Imagine Dragons’ Dan Reynolds Knows His Band Isn’t for Everyone: ‘You Either Love It or You Hate It’

Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds has faced a lot of pain and turmoil since the group released their most recent LP, Mercury – Act 2, back in 2022. His relationship with Nico Vega lead singer Aja Volkman, the mother of his four children, ended in divorce after 13 years of marriage. His drummer Daniel Platzman took an indefinite hiatus from the group to focus on his health, reducing Imagine Dragons to a trio. And he continued to deal with chronic pain caused by the inflammatory bone disease ankylosing spondylitis.

Reynolds channeled all of this into the new Imagine Dragons album, Loom, out now. “I wrote this record when a lot of change was occurring in my life,” Reynolds tells Rolling Stone. “It’s years of journal entries told with melody and production.”

Those journal entries were turned into bombastic, stadium-ready anthems with a lot of help from his remaining two bandmates, guitarist Wayne Sermon and bassist Ben McKee, along with the Swedish songwriter-producer duo Mattman & Robin, who have worked with Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, and Britney Spears.

The duo helped them comb through more than 100 possible songs. “They’d say, ‘We want it to remain simple and have no fat,’” says Reynolds. “One of my favorite records is the Blue album by Weezer, because from start to finish, I just can’t skip any song. It just shows all the sides of Weezer that I wanted to see on a record. That was our goal.”

Many songs pulsate with frustration and regret, including “Wake Up” (“Everybody’s coming, wake up/Bodies dropping everywhere, I’m waist up”), “Gods Don’t Pray” (“My venom went and turned to rage”), and “Fire in These Hills (“I fear I might die alone/I fear I might knock and no one’s home”).

But there are also tunes about finding new love and starting over, which Reynolds has done with actress Minka Kelly. She provides the handclaps on “Nice to Meet You,” which is about the early days of their relationship when her friends expressed doubts about this rock star that had suddenly entered her life. Sample lyric: “I was shutting up those doubters/She was jealous of our relationship/She hated that we were making it/She’s smiling but she’s faking it.”

Days before Loom arrived, we hopped on Zoom with Reynolds to talk about the creation of the album, the drummer situation (spoiler alert: he’s not willing to say much), his battle with ankylosing spondylitis, his difficult decision to renounce Mormonism, and blowback over Imagine Dragons choosing to perform in Israel and Azerbaijan.

We last spoke in 2013 right when “Radioactive” was exploding. Back then, did any part of you worry you’d be a one-hit wonder, even though it very much went in the other direction?
It was all so shocking. I don’t even think that went through my head. I was just so swept up in traveling to wherever we could to play to as many people as we could. That was the focus. We just ping-ponged all over the world. I was constantly in a new time zone and on a stage or in an interview. I didn’t have much time to think. I feel like it’s only been the last few years that I’ve been more reflective and had thoughts about it all.

That sort of whirlwind has destroyed many groups. How did you make sure it didn’t break you?
Oh, it did break me.

Not in any way that slowed down the band’s progress though.
No. We’d all been doing music for so long at that point. All the guys had gone to Berklee for school, and started from a very young age. We just took it really seriously. It was a job to us. We had four years before we got signed, and we would practice six to seven hours a day. We lived in a house together in Las Vegas, and then we’d go out every night and play six-hour gigs on the Strip. We did that for four years.

I think that really helped so that when everything was crazy and hard, we had already been through hard times together, and been really broke for a long time. We were playing music and making money and getting to play it for people all over the world. It was our career, and that’s all we had hoped for. I don’t know if that answers your question, but all of that helped. Everybody’s egos were a little more smooshed because we had just had so many years of playing empty rooms, and struggling to get by and pay rent.

To take a step back, what do you think happened in the last 15 or 20 years that basically made it impossible for rock bands to find a mass audience? Imagine Dragons is one of a small handful that pulled it off after a half-century run where new bands exploded all the time.
It’s a great question. I think two things have served us really well. One is that we write all our own music. I write from a very narrative perspective with lyrics and melodies. So it’s a very through-line, almost predictable thing to our fans. They know what they’re getting. It’s not lightning in a bottle. It’s just a Dan journal entry with a melody, and us creating music to that in a room. Sonically we dress it up different, but it’s always just an autobiographical journal. I think that throughout the years, the honesty, take-it-or-leave-it, this-is-what-Dragons-are approach has become familiar and comfortable. It’s a community for a lot of people.

Then I think because of the emotional quality of the music and the different genres that it spans and how much we put into our live show … we really have a great live show that we’ve really refined throughout the years and put a lot of effort and production value into. That’s just word of mouth. Parents are now taking their kids. People who went to Dragon shows 12 years ago now have kids and are bringing their kids out. There’s a lot of families at Dragon shows. I’m kind of guessing for you. These are things that come to mind that really helped us.

I think it helps that you aren’t afraid of a big song with a big chorus. A lot of newer rock bands don’t want to go there.
I love a big song. That’s the music I grew up on. I grew up listening to everything my dad listened to. It was Paul Simon and Harry Nilsson, Cat Stevens, Billy Joel. These are all singer-songwriters who wrote from a very emotional perspective. Then on top of that, I listened to a lot of Queen. I grew up in Las Vegas, where everything was kind of eccentric and larger than life, and unapologetically dramatic. And then 10 years of piano from six to 16 where I learned melody writing … you put that all together and you have Imagine Dragons.

Queen were definitely not afraid of a song with a monster hook. “We Will Rock You” is basically just one big hook.
When I was 12 or 13, I just wanted to hear melodic things. I like to hear every word of lyrics — that’s the kind of music I consume. I also was a child of the Nineties who had mixtapes. I would sit next to the radio, Mix 94.1 in Las Vegas. Every time a song came on, I would hit play and record and make mixtapes. I listened to just singles. I didn’t really buy a lot of albums. I was listening to the most poppy song from every artist. Alternative radio was really big at that point, it was like Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill and Sheryl Crow. And then it was Nineties hip-hop like Tupac and Biggie and Outkast, and then Nirvana. There was a lot of fun things happening at the time, but I was just listening to their most poppy songs.

Some critics have said Imagine Dragons jump around between genres like it’s a bad thing.
That’s just how I write music. I’d get bored if I had to just write guitar songs or something. We like to keep it exciting for ourselves. It’s a simple as that.

Let’s get to the new record. You worked with Rick Rubin last time. Why did you want to go in a different direction here?
I love Rick. I still talk to Rick almost every day. It really wasn’t a matter of not wanting to work with Rick. It was just wanting to try something new and be exciting for ourselves. Mattman & Robin we’ve worked with before, but we had never had a single producer just say, “I’m taking on the entire task. No other producers.” Even with Rick, we had other producers that would do songs, and Rick kind of oversaw everything.

This was our first time letting someone take the reins. We chose [Mattman & Robin] because I had worked with them many years and felt very comfortable being vulnerable in a room with them. I typically don’t like writing in the room with anybody. I do the majority of the work at home by myself in a room. This was the first time that I wrote in a room where the producers, Mattman & Robin, were there every day for six months.

They basically became members of the band in terms of songwriting. They are credited on every track.
They are such an integral part of everything. They’re Swedish, and they speak very little, which can be really intimidating at first when you work with them because you’re like, “Do you hate this? I don’t even know.” Over the years, I’ve learned to read them. They never try to write or change lyrics that I write, but they will be unresponsive if they don’t like something. There’s so much unsaid, and I love that actually. It kind of makes it like you’re just hanging out with your friends and vibing.

The lyrics on this album feel extremely personal.
I had just moved to a new city after living my whole life in Las Vegas. I just got out of a 10-year relationship, was navigating what that meant. I’d left my religion many years ago, so that has always been a theme throughout Imagine Dragons, but I feel like I’ve landed more in there, so that wasn’t as much of a thing.

Let’s go through the songs, starting with “Wake Up.” What put you in the headspace to write that?
I’ve always struggled with anxiety since I was young, feeling just anxious. I’m an introvert, and my career requires me to be an extrovert. When I’m onstage, I am an extrovert. I feel free. It doesn’t feel taxing to me. I’ve never been nervous to be on a stage, but I’m extremely nervous in a party situation. I’m always want to escape to the bathroom and just kind of breathe.

I don’t know where that comes from. I don’t know if it’s just how I was born or a product of being Mormon and always feeling unresolved or unsettled or untrusting about my situation or leaders at church or something. I’m still sorting that out in therapy. I hear “Wake Up” as kind of an anxiety song. I want to capture anxiety and that feeling.

Starting the album there really sets the tone for the rest of it.
Right. I wanted that. And there’s a reason we choose Loom as the title of the album. Looming is an anxious word. Like, “Ooh, something’s looming.” It’s not necessarily bad. It could be good, but it’s looming and it’s on the mind. Then also the idea of the double meaning of it being a loom, the colorfulness of that, and intertwining things together.

Imagine Dragons is not a subtle band. It’s love or hate. It’s just Vegas. It’s right in your face, and it’s from the get-go. Our first record “Radioactive” was the first song on Night Visions. It’s kind of following in that, where it’s just like, “Here we go!” You’re either going to love it or you’re going to hate it, but I’d rather that than to feel indifferent or feel vanilla.

On “Nice to Meet You” you sing, “I was buying you those flowers/I was listening for hours/I was shutting up those doubters.”
I was dating someone new. When you’re dating someone, you’re kind of also dating their friends and family. I’m in a very different position in my life now. I got married when I was 22, and I was still Mormon at the time, so I really didn’t date at all growing up. It’s been a new thing for me to learn in my life, because obviously I have a weird life now, and so people are going to have a lot of weird preconceived notions about who I am or who I am not.

So that song was about dating someone and their friends being in their ear like, “Whoa, you shouldn’t date someone who’s a musician for XYZ reasons.” Which are all valid reasons. That’s just about giving love a chance, giving someone a chance and putting aside your preconceived notions.

Minka Kelly is credited with the hand-clapping on the song.
Yeah. She was there for claps. That was the last song that we wrote for the record. When we had finished recording it, there was a room mic on still, and we were all chatting about the song. And then we had to cheer because the record was done. The next day we came in and we wanted to add more liveliness to it, and we were like, “Oh, well, why don’t we add when we just have the studio mic on.” When the second chorus starts, you can hear everybody cheering or just celebrating that the record was done. We had a lot of fun with that song.

On “Eyes Closed” you sing “Lock me up in a maze/Turn out turn out the lights/I was born I was raised for this.” There’s a lot of defiance and determination in that.
That’s a song with a lot of false bravado. I think I do that a lot. I started doing that when I was really young. When I was in middle school, I wrote a lot of songs that were just me feeling inadequate, and then I’d go home and write a song to try to make myself feel empowered.

I feel like there’s this 12-year-old kid in me still who always has moments where I feel that, and I feel self-conscious or I feel like I can’t … I’m just tired. Then I’ll write a song that is a cup of coffee for me, and [“Eyes Closed”] really is just that. But I love that people hear it and they’re like, “Oh, it’s this really confident song.” Because it wasn’t really written from a place of that.

On “Take Me to the Beach,” you sing about wanting to get away from the world, turn off your phone, and chill on the beach.
It’s one of my favorites on the record because it’s not very serious. The goofiness of it reminds me a lot of what I loved about a lot of the bands that I listened to growing up. Going back to Weezer, there are moments of self-seriousness and moments that aren’t so serious. But really the meaning of that song comes from a serious place of just wanting to have opinions about things.

I grew up such a people pleaser. I don’t know if it’s because I was a Mormon missionary and you’re trying to get into doors and you’re smiling at people … I think something from that has made me always want to be liked and want to have someone care. Then as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that’s been the bane of so much unhappiness for me. Once I could let go of that, I’ve been so much happier, not trying to control the things you can’t change.

“In Your Corner” is obviously a breakup song.
Yeah. I think a lot of the record is about a relationship. There’s the birth of it, the beginnings of it, the middle of it, the end of it, and then what happens after the end. I think “In Your Corner” examines that. It’s about loyalty, hurt, how to deal with hurt, but also being in each other’s lives. Just because a relationship ends, it doesn’t mean it always ends. You might have kids, you might work together, you might be in a same friend circle, you might have to still coexist.

That’s an interesting, uncomfortable place to be. Because when you have heartbreak, you both kind of just want to run away and that is how you heal. You can’t always do that, so then what? “In Your Corner” comes from that place.

On “God’s Don’t Pray” you sing “My venom went and turned to rage.” Where is that coming from?
That song actually started with that line. I was like, “Gods don’t …” I sang it, just kind of riffing over the song when we were building it. Mattman & Robin were like, “That’s interesting. Did you say, ‘Gods don’t pray?’” Then I was just examining what that meant. I grew up praying and asking for forgiveness and guidance every day. That’s what you do at the end of the day as a Mormon kid. You’re like, “Dear God, these are the things I did bad today. I’m really sorry. Please forgive me. These are the things I’m trying to achieve. Help me please. I’m thankful for these things.”

That really led me to never feel adequate. I always felt like I had something to be forgiven for and wondering if God had forgiven me. I really struggled with self-love because of that. So later in my life, I had to learn that that’s not a real concept for me, and also has been not healthy for me. I had to learn to hear my own voice and be my own God, or at least find God in myself or in the universe in some way. That song examined that, but it’s also a little tongue-in-cheek.

“Don’t Forget Me” is clearly about the beginning of the relationship with your ex-wife, back when you were both dead broke.
That’s exactly that. It’s really reflective on the simpler times, the good parts of that and the bad parts of that. I’m grateful for the way that I was raised. I got married at 22. I’d go back and do everything the same, because I’m so grateful with where I am today and my kids and that I get to do what I love for a living. There’s a lot of things that I just feel so happy with, that I don’t think I would’ve ended up here.

On the song “Kid,” you seem to be singing to yourself.
I’m really talking to my younger self there, but I’m also talking to my current self. That was on a day where I was really not in a good headspace. I was writing a song for myself to get through the day, make myself feel a little better. It was a very cathartic experience. I had an SM58 [microphone], and we had distortion on it, so you couldn’t really tell that much of what I was saying, because we were exploring that kind of vibe. It had kind of a Gorillaz vibe to it.

I just mumbled, “You got to get yourself together, kid.” Then I said something like, “Pull your trousers up, there’s holes in it.” Both the guys started laughing and we were like, “It sounds like you’re saying pull your trousers up, you’re hosing it.” And I was like, “Is that even a saying?”

We listened back to it and then we kept that exact take. I didn’t even re-sing it. When the song starts and you hear that take, it’s actually me just saying that on the fly. Then we were like, “That sounds funny.” That’s how I felt.

A lot of times that’s how I’ll write lyrics: stream-of-consciousness that comes out and I almost don’t even know what I’m saying. Sometimes it has no meaning, and sometimes it has meaning. If it has meaning, then we’ll chase it. I was feeling out of control that day. And it was like, “Get it together. You have a lot of responsibility. You have these kids who are counting on you, you have a band.” It’s the pressures of life.

You close the record on “Fire in These Hills” where you sing “I’ve lost my will.” Where is that coming from?
That’s one of my favorite songs on the record. I feel that way sometimes: “Where’s home for me? What’s my purpose?” I think that’s because a lot of my life has been restarted later in my life because I had such a spiritual crisis. When you’re raised Mormon, it’s like, “The next thing you do is this. You’re supposed to be an Eagle Scout. After your Eagle Scout, then you go on a mission, after a mission, then you get married, then you have kids.”

You have this timeline, and there’s an answer for every question. “What happens when you die? Well, this is what happens when you die. What happened before you’re here? This is what happens.” There was no questions. In my twenties, I was like, “Wait, who am I? I just die and it’s nothing maybe. Oh damn. This sucks, man.” I have had to kind of rebuild my sense of meaning and sense of self.

Do you miss the certainty of being a Mormon? There’s a lot of comfort in certainty.
I envy people of faith. My whole family is still very much Mormon. Seven brothers, one sister. They all live in Las Vegas. My mom and dad are still alive; all of them are Mormon. My cousins are Mormon. I have 40-plus nieces and nephews, all Mormon. I’m the only one who’s not. So that’s a strange position for me. I would love to believe that families are forever, and heaven and all those things come up.

How did your family react when you turned against the faith so publicly?
There have been hard moments, but we’ve worked through it, and I’m really close with my family. I’m really close with my mom and dad. We’ve healed a lot of hurt that’s come through the public-ness of that. I have a lot of respect and love for them. It just something that didn’t work for me.

Let’s say you’re talking to a 17-year-old Mormon about to go on his mission, but he’s having doubts about the whole thing. He wants to honor his family tradition, but the church’s stance on LGBTQ issues is hard for him to take. What would you tell him?
To really see that through for yourself and listen to your own voice. Don’t just follow what you think you’re supposed to do. I really would not encourage them to go on a two-year mission, unless they felt, “I’m all in. Yes, I love this.” If you feel unsettled about it, a two-year mission is a long time. It’s hard to hear yourself when you’re knocking doors every day telling people what the truth is, and you don’t even know it yourself. That’s what I did for two years, and I got really lost.

You’ve said you don’t regret it though.
I don’t, because it really made me who I am. But it was really difficult. I have a lot of happiness in my life now, and I don’t know how much of that is because of that. I only lived this life to my knowledge. So I want to be exactly where I am today, and I’m happy with who I am today. I don’t know how much I attribute to that or not, but I certainly wouldn’t tell some other kid to go on a Mormon mission.

I was stunned to learn they only let you call home twice a year.
Mother’s Day and Christmas. You get an hour and your mission companion is waiting there right by you the whole time, because he wants to call. It’s a really lonely two years. You save up $10,000 on your own from working jobs all growing up, and you live off $10,000, and that’s your room and food for two years. You can do the math, $10,000 for two years for your apartment and for your food. The church doesn’t pay for it. You pay for it.

To move on here, fans are confused about the drummer situation. Daniel Platzman went on hiatus from the band a year ago. Is he on the album?
He doesn’t play on the record, and I can’t talk about that.

Fair enough. Original Imagine Dragons drummer Andrew Tolman has been filling in ever since Daniel left. Will he be on the upcoming tour?
Andrew will be on the tour.

What’s it been like to have him back? When he left, you guys were a baby band. And now he’s suddenly back with you playing arenas. It must be a real trip for him.
It was very full circle. Before he even came back, he’d been on the road with us as a drum tech and helping behind the scenes. He also lives right next door to our guitarist. They’re best friends and have been through the whole process, way before the band started. We’ve always been really close with Andrew. I love him. He’s a really, really good human.

If you go on Reddit or the fan forums, there are very long, confused threads about Daniel. But I take it that it’s simply not your story to tell, and you can’t talk about it anyways.
Exactly that.

How are you doing in terms of your health?
My ulcerative colitis has been in remission for many years. [Ankylosing spondylitis], I still flare at least a couple of times a year, but I usually can get it under control with just a strict diet. l’ll give myself a shot of a biologic once or twice a year if I’m having a really bad flare. That happens if I’m really stressed or something, and sometimes it’ll be more often than that, but usually with diet and exercise I can keep it under control.

Every day I have to exercise. I have to flush my body, all my joints, whether I like it or not. I genuinely don’t like the gym, and I just don’t have a choice, because it’s what makes it so my body doesn’t hurt. I strengthen my joints, my hinge joints, especially in my hips, my shoulders, and elbows. But that being said, I’m able to do what I want every day. Some days I’m a little more inflamed than others, so I’m just grateful for my body still working.

How did you learn to stay positive after the initial diagnosis?
Anytime someone is diagnosed with a disease, you feel scared and angry. I was like, “Why me? Why is this happening?” Especially since I had lived so clean. I didn’t even have a drink of alcohol until I was in my mid-twenties, and I got diagnosed at 21 years old. I lived the strict Mormon life and still it was like, “Well, why is this happening? Is it because I’m struggling with Mormonism? Is this from God? What is this?”

Then I just went through the cycle that most people do where it’s like, “Well, complaining about it isn’t really getting me anywhere. What do I do just to not be in pain? Let me try to do every single thing I can.” I de-stress, eat healthy, cut out processed foods, exercise every day, find a good doctor, and try my best every day to do all those things. I do therapy every week to try to de-stress myself and find other ways of calming myself down.

The tour starts in a few weeks. How much thought have you given to the set list and finding slots for the new songs?
It’s so hard. At this point in your career when you have six albums, it’s like, “There’s so much material and not enough time to comb through it.” We really are trying to pick the songs that we believe that fans will want to hear, deliver all of them to the best of our ability within a time period. Also, we like to make the songs a little different live and extend them and have the storytelling throughout it, so we’re all chipping in together and have a month of rehearsals starting tomorrow to get ready for it.

We want to play the whole new album. Luckily it’s nine songs, so that’s helpful because it’s shorter than our other records. Then we want to play all the hits and then also some deep cuts along the way. It’ll be a long show. Our last tour, our show was two and a half hours every night. I would think this is probably something like that.

Because of the relationship you’re in, photos of you just walking down the street with Minka Kelly are winding up on tabloid sites. Is that weird for you?
I made a life adjustment quite a few years ago where I don’t have Google alerts, and I don’t have social media, so I really am able to avoid the majority of knowing that, unless I do an interview and someone tells me. If it’s something significant, my manager will tell me. Or the guitarist, Wayne, will tell me, “Hey, I read this article or something.” But it hasn’t really affected my life in ways, because the photographers are so good at hiding genuinely. I can only think of a handful of times where I’ve been like, “Oh, OK.” But it’s not like I’m walking around and people are taking my photo everywhere.

Getting off social media is smart. That new Jonathan Haidt book The Anxious Generation is showing a lot of people the terrible impact it has on children and teenagers.
I don’t let any of my kids have social media. I don’t know when that will change because I have read significant research on that. I don’t think we even know what the full impact is yet. To already be seeing these huge upticks in anxiety and depression among kids and knowing that it’s directly from that, it’s kind of unquantifiable, the damage that it could be doing.

You’re going on tour in the middle of a pretty heated election. Will you use that as a platform to speak out against any issue?
We believe in taking the path of what we naturally are taken to. We never are looking to just jump on some issue because everybody is talking about it. But we played in Ukraine a lot throughout the years. It was one of the first territories that we were able to go play in, and we fell in love with the people there. So that was natural. We had real feelings about that situation, so we got involved and have been part of working with that initiative over there. There are things that we feel we can actually make a difference on, and when we do, we certainly talk about it.

You took some heat for playing Israel and Azerbaijan. Any regrets over doing those shows?
No. I don’t believe in depriving our fans who want to see us play because of the acts of their leaders and their governments. I think that’s a really slippery slope. I think the second you start to do that, there’s corrupt leaders and warmongers all over the world, and where do you draw the line?

Serj Tankian went after you pretty hard for playing Azerbaijan. He said he “didn’t respect you as human beings” for playing there. Any response?
I think I just said it. It’s a slippery slope, and I’m never going to deprive our fans of playing for them.

Do you think it’s just a coincidence that two of the most successful bands of the past 20 years, your band and the Killers, both came from Vegas and are fronted by singers who grew up in the Mormon church?
I’ve thought about that too. There’s also Panic! at the Disco. I grew up with Brendon Urie going to Mormon dances. He’s Mormon too. It’s weird. Vegas was settled by the Mob and the Mormons, so there’s a lot of Mormons there. It’s a really interesting juxtaposition of a city, the city of sin, a bunch of Mormons.

Mormons are very musically inclined. You’re singing in church every week, and sometimes you’re doing solos in church, and then you’re maybe learning pianos to play hymns in church. It’s very academic. I think it has the highest doctorate degrees per capita of any religion.

My mom had us all take piano lessons because she read an article that said that kids who do that perform better in math and science. I think that probably has something to do with it. You’re around music all the time. Then also I’m sure there’s an extra dichotomy of it’s the antithesis of everything that you’re raised to believe, so it’s dangerous. It feels really rebellious to be a musician when you’re Mormon.

Do you know Brandon Flowers? Do you guys ever talk about this stuff?
Yep. I love Brandon. I love the Killers. I know them all and love them and respect them deeply. They put on such a great show. They put Vegas on the map. I have immense respect for the Killers.

Are you optimistic about the future of rock? Do you think we can ever get close to a period of time again like the Nineties where a bunch of new rock bands become huge?
I do actually think so. I think that there is a resurgence right now for out-of-the-box thinking, and people are wanting more authenticity. I’m even listening to what my 11-year-old wants to hear. She’s wanting to listen to live instruments on a record, so seeing that makes me excited because we’ve gone far from that. It’s been the digital age. So there is a resurgence happening of the Nineties and alternative music … Even Olivia Rodrigo, her new record, I was listening to it, and that could have come out in the Nineties.

I saw her play the Garden. She was backed by a full rock band. The place was full of kids losing their damn minds.
There’s a resurgence happening right now. I guess the short answer would be no, I’m really not concerned about the future. It’s cyclical.

I saw the Rolling Stones in Cleveland recently, and they blew my mind since they’re still doing this in their eighties. Do you want that to be you one day?
When we played in Paris recently, Mick Jagger came to the show, and we had dinner with him afterwards. It did actually change my perspective a little bit. My answer to that would’ve been no if you asked me that a couple of years ago. I actually felt pretty close to being able to want to hang it up and go do something else. Now I feel a lot of drive. I feel like we have a lot more to do and to explore. I feel like we’re just starting to figure out who we are.

You could still be doing this in 40 years like Mick.
I would bank on that.

From Rolling Stone US.