Imagine Dragons Veer From Their Usual Process for ‘LOOM’—“This is the First Time We Ever Did That”

By many measures, Imagine Dragons are one of the biggest bands in the world: they’ve accumulated more than 160 billion song streams, and sold 65 million digital songs. They hold the record for the most billion-streamed songs—10 of them—on Spotify. They have four RIAA Diamond singles—songs that have achieved at least ten times-platinum sales (for “Radioactive,” “Believer,” “Thunder,” and “Demons”). They reached the Top 10 on the U.S. album chart with their full-length debut album,Night Visions (2012), and with their next four albums, as well.

Given this track record, many artists might attempt to continue their winning streak by carefully following their own formula as they record their next album. But not Imagine Dragons.

During a call from his Los Angeles home, frontman Dan Reynolds explains that he and his bandmates actually jettisoned a big part of their usual process for their sixth studio album, LOOM (which was released on June 28 via KIDinaKORNER/Interscope).

He estimates they had about 150 songs demoed when they got together in the studio this time, and normally they would’ve simply chosen some of those songs to record for the album. In this case, though, “We listened to them all, and we said, ‘Let’s just scrap it and write the whole record here, with Mattman and Robin, the producers, in the room with us.’ This is the first time we ever did that.”

Reynolds says they tried this new approach “just to try something new. And it just sounded fun. I’m like, ‘Write more music? Cool. Maybe it will be better than these [original] 150 songs!’” He says they wrote 30 to 40 new songs together, then chose the tracks for LOOM from those.

Despite this radically different approach, fans shouldn’t worry; the songs on LOOM still embody the distinctive Imagine Dragons sound, which is unabashedly anthemic, but with highly emotive lyrics imbued with a certain intimacy.

“There’s a lot of jubilance and joy and youthfulness, but also, it has moments of melancholy and sadness,” Reynolds says of the new album. “I love songs that sound bright but have melancholy lyrics, or vice versa—I’m always interested in that kind of juxtaposition.”

This interest in contrasts is, Reynolds says, why the band chose to name this album LOOM. “It’s a powerful word, and it just felt like it tells the story of, ‘Something’s coming.’ When something’s looming, it’s not necessarily good or bad; it could be either. But it’s probably both. That’s what life is—it’s never one way or the other,” he says.

He points to the album’s cover art, featuring a striking image of a sun shining on a pair of mysterious people, as a good illustration of this concept. “The idea is that it could be a sunrise and it could be a sunset. It’s a new beginning, or it’s the end of something.”

Although it was a different approach to write all-new material in the studio this time, Reynolds says the actual nuts and bolts of his songwriting process have remained the same for this and every other Imagine Dragons album. “I always start with some sort of musical sonic landscape,” he says. “I never write lyrics first. I know some people have poetry or lyrics and then they put it to music; that’s never been the case for me. I always have a feeling. I hardly ever actually have an idea of what I want to create before I create it. It just is created in the moment and becomes a song.”

He also says he never deliberately picks a specific emotion to guide his material. Instead, he’ll sit down and play a piano, guitar, or drums, letting a melodic soundscape come out as an expression of whatever he’s feeling in that moment.

“Once I have something created in that way, then I’ll start to write lyrics and melody at the same time,” he says. “Usually, they’re both being written together, because the words need to feel right melodically, and the melody needs to fit the lyric. I’ll start to say words with melody, and then I’ll pull out a pen and a paper and write them down and try different things.”

Reynolds says he also tends to work quickly. “I usually want to finish the idea, at least, before the day is over. I never like to return and rewrite. I hate rewriting. I hate anything that feels like work or rough drafts. I just like to have a feeling or idea and get it out of me. That process feels really cathartic and enjoyable—and I don’t want to do music unless it’s enjoyable. There’s a lot of things in life that are work, and music is not one of those things for me, and I never want it to be,” he says.

This process may not seem like work to Reynolds, but it still takes effort; he estimates he’ll spend eight to 10 hours at a stretch getting an idea solidified. “So there’s always quite a bit of meat on the bones on it by the end of the day, just because I’m too OCD to walk away from it,” he says. “I could not carry on a conversation with someone if I’ve been working on the song. If I try to stop midway, I can’t concentrate on anything else. I’m just kind of obsessed with the song at the time.”

He says he’ll revisit the idea the next day, “but I’ll never go longer than that. And then once it’s done, I immediately send it to the band.” At that point, he’ll wait for them to chime in with their feedback. Sometimes, he adds, it will go the other way, with one of his bandmates sending him an idea, and he’ll then write lyrics and a melody for it.

“I think because we all give each other space to do our own trade and instrument, that helps us never get stifled,” Reynolds says. “I’ve been in writing rooms with people where people get shut down very easily. And so we don’t ever do that. We definitely will be critical to each other, to the song, but never tell each other what to do. Nobody’s ever been like, ‘Hey Dan, that lyric is cheesy,’ or something. Everybody respects each other’s role and trusts each other. It makes the process very fluid. It’s never static.”

Reynolds says the band will pass ideas back and forth until the songs feel ready for the studio—and knowing when they’ve reached that point is another instance where his bandmates play a crucial part in the process. “It helps to have people wrangle me in and say, ‘Hey, I think we’re done here—let’s stop you there.’ I have a team of people that tell me when enough is enough.”

After a year and a half to two years of this, the band will have a large number of demos they’ve created in this way, and they’ll be ready to make a new album. “We’ll listen to them all together in a studio and decide which ones make the cut,” Reynolds says. “We usually pick between 10 and 20 of them, and then we’ll rebuild them from the ground up together in the studio. Everybody then brings in their own creative insights and thoughts and melody and guitar and bass and drums. That’s always been how we’ve created everything.”

Reynolds expects this is the way the band will work on their future albums, as well—and there likely will be many more Imagine Dragons releases, since Reynolds is confident his songwriting well will never run dry.

“I have a lot of thoughts, and I don’t overthink them,” Reynolds says, “so I am always inspired to write something. I write a lot—a lot, a lot, a lot. Like, obsessively. I’m always feeling some emotion. And when there is a feeling, there is a melody in my head that encapsulates what that feeling feels like. That’s been the way since I was very young.”

As he was growing up in Las Vegas, Reynolds says he “always had sounds in my head, so it was just a matter of putting it on paper. Writing, for me, is like a journal.” He started writing songs when he was 12 years old.

There was no question Reynolds was going to become a professional musician. “It’s all I wanted to do. I loved having an idea, and then you can create something from nothing, and then you can share it. To see it affect other people, or resonate with other people, was such a joyful experience for me that I just wanted to do it more than anything else. I loved it so deeply. There was nothing else I could do that I would ever be as passionate about, and I just had an unlimited amount of passion and joy that I got from it.”

He recalls thinking to himself, “‘It’s very possible I’ll just be a really poor artist.’ But I just had to do it.” Fortunately, though, his gamble paid off after he co-founded Imagine Dragons in 2008; the band achieved worldwide superstardom within five years time.

Despite his massive success with Imagine Dragons, Reynolds admits that he only recently has begun to feel secure in his chosen profession. “I always felt like, ‘Okay, it’s going to go away. Wow, this song popped off, that’s crazy, but this next one is not.’” Only now, as his band has spent more than a decade as a multi-platinum-selling act, is he allowing himself to believe this is actually his career.

Even so, Reynolds doesn’t feel like he can rest on past glories. Instead, he continues to push himself to improve his craft. “I feel like there is a better song to write—I’m always chasing that,” he says. “There’s something about that that’s addictive and wonderful to me, and it keeps me coming back.”

Photos by Eric Ray Davidson