After his years of knocking on doors, Foster suddenly had a riot outside his own. Every management company and record label he had dreamed of getting through to were suddenly emailing and calling him. However, commercial writing will teach you two things; what makes a song catchy as hell, and how to convey feeling.
And Torches has both in spades. Each track moves so fast, with barely time between verses, choruses and bridges to even think about losing your attention.
They were a viral sensation for that time, a statement born out by the fact that nearly every single track on Torches was licensed to a TV show or commercial. And some even before the release of the record. They even featured in the triple j Hottest , despite having never visited Australia. Heartfelt angst was out, hedonism was in, and Foster The People even came under fire for Pumped Up Kicks once its popularity brought people to the realisation of the subject matter.
We sat on it and we kind of messed around with it for a few years, going back and forth. And we do that all the time. Then my uncle got sick, who I was really close with. He lived with us for a number of years when I was in middle school and high school. We found out in the beginning of last year that he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. It was a huge shock to the family.
I revisited the tune and I wrote that song with him as inspiration. It stayed in the concept of what Isom originally came up with four or five years ago, which was loss. Totally different. The Things We Do is a song that is written more in character. A little bit. Whereas Things We Do is like, let me put on like a Star Wars mask and sing the lyrics with a fog machine. The younger me might have tried to fight against that.
Can you tell me more about it? Is this your first time writing a film? Last year, I decided to take the plunge and teach myself how to use Final Draft. I started looking into writing scripts and screenplays. What moves me is culture. I'm watching culture and responding to it. I remember that week [that I wrote the song], there was some shooting that happened, and it really bothered me, because I recognized that it was going to continue to get worse.
And that nothing was going to change. And then that song popped out. I don't remember which one but I can tell you I wrote the song in January It wasn't necessarily reacting to the shooting itself, it was reacting to the idea, realizing that this isn't going to change and that this is going to get so bad. It was like peeling back time and looking into the future and being like, "This is going to get so bad before anything changes that a lot of people are going to die and this is going to be a really dark period of American history.
Did I write it specifically to try to warn the public? No, I didn't think anybody was ever going to hear the song. I was a starving artist, I didn't have an audience. I never in a million years thought that it was going to become a global phenomenon. Walk me through what it was like in the studio recording the song.
I saw that you did nearly everything on it -- you wrote it, produced it, engineered it, and played all the instruments, even the whistling and the clapping. How did you make the decision to make the melody upbeat and cheery? Well it's funny, I was about to leave the studio that day because I was across town in L. And as I was about to leave the studio, I had this thought. It was like, "You know what, you're here, why don't you just start a new idea.
Just write something, start a song, experiment, try something. And then I added the harmonies that were like late-'60s-early-'70s, like Mamas and Papas, kind of Phil Spector-y. Everything happened really quickly -- I didn't overthink anything. When I picked up the guitar for the bridge, I wanted to do something in a style like Jimi Hendrix -- like, if he was just casually riffing over this with his hammer-ons and blues influence, Americana style.
So it was little things like that where I was pulling from little bits of history and just experimenting. After that, I just turned on the mic and when I started singing, both of those verses pretty much came out of me verbatim.
A lot of times when I'm writing, I try to leave it open for the universe to try to serve as some kind of a channel, or some kind of a lightning rod, for whatever comes out.
And in that first verse, I didn't change one word that came out. I wrote that song in eight hours, and for me it wasn't necessarily more special than any other song. The thing that made that song special was the public, and the fact that people thought it was special, and it resonated and it created a conversation. And I'm proud of the conversation that it created. But now I've been very seriously thinking of retiring the song forever. Is it because shootings have continued to happen in this country or is it something else?
Yeah, exactly. Because shootings have continued to happen, and I feel like there are so many people that have been touched, either personally or by proxy, by a mass shooting in this country -- and that song has become almost a trigger of something painful they might have experienced. And that's not why I make music. We're still talking about it 10 years later.
It still gets brought up. And I'll tell you, that kid Nikolas Cruz. Drinking Hanging Out In Love. Introspection Late Night Partying. Rainy Day Relaxation Road Trip. Romantic Evening Sex All Themes.
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