"My main takeaway from our meeting was just they need help. Reynolds recently spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over Zoom - a meeting he calls "the honor of a lifetime" - and has joined a fundraiser for new ambulances to replace those lost in combat with Russia. Reynolds has also been working with a team in Ukraine on a video game. Imagine Dragons are huge in Ukraine and sold out the Olympic Stadium in Kyiv in 2018. The band performed at the Save Ukraine telethon and during the European tour, Reynolds was rarely seen without the Ukrainian flag, dedicating songs to the country. They've recently added Ukraine to their list of concerns. On a wider scale, Imagine Dragons have always had a social impact apart from their music, raising money and awareness in support of causes like LGBTQ+ rights, the fight against pediatric cancer and the empowerment of women. "If you listen closely with headphones, you can hear screaming kids in the background," he says. The latest single to cross the diamond threshold is "Thunder" from 2017's album "Evolve." Reynolds marvels at its humble roots: He wrote and recorded the vocals over two hours in his house in Las Vegas, even manipulating his voice to a crazy pitch in parts that were included in the final song. I don't even know what that means fully."' Maybe there's some people who can wrap their heads around this. "I honestly have realized in my life that I have no ability to have true perspective on any of this," he says. A stunned Reynolds calls it "funny numbers." Imagine Dragons - which includes guitarist Wayne Sermon, bassist Ben McKee and drummer Daniel Platzman - just celebrated being the first band in history to have four certified diamond singles - each reaching 10 million or more in sales and stream equivalents in the United States.
from a show and kids jumping on you at 6 a.m. Lots of throwing up on long winding roads with kids and screaming kids in airplanes and getting in at 4 a.m. He laughs good-naturedly at some harrowing dad moments from a few months ago. Unlike this spring's European leg, Reynolds will be leaving his four kids at his home in Las Vegas for the North American tour, which kicked off in Salt Lake City. "There were so many great songs that they had generated over a large time period and they wanted to make sure that their fan base got to experience all the stories they were telling." Sam Riback, executive vice president and co-head of A&R at Interscope Geffen A&M, agrees: "I think this is obviously Dan and the band's most personal work to date," he says. "I really feel like `Mercury' at its core is a very self-reflective record." "When I looked at mercury, it felt reflective in that way, that it was like beautiful but also volatile at times," he says. The album was named "Mercury" after the reflectiveness and chromatic beauty of the element. For Reynolds it was the opposite: "Every moment is so meaningful. Such blows could make anyone wonder what's the point in anything. "It makes you question everything," he says. In addition to his sister-in-law, Reynolds lost his business manager, an ex-girlfriend and his best friend. "The main takeaways were death played a huge role in my life during those five years the records were written," he says. The songs on "Mercury" reflect a tumultuous few years for Reynolds. "How do we go from empowering to happy and then happy to angry? There's so much emotional baggage with Imagine Dragons."įans will find out as the tour winds through such states as Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Colorado, California and Nevada.
"It was really hard to find the momentum and to do it correctly," Reynolds says.
One solution was to break out some of the songs from "Mercury" and halfway through the concert play four or five of them acoustically, in a stripped-down, intimate way on a secondary stage. Integrating the new songs into a seamless, fun night out for fans has also been a challenge, with the band needing to somehow fit hits like "Radioactive" and "Believer" with songs like "Wrecked," which Reynolds wrote about losing his sister-in-law to cancer. Where was I? What was I feeling? Now let me emote that.' That's a lot to emotionally go through every other night." "When I get up on the stage, it's `OK, the song is playing.
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"I don't know how to perform without going to the place that I was when I wrote the song," he says. The band is debuting songs from the second half of "Mercury," a double album of brooding and moody meditations on death and human frailty. this summer and fall, which means frontman Dan Reynolds has to go to a lot of dark places.
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