we're like, okay, we did an overture for the last album. How are we gonna beat the last overture with an overture on this album?

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Jack]

And that's so crippling to us that it makes us, like, not even wanna write. It's so, like, hard to think, how are we gonna beat. Like, it's a competition between the thing we put out last year and this year. So often we find ourselves just taking a left turn and going, this album actually is not gonna have an overture. It's gonna have a whole different thing that you can't compare it to.

[Ryan]

And it's worked out for us. Honestly, I think that that could go wrong, but we've learned that that has always seemed to work out for us.

[Jack]

Yeah. And it's just like, we keep saying truth, but it's like, have, like write something that you can defend in front of a jury. Right. Like, we have some songs that I don't wanna say regret, but I can't defend. We have a song called Thirsty that, like, it's like, silly, and it sounded like 2013. And it's like the hook is like, thirsty, Thirsty Thursday and yodeling and stuff. And we were experimenting and there's been like, countless TikTok trends about how it's the worst song ever made. And not that that it doesn't hurt me, but I can't get on the stand and defend. That's actually how I was feeling. Thirsty Thursday, Thursday. But a lot of these other songs, if there was to be a trend about a dog song, how it's the worst song ever made, I could stand on the. In front of a jury and go, it's actually how I was feeling, so fuck all of you. Like, this is my truth. And I think that's probably just something that we've learned. It's just like, keep saying your truth, and then you can't possibly have regrets. And any kind of hate, which every artist gets hate now, it's just like the culture of that. Any kind of hate just bounces off of you because you're like, what do you mean? I was just being myself. I can fully defend that till the end of time.

[Interviewer]

You guys seem remarkably secure in these things, and that must have been a process of. I would presume there were times when you had gotten hate and you're like, man, we should. Maybe we shouldn't go that route. Maybe we shouldn't be like that. And now it seems like you've overcome something where you're just like, we're just going to be these people. Or maybe you just always had these spines of steel that. I just cannot relate.

[Ryan]

Definitely not. It definitely hurt us at first.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

And then I think we quickly realized that the things they hate about us are the things that we love that.

[Jack]

We love about ourselves. Exactly. Yeah.

[Ryan]

At the end of the day, it feels like, okay, I guess we just wouldn't be friends with this guy. And I think you could zoom out and realize it's not hating us as people, it's just hating the music. And in the moment, it seems. Watching a video, it seems like, they fuck these guys. They're pieces of shit and whatever.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

But it's not really that. There's kinds of music I would never get on the Internet and shit on songs. I think that's absolutely ridiculous and a waste of time. But there's songs that I really don't like and I hate and don't ever want to listen to again. And that has nothing to do with the person that made it.

[Jack]

Yeah. And we've also just seen so many of our favorite artists put out their first album, and it's so unique. And then they naturally get a lot of hate because it's unique. And then their second album was, like, apologizing for how unique that first album was and like, okay, now I'm gonna sound like the rest of hip hop. Or, okay, I'm just gonna do an emo one because that will give me less hate. And it's like, for us, we're like, no, you. You had something that was real, and you. Then inevitably, those artists often, like, go down in popularity after that because they're. It's a race to the bottom of trying to sound like everybody else. For some reason, we were very aware of that this whole time of being like, no, no, we're just going to keep being unapologetically ourself. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

So you have a new album coming out now, and how are you thinking about distribution and marketing? How has that changed over time?

[Jack]

Yeah, social media is just, like, a thing that we've had to wrap our heads around. I know we talked, like, about TikTok. Like, it's also a really cool thing. Like, World's Smallest Violin wasn't supposed to be a single ever. It was the weird, deep cut for the fans. And now it's like our top song that we've ever made.

[Ryan]

Three years ago, we made that and took two years for it to start being noticed. The good part, another one that got big on TikTok was five years before it started getting big. Yeah. I think about 2018, and then 2023 it started.

[Jack]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

You guys must be super unique in how long it takes for some of your songs to get popular. Is that normal?

[Ryan]

Yeah, it's pretty normal these days, I think. Lizzo, what's the song?

[Jack]

Truth Hurts.

[Ryan]

Truth.

[Jack]

Truth Hurts. Yeah.

[Ryan]

Yeah, I think she made that in 2016 and it got big in, like, 2021 or something like that. I mean, look at, like, Fleetwood Mac. They're like, the biggest band ever now because all of their music. Abba. Abba.

[Jack]

Abba.

[Ryan]

I don't know how to pronounce it, but they're, like, the biggest band ever now because of TikTok. I mean, they were always huge, but now they're like the biggest modern pop band. Yeah, it's pretty common.

[Jack]

And definitely it's easy to cry, like, to lament the old industry where you picked her single, but also, like, that's kind of a cool new industry where you get to just make a lot of songs that you like and go live your life and hope that in a couple years one of them, like, blows up and crunches down history to, like, forget that five years passed and just goes, oh, Ajar is blowing up again. Like, there's some optimism to it.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Jack]

Because you can never fail because there's always just the chance that tomorrow it could blow up.

[Interviewer]

You know, that is nice that you can put stuff out and many years from now it could be taken up. Because that is almost the antithesis of social media. Social media is this kind of constant grind. Things don't get rediscovered.

[Ryan]

That's one of the great. Because there's negatives, positives, honestly.

[Jack]

We've talked about a lot of the.

[Ryan]

Frustration, but there's a lot of real positives with this. Went back in the times of when radio was like, the thing. If your song was, like, they called it done at radio, like, down a lot of spins, and they're not going to play it anymore. Your song was never heard of again. Yeah, never. You don't even know who that person is or not person, what that song is.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

And it's the total opposite. These days. Anything could happen. Someone can use it in a trend. World's mouse violin was used. Started in, like, a trend of anime artists showing their work. Like, I'll blow up into smithereens. And it started, like, cutting on the beat of different pieces of art. That's just so unbelievably random. And then all of a sudden, it blew up from there. There's no other time in history where that could be.

[Interviewer]

Well, guess what's so weird about the Internet is you could basically categorize the Internet as ephemeral and permanent, and ephemeral and permanent are antonyms. And yet the Internet's both.

[Jack]

It's like, just a living thing that we're all a part of that. Yeah. I don't know what I'm picturing. I'm picturing, like, a swirl. Come on. Imagine this with me. What are we looking at here? Yeah, it's just, like, constantly rolling. And I think being an artist now, I kind of think being in any industry now is like, with AI Is like, okay, I'm rolling with the punches, and I'm ready to pivot with what people decide is in right now. And I'm still being myself all along. It's hard and more fun at the same time.

[Interviewer]

And what are the economics of AJR in terms of where revenue profit comes from? Because you were saying earlier that a song is an advertisement for the tour, and then merch factors into it. So how does that all work out?

[Jack]

Yeah, that sounds really cynical. I forgot I said that. But, yeah, you don't make a lot of money with streaming unless you're, like Ed Sheeran. Unless you're just, like, in the billions of streams.

[Interviewer]

Um, and does that bother you, or is that just that that's how it is.

[Ryan]

We don't know the ins and outs. I mean, I don't know the ins and outs.

[Jack]

Yeah, we'll tell you our surface level understanding. But, like, for our first many tours, we lost money. So it was like. Especially because we were, like, bringing cool effects, thinking, yeah, okay, we'll. We'll lose money this tour. But I hope they tell friends about in the next tour, we could play a little bigger. We very much played the long game with the tour, that has worked out for us, like, you know, financially or whatever that, like, now we're able to like, play arenas and amphitheaters and stuff and actually, like, make that money back. So that was cool that, like, we were right about this very long, you know, 15 year risk we were taking. Yeah. The songs. I think if you add up all the streaming and the music videos and stuff, you probably make like, some money, but it's definitely not what it used to be. You make money when your song gets in a commercial. That money is still very, like, fertile.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, you guys have been a lot of commercials.

[Jack]

Yeah, that's the kind of thing like that world is. So, like, when you're in, you're in. And like we were in a Microsoft commercial and like, they must have like internal conversations among all those music supervisors where they're like, something about AJR's music sells tech.

[Ryan]

Yeah, right.

[Jack]

So then like, Apple asked us to use Bang in their commercial. So we've been really fortunate with that. I'm trying to think, yeah. Merch makes. How else do we make money?

[Ryan]

Merch does. It's, it's. It's so much touring these days.

[Jack]

It's so much touring. Yeah.

[Ryan]

That's why it's a big reason why you're seeing so many people going on tour. It's just the way to make money.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

That's so funny. Ajr, you know, you make music and then all of a sudden it's like the Samsung Galaxy S17 and both. There's something cool about that. And then also there's. I mean, it's honestly how I feel with ads for the show. Sometimes I'm like, that's kind of cynical. You know, my life's work will then be to sell, you know, some sort of. It's how you fund it.

[Jack]

I don't know.

[Interviewer]

It's just sort of the world we live in.

[Jack]

Yeah. Yeah, I feel like that probably like when smaller artists ask us for advice, it's like, write a million songs, Write a lot and tour a lot and play a lot of shows for people that don't come for just a few.

[Interviewer]

When you say write a lot, what does that mean? Does that mean you sit down from 9am to 12pm every single day? It means you walk around with a notebook. What does it actually mean to write a. A lot?

[Ryan]

It's. Write a lot of bad songs is the idea. And it's such an uncomfortable feeling to sit in that. And it makes you feel like a failure and inadequate. But that's just truly the only way. I'm sure every writer has said this. It's truly the only way to get better. A thousand bad songs.

[Jack]

Yeah. And a thousand songs where you could clearly see, oh, you guys are just copying the Beach Boys with this song. Like, don't be afraid to wear your influences on your stuff on your sleeve. Naturally, the first 'Thousand, you know, 500 songs you write are just going to be like copies of your favorite artists, and that's okay. But now you have those skills in terms of writing, in terms of producing you. I feel like I know how to implement a hint of Frankie Valli, like, whatever, because I made a fully Frankie Valli song 15 years ago. So now I could just, like, take that little tool and implement it into what's a song that, like, week where that. Is that Frankie Valli kind of tool that I had. I knew that our voices sound good with distortion and that kind of high falsetto thing. So, like, it's doing it a lot. And then you get really bored of copying your influences and you watch your friend's reaction and it doesn't feel so good when they go, oh, were you listening to a lot of Arcade Fire when you wrote this? Like, you feel a little, like, ashamed, right? You feel like, I'm not an artist. I'm just like a proxy for Arcade Fire here. So you then start really working on, what can I bring to the table that no one else can?

[Interviewer]

What are the pros and cons of you guys not being classically trained, taking music lessons when you're a kid, being like, I don't really like this and we're going to teach ourselves.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

I mean, there's that imperfection that we were talking about. There's that. I feel like when you're classically trained, you kind of get conditioned that you miss a note, start over, you know, like, yep, you gotta be 100% on and you gotta punish yourself and it's gotta be perfect every single time.

[Jack]

Yeah, totally. There's also, like, what's, like. It's called, like, the Dunning Kruger effect, where, like, you're so naive that you.

[Interviewer]

Think you know a lot, you think.

[Jack]

You know a lot. And often those are the successful people because they don't know how difficult the road is actually gonna be. Or, like, they don't know what they don't know, so they just, like, go for it. That, to me, is like the history of us. It's just like, if we had more knowledge growing up of this is the correct chord to go here. We wouldn't have taken all the musical risks that we've taken and switch up time signatures or. I don't know. We bend genre a lot, I think, and we're very like, I don't care. Like, just something in my brain. And our brains are like, I don't feel that anything is so sacred. I feel like, why not take yodeling and combine it with classical piano and beatboxing and see how that sounds? And I think a lot of people's brains, probably, if they're a little more educated, don't naturally work that way because they're like, yodeling came from Scandinavia in 1600. And that has nothing to do with beatboxing, which came from Brooklyn. Like, to me, it's just like, does it sound cool? And that's the benefit of living in a postmodern 2025 world where you can just. Everybody's doing it on TikTok. Like, this random person can combine beatboxing and this and this and see if it sounds good, and then it might be a viral trend. So why can't the artists do it, too?

[Ryan]

Honestly, I think that a con is that we tend to rely on the kind of the same chords and the same progressions. At least I do when I'm, like, trying to write melodies and stuff like that. And it'll be so nice if I can get to this seventh chord and blah, blah, blah.

[Jack]

That's true. Yeah.

[Ryan]

If we just knew more in that way, I think it would just break.

[Jack]

Especially with the Broadway stuff we're writing. We're a little bit like, okay, let's do a crash course in music theory to be able to get where we need to get.

[Interviewer]

How do you guys listen to music differently from an average person? Listening, collecting, sampling.

[Jack]

I don't listen to a ton of music.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Jack]

Yeah. I mostly listen to podcasts, how I write.

[Interviewer]

There we go. We can add it to your podcast.

[Jack]

That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess the music that I do listen to is, like, old. It's like, I listen to, like, a lot of, like, barbershop quartet stuff, like 1950s stuff, like mellow Men. Like, a lot of Broadway stuff.

[Ryan]

If I send him a song I think he'll like, then he'll listen to that.

[Jack]

Yeah, then I'll listen to that. I don't have a good answer for you of why I don't really, like, listen to a lot of music. But you listen to, like, everything.

[Ryan]

Tons. Yeah, yeah. I'll go so deep into Spotify of, like, the radio, of this, of this. Of this. And then I'll get into, like that have like, no streams. And I just. I like looking for a great song, you know, and a lot of it can blend together. But then when I find that I'm gonna go into. I'm gonna listen to it a little scientifically first. I'll listen to it and just see if I like it. And then I'll kind of get that feeling a little bit of.

[Jack]

I think I'm missing that first step that you're talking about where you're like, I'm just consuming. Like, I feel like I only can listen almost like I just know too much about the production. I can only listen for, like, cool snare they used here as opposed to Let me let this thing wash all over me.

[Ryan]

It's just. I find it so exciting that I know there's gonna be like. I know there's gonna be one in the next hundred that I listen to that's gonna be like, oh, my God, a new song. And there's nothing better than finding a new song that you're obsessed with. Where has this been my whole life? That feeling? So I'll let it wash over me. I'll probably over listen to it and I'll hate it after the 150th listen. But I'll also be listening pretty, like, scientifically in the back of my mind. I just am obsessed with. With knowing why I love it and listening to a hook that I wish I had written. It makes me so annoyed and excited.

[Interviewer]

So you follow the radio of.

[Ryan]

I'm talking about of Spotify. Yeah, yeah. Like this artists or this. I think you can do radio of songs.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

So we could hear a song and.

[Interviewer]

Somebody like another radio.

[Ryan]

Keep going and keep going. And eventually it really. You will find artists that are unknown.

[Interviewer]

Well, it's crazy because I remember when I got to college, there was a dorm room, 10 of us, and the entire status game was who could find the coolest music. So we were on different music blogs. This song is sick, you know, whatever else. And we would just hang out on Fridays and Saturdays and Will and Vince in the back. They just always had the best music. So they, you know, if you had ox control, like you were the coolest guy in the. In the group. And now it doesn't feel at all like there's any sort of social capital to be gained in the same way from just finding new music because it's all just sort of on. On Spotify.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

I mean, a lot of the songs I find are pretty unknown. And it makes me excited, I guess, to send it to people.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

Yeah. Like, I think that there's nothing better than a good wreck. Like, when you recommend a movie to someone that they like, it's like, oh, God, it feels so good. I did it.

[Interviewer]

You know that song Sign of the Times by Harry Styles?

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

When I heard that song for the first time, it was like I was being born again. I mean.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Just. It's the side of the times. It was so grand. It was so. It was unlike anything else. I listened to it, like, a hundred times. The. The gift and the curse that I have is I don't have the musical knowledge to get caught on the snares and stuff.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Like, sometimes I watch Rick Beato videos, and he did one about Smells Like Teen Spirit of, like, Dunn and how that's. How that's all done.

[Jack]

I'm like, whoa. Does that ruin the song for you a little or enhance it?

[Interviewer]

Well, it makes me appreciate it more. But the problem is, then that's the only thing I know. So then that's the only thing that I can kind of hear. And I will say with writing, it's sometimes harder for me to get lost in words because just like you guys with sound, I'm like that with paragraph, transition, sentence structure, word choice, all that sort of stuff. It's. I can't turn off X ray vision in my reading, but I don't have it when I listen to music.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I don't know enough.

[Jack]

I hear a lot of comedians talk about jokes like that. Oh, I see what you did there. You did a turn, and that was a classic misstep or whatever.

[Ryan]

That's especially bad. I think in comedy, that's, like, where it goes to die. Right. What is? The dissecting the frog. You learn how it works, but you kill it in the process. Oh, it's like a pretend.

[Jack]

Yeah. I could see how that would ruin joke. Especially jokes like, come on, let that thing just wash over you and either laugh or don't laugh.

[Interviewer]

Well, it's sort of the hard part of getting good at something is you lose your childlike approach to it.

[Ryan]

Totally.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

I think I've developed the ability to go back and forth. Honestly, I have no idea. Just like I've almost trained myself to. I really think I can listen from that stranger's point of view. For some reason, I've developed that ability. And then I could listen from Jack's point of view. And it has come from just watching and really asking friends of their type of their taste in music and having them recommend songs to me and. Okay, I know what you like. You must like this weird offbeat kind of thing.

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ryan]

I think that's just one of my few skills that I. Yeah. That I can contribute to.

[Jack]

Such an interesting line that you walk between. This is the most extreme. I'm the artist. I'll tell you what's good. And it seems like you like this. It seems like the overeager. You have to just constantly be going back and forth in any kind of art and walking the line. It has to be somewhere in the middle of the two. Because if you were just making music based on like, seems like people like this, like, we'd be a pretty boring artist.

[Ryan]

Totally. But you need some of that. You're right. You need a little bit of that.

[Jack]

A little bit of that. Because there are a lot of artists we see where like they're like, I make the art for myself. And like that can be dangerous. Because don't you want your art to be seen by other people and to connect with people? That's too far in that extreme. It's just constantly riding that line.

[Interviewer]

Well, that's also in your guys partnership is you're saying that you come up with the early words and kind of create it and then you get the feedback. The very fact that you have each other means that you don't need to play both. Both sides all the time.

[Jack]

That's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. It's just I'm never thinking about like, I'm thinking like when I made world's smallest violin or whatever. Some of the more like uncool kind of stuff. Like I'm just thinking about how I feel in that moment. And that's the subconscious creates the conscious head. It's like you have to just be thinking about yourself. And then the next step is let me craft this into something that's digestible enough that people won't just turn it off and be like, this was a narcissistic exercise.

[Interviewer]

Have you guys pulled from hip hop in terms of inspiration?

[Jack]

Yeah, 100% definitely.

[Ryan]

Production?

[Jack]

Yes, for sure. Beats wise, but also like honesty wise. Like I like our first album that he talked about was like very much us trying to figure out who we were. We have a song, it's called Living Room. The album. We have a song on Living Room that's like so clearly an Imagine Dragons copy. And this one is so clearly a Beach Boys copy. Like I was saying. And then I. I think I was listening to Macklemore at the time because it was around that time, and he just had all these great stories on his first album about the shoe culture and how someone was murdered for their Nikes. And, like, I remember being really jealous of rappers that, like, wow, you get to, like, tell these stories that are so personal. I'm yearning to be that personal. But I have to wrap it up in a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. 3 minute, 30 second Catchy pop song.

[Ryan]

And then we wrote a song called 3:30.

[Jack]

And we wrote it. Yeah, literally, we wrote a song about that.

[Ryan]

Yeah, About. Rappers have it easy because they. They can kind of say whatever they want in whatever phrasing they want, and we have to kind of keep it this way.

[Jack]

And along with 3:30, the first moment of me. Of us trying to, like, bridge, that was a song called Netflix Trip. That's about the office. It's about the TV show, which is another example of, like, a laugh, then cry. And that felt like probably the first moment where we were like, okay, I can't. It's not our life to talk about someone being murdered for their Nikes. I can't talk a lot about the stuff that most rappers talk about. But here's how I can get personal in something that's truthful to me. How much a TV show shaped the way I cross my legs or the way I hugged my mom at this age. Here's my way of getting as personal as hip hop can get.

[Interviewer]

Who are the craziest, most faraway artists that you guys pull from for inspiration? Obviously, you talk about the Beach Boys and Imagine Dragons, and there's things you're pulling right in. Who is just 7 million miles away.

[Jack]

There's a guy named Dan Reader that we're really big fans of. He might be my favorite artist that is like, a old. He's probably, like, in his 70s or something. He, like, builds his own guitars, and he. He writes a lot of, like, the kind of stuff that I'm talking about. Like, he would write a song from a dog's perspective.

[Ryan]

But then there's also, like, the Mellow Men, too, which is like, barbershop quartet, which on our album Neo Theater, it was almost like the theme. It was like close harmony that we, like, fell in love with.

[Jack]

That's that, like, Peter pan, kind of 1950s, like, Disney choir thing that we love.

[Interviewer]

How about musical theater? Do you guys go to a lot of shows? Broadway shows?

[Jack]

Constantly, yeah.

[Interviewer]

Constantly.

[Jack]

Yeah. We grew up going. And then. Yeah. I think that there's, like, a feeling, like, in Les Mis, where, I don't know how well you know Broadway, but like in the show Les Mis, right before intermission, they're all like about to go off to war. And they're going, one day more. And it's like it ends and then the audience stands up and can't wait to see the second half. That's like, to me, that's pure emotion. Uncloaked by. Is this cool that we're going, we're off to war? Like, are we dressed cool? Like, all of that is diluting the pure emotion of France. It's about the revolutionary war in France. Like, France is coming together to overthrow the upper class. And like, they're all singing about it. To me, that kind of pure, unadulterated emotion is what I want to feel in our music.

[Interviewer]

Broadway really is just the place where you have the most permission to be expressive kind of with your body.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And with body and voice. And whenever I go to a show, I'm just like, wow, it's so grand. And it's, it's.

[Ryan]

And you don't get judged.

[Interviewer]

You don't get.

[Jack]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's the new church. Like, honestly, like, we grew up Jewish. Like, we're not necessarily like super religious. I've been to church a few times. Like, the first time, this is just my experience the first time you're like looking around at people that are like this and you're like, you roll your eyes a little bit at it, like. Cause I don't know. Because it's a new weird thing. And then you go a few more times and you're like, oh, I'm the villain in this story. They're just being fully themselves. Like, who am I to like look down on them? And it turned into like the most magical experience ever. Like being in any sort of. Like that is what religion is. It's like, like we're all one big organism here. And there's nothing like disconnecting all of us. We're all just gonna be ourselves. And that's how Broadway makes me feel. And that's, I think, what we're trying to do with the music. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

The other thing with Broadway, I've been to a lot of shows this year, and what's cool about Broadway is it's close enough to your guys work that you can definitely pull from it, but it's far away enough that other artists probably aren't pulling from it. And you know, if I was making a live show, I'd be like, okay. I went and I saw Hamilton. Hamilton had the rotating stage, maybe we do that. We have a rotating stage for our next live show. Okay. I just went to Moulin Rouge, and they have the. The actors and actresses on the stage before the show begins. They're just sort of walking around. Every time I go to a live show, it's just dark. Like, what do we. How do we pull into that? Yeah, and now you just start going to shows. And every time I go to a Broadway show, I always find one or two things. Then I'm like, I'm gonna add this to my mental bank. It's a lot of things to do.

[Jack]

Totally. That literally happened. David Byrne had a Broadway show a few years ago, like, American Utopia, where there was like, a curtain that came down and a light down here, and it shined like a big shadow of him up there, and he's playing. And I saw it with my girlfriend at the time, and I was like, how cool would it be if we all, like, believe that this is his shadow? If his shadow just started doing different shit than he was doing, started duetting her? And I just felt that as a consumer in that moment. Then we literally just took that and put it into, oh, maybe Mantour.

[Interviewer]

Last year, I laugh because Madian, who's one of my favorite artists, he did a live show called Good Faith Live. And there's this part inside the show where so he's dressed as this black silhouette, and the lights behind him are really bright, so you don't get a lot of depth and dimensionality. And then what happens is there's this white background, and all of a sudden you get like six to eight madians. And I'm with my friend, I'm like, where did they all show up from? And we were totally tricked. He's like, you guys really into magic and stuff. We're totally tricked. And we're looking at each other, probably last 10 to 12 seconds, and then all of a sudden they all disappear. And he's standing right there in the middle. And we just looked at each other being like, whoa. You know, we had just totally kind of been burned or roasted by the artist.

[Jack]

And I was like, yes, that we love magic. Are you into just magic in general?

[Interviewer]

I hate magic. I hate magic. It bothers me so much to know what's bothering you. I just feel like I'm being tricked. I can't figure it out. It's one of those things where I think some people enjoy that sensation. The fact that I can't figure out infuriates.

[Ryan]

That's why we know so many people like that. Just Cannot stand. Get it away from me.

[Jack]

I don't even want to do the exercise of thinking how you could get that done. And for us, it's like. Like, if we could live in a world where that guy could be 9 people at once and then this, like, what else is possible? I don't know. It feels like that's. We're kids again.

[Interviewer]

Yes. Yes.

[Jack]

Yeah. That's like, oh, okay. We don't understand all of reality. Like, and that's fun. And I think we like the feeling of you trust us on stage because we do a lot of magic and a lot of like, oh, you thought we were going here. We've established a trust and we've established that, a connection. But, like, we're always one step ahead of you. And I think people, I think nowadays, especially with the phones is, I know what my vacation is going to be before I even go. Right. I've booked out everything and I've seen all the pictures and I know what I'm in for. And it's a really fun feeling to go to a place and just not know what you're in for. And a song ends and then suddenly Jack's skydiving here. Or like in magic, he takes out cards and then he puts that away and then all of a sudden an elephant is here. Like to just be a kid again, consuming the world for the first time and not knowing what you're in for. It's so fun. Yeah. Especially, yeah. For our last tour for Maybeman, there was a whole narrative and sort of at the end, there's this big reveal of like a 50 foot version of Jack that we had this like whole animatronic built and it was really tied into an emotional story just about like sort of being the biggest version of yourself and stuff that our dad used to say to us. And that was one where we kept really close to the vest. We were like, we tease a lot on social media. Let's just have you be there in the moment when that big. It was like looking over the audience. When that big thing gets revealed. Let's have everybody just be on the same page of bewilderment here and start to think back. Oh, that's why they were putting Easter eggs in the show throughout to lead up to this thing. Let's make everybody in the audience little kids again in that moment. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

How do you guys think about themes on your album? Have you heard of the album the Great American Bar Scene by Zach Bryan?

[Jack]

No.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so Zach is big country artist now and it's the album starts with a really beautiful poem. I quite like it. I've listened to the poem many times. And he talks about it, and then the final word, final line in the poem is the great American bar scene. And it's cool because the album starts and he sort of creates the world of the great American bar scene. And then he sort of rem Repeats the line of the great American bar scene I've been grappling with. Was he too explicit about the theme of the album, or do I really enjoy that it feels cohesive or something? But is that cohesiveness forced?

[Ryan]

Right? Like, is he trying too much? I think that it's different per album. I mean, actually, I don't know. I think we find it along the way. I think with maybe man, we found it along the way. We started writing a bunch of songs that were like. What's the word? Like, not aimless is the wrong word.

[Jack]

But it was all pointed in different directions.

[Ryan]

Different directions. We didn't know what it was. And then I think we wrote this one song called Maybeman. Or we named it maybe man, the titular track. And I think right away, we realized this is what the album is about. It was about not knowing who we are as people. We're this kind of person with our friends, and we're this kind of person with our girlfriend and this. And at the end of the day, who is the real me. And I think we were like, okay, this is the song we're most resonating with right now. This should be the arc of the album.

[Jack]

And then not to go too dark, and we won't, but throughout that process, our dad got sick and ended up passing away. Like, while we were making that album. By the time we wrote the last song for the album, which is 2085, that's a song about what we're gonna be like in 2085 when we're old and, like, what will have been important at the end of our life? And then there's, like, a wrap up to that first song of, like, oh, these are the things that are important in life. And we only could have learned that by watching, you know, like, everybody that came to my dad's bedside, like, nobody said he was a great architect. Everybody was like, he was the nicest guy ever. He had this little conversation with me. He, like, it really is about these, like, small little moments that you have with people and. And sort of friendship and family. It's like all this obvious stuff that now seems obvious. Wasn't obvious to us when we started the album. I feel like we, like, literally learned that lesson along the way. So I think that that's part of it. Be open to changing the course of, like, a lot of times when people write movies, by the end of the movie, they're like, I didn't even realize the movie was about this thing. And be open to that, because that will give you the best movie.

[Interviewer]

That was so fun. It was so good to meet you guys. It was so good to meet you.

[Jack]

Amazing. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

That was so fun.

[Jack]

We covered everything. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Covered a lot. It's just great to hear how you guys think about things and the freedom that you guys have, the joy that you guys bring to the craft, the goofiness. I really admire it. I hope we can hang out in New York.

[Jack]

Let's do it.

[Ryan]

I'm sure we'll see each other on the Neighborhood. That was an amazing interview.

[Jack]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Ryan]

Thanks so much for doing that.

[Jack]

Thank you, man.