How Finding Sobriety Unlocked Foster the People’s First Album in Seven Years

Mark Foster turned 40 in February. But as a leap-year baby, he’s really just 10. Ask him how old he feels, and the singer, songwriter and producer behind the band Foster the People, says: “Different ages on different days. My wife tells me that I’m 17. I approach songwriting probably much younger than that, actually, like 6 or 7. When I start a song, I don't approach it with any kind of craft. I just start banging on whatever instrument I'm holding and then chasing the accidents.”

Seeing the world through a different, even childlike, lens has served Foster well. It brought him to Los Angeles from Ohio after high school (the idea of “New York scared the shit out of me,” he confesses). And even as he toiled away at service jobs (as a barista at Alcove café, delivering pizzas, selling cutlery and folding clothes at the Grove), Foster found music. Or you could say music found him.

He was writing jingles in the Valley when “Pumped Up Kicks” popped into his head. The song would become a worldwide hit in 2011, resonating with hipsters and beyond for its poignant lyrics about experiencing a mental break (“Better run, better run / Outrun my gun”) as it climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100.

That a pop song would have such dark overtones is very on-brand for Foster, whose formative years in L.A. took a toll on his health. “Anything you want to find and anything you don’t want to find will find you in a city like this,” he says. “But that’s part of growing up. As a writer, I’m drawn to situations that feel dangerous. I like being out of my comfort zone. I love broken people. There’s complexity in those things.”

“Art’s not always supposed to make you comfortable."

It only took eight years in L.A. for Foster’s career to take off, but he marvels at how the grind seemed longer. Maybe that’s because he did a lot of hard living in the salad days of Foster the People. Signed to Columbia Records, home to Adele, Bruce Springsteen and Beyoncé, the band would spend a decade cycling through tours and albums. With the deal’s end in 2020, came musical freedom.

“I made this record independently,” says Foster of Paradise State of Mind , out Aug. 16 via Atlantic Records. He says the journey toward creating the album took him to London — where his wife, the actor Julia Garner, was working — and to British producer Paul Epworth, who helped craft the early notes. “Going into this, I had taken a step back from my identity in music for six years,” he adds. “For me, it was important to get healthy in a different way and really get to the core of who I am as a person. I got sober six years ago; I needed to.”

As these things sometimes go, finding recovery coincided with finding love, and other major life changes. “I got married; I moved from downtown to a place surrounded by nature. I'd never lived in the hills before, and I was like, ‘My God, why did it take me so long to come up here? To hear owls at night and to garden... Just connecting with the earth and things that are a little bit more effervescent.’”

During the pandemic, Foster discovered he had other talents, like woodworking and growing tomatoes, but there was no shaking his lifelong passion of making music. The label deal coming to an end — “At the end of our tenure there, the company was completely different,” he says — opened the door to organic collaborations.

Says Foster: “I camped out in London for two months with an engineer at [Epworth’s studio] The Church. Paul would pop in and listen to things. And sometimes we’d go up to his room and write together. Then I came back to L.A., got my bandmates together and other musicians and friends that were around. I set up shop for two-and-half months and basically finished the record.”

Paying for everything out of his pocket, Foster performed and produced much of the album at L.A.’s East/West Studios, where the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds was recorded. Indeed, lead single “Lost in Space” sounds like it’s from another time, with disco strings a la Studio 54 and flicks to the funk sounds of the late ’70s. “I’ve always appreciated it,” he says of dance floor-tailored pop music. “I started to dive into the pre- and post-drum machine era — Anita Ward’s ‘Ring My Bell,’ Nile Rodgers, Giorgio Moroder, the Gap Band, Parliament and Prince. It was all happening at the same time, this cross-referencing of styles.”

Enter Craig Kallman, longtime Atlantic Records executive whose track record for signing hit artists and launching hit songs has been a calling card for decades. It was the first meeting Foster took upon finishing the album and debuting “Lost in Space” and, “it just felt right,” says Foster. “I met Craig on our first record and always felt a connection there. He's a real music person. Like, loves music [where] it doesn't feel transactional. It feels very authentic.”

With that February meeting, which soon included other members of the Atlantic team, things escalated quickly. “They moved so quick,” Foster shares. “We had been already working on the campaign full-on two months before we even officially signed. Yeah, we hit the ground running.”

With the song gaining momentum, now comes the hardest part: setting it free. “I want to hold on to it, because once I let it go, it changes forms,” Foster shares. It’s a lesson he learned with “Pumped Up Kicks.”

Says Foster: “I’ve always seen it as an albatross. ... When that song was breaking, I remember being kind of beside myself. Like, out of all the songs I’ve written, this is going to be the one that I have to talk about for- ever. But as I’ve also gotten distance from it, there’s something so beautiful about that — to be able to write something that culturally poignant and controversial. Art’s not always supposed to make you comfortable. And as I’ve evolved as a human, I’m letting it change forms. ... I’m just a channel.”

A version of this story first appeared in the August 2024 issue of Los Angeles magazine, on newsstands now; click here to subscribe today.