Meet The Band Who Keeps Going Viral on TikTok

Transcript

Table of Contents

• [05:25] Conscious awareness in songwriting

• [07:43] Transitioning from party songs

• [12:39] Early career struggles and growth

• [18:53] Importance of live shows and albums

• [24:41] Writing process and collaboration

• [31:11] Leveraging TikTok and social media

• [37:16] Dealing with fame and expectations

• [43:24] The role of AI in music creation

David Perell:

This interview is with Jack and Ryan from the band AJR. They have more than 5 billion streams on Spotify. More than 8 1/2 million people are listening to them on the platform every month, and the music video for their song "World's Smallest Violin" has more than 170 million views. The story of the band is the story of the Internet, from how they blew up on TikTok to how they think about marketing and distribution, YouTube, social media, and of course, now, AI. We talked about all those things. They told their story, shared their thinking.

And you'll notice that the theme that runs through this conversation is how do you actually speak and communicate truth?

Well, that's what we talk about in this episode.

All right, welcome, guys.

AJR:

Thank you.

David Perell:

Music is a funny thing because for some music, you have live feedback of the people in the audience when you're playing live, but sometimes now you're just making music. It's just the three of you, the two of you and your brother, and you don't have that feedback.

AJR:

Yeah, we were just talking about comedy. I've seen said a lot about comedy, that if you're writing a joke thinking, oh, this'll make people laugh, the joke's gonna die. And if you write a joke and the joke makes you personally laugh, the joke's gonna kill it on stage. I think we think like that a lot. I know it sounds cocky to say, but a lot of the songs do make us cry as we're writing it. A lot of the more emotional ones, we're having the exact reaction that we want fans to ultimately have. We're dancing or we're crying, and that's kind of our indicator of, okay, I think we're gonna be on the same wavelength as the audience here.

David Perell:

Like, what's an example of that?

AJR:

Ryan is the emotional lyric writer, I'd say, between us. So it comes from him.

AJR:

Yeah, I guess for the more emotional stuff, I'm thinking. I think a lot of what we try to do now, especially in the music, is write from character. We talk about that all the time. We have a song on our EP that's coming out called "Dog Song." That's probably a good example of this.

We knew we wanted to write; we both have dogs that we love, and they're the light of our life, and we knew we wanted to write a song from our dog's perspective. Exactly that reaction is, like, this could be really funny and silly. So I laid down for a nap, gimmicky and stupid, but there's gotta be an emotional way in to write from our dog's perspective.

It just hit us at a certain point. I'm trying to remember what it was. It was the naivety in which our dog views the things happening in our life. The way our dog thinks he's protecting us; in reality, if you zoom out, we're protecting him. That's the character we want to write from. I got you guys. I hear you're going through this tough thing. I brought you this stick. Did that help? There's the emotion that got us really excited about that story.

AJR:

And the naivety of watching a human cry and not understanding why. There's something just so emotional to that.

AJR:

Something I did.

AJR:

It's almost like a little kid. Like, what's really emotional about that? I have no idea what's happening, but how can I help make it better?

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

That's so funny. I love the laugh that you have because that's always our process in writing. When I first met my girlfriend, I showed her some of our music, and 10 seconds in, there's a funny line and she's laughing a lot. And then it's a portion about how I feel so lonely and I want to call my dad, and then she's like, oh. And we're like, wait, maybe that's the style.

AJR:

Style that we started singing.

David Perell:

What's the song? "Humpty Dumpty, Humpty Dumpty." I was listening. I definitely got the melody wrong there, but I was listening to that.

AJR:

That's what the melody should have been.

David Perell:

Okay, I'm gonna join the band. You just start laughing, and that's what I love about you guys: you have preserved the goofiness among success. Generally people become a little more buttoned up, but you guys are just goofy people, and that really shines through the music. You don't often even think of music and goofiness as coming together.

AJR:

Well, I think we love Pixar movies. That's probably our favorite type of art, possibly for exactly that reason. It's like, this is going to be a silly movie about fish in Australia.

Oh, it's a movie about a dad learning to trust his kid for the first time. You're laughing, then by the end, it hits you with a left turn and you're crying all of a sudden.

I think that we are. So much of what becomes your superpower started out as your weakness. When you're a writer, finding your perspective is: we can't be cool.

You're saying goofy, which is kind of the opposite of cool. Anytime we've tried to pretend we're cool or wear sunglasses on stage in a metaphorical sense, we just look like we're wearing a costume. It just feels fake. Audiences can smell that from a mile away.

I think we realized if we can't be as cool as Drake and talk about the cool things Drake talks about, what's really our POV? What can we do that maybe Drake can't? I think it's really empathizing, making you laugh, then cry, but just really letting you know what the very uncool experience of being a dog is, or the very unsexy experience of being in a relationship could be. I think we found that that's sort of our voice.

[05:25] Conscious awareness in songwriting

David Perell:

How conscious are you of this? How do you have that consciousness help your work, rather than being so conscious of who you are and what you're trying to do, that it's like, now we're not really producing stuff from the soul anymore. It's sort of coming from our minds.

AJR:

It's just a dangerous thing to go down. To go, what would AJR do? What's this character? What would they say in that? That's almost the death of creativity.

AJR:

I feel like there's a few tricks that we've learned. One being, to get away from that. What's AJR? What's the most embarrassing thing I could think of about me? Let's go down that route.

I think that that's just the key to writing in general, most writing. I would say, what's the thing that would embarrass you most to say to a random person on the street or to your best friend? That has to be the next song concept that we write about.

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

I think there are tricks to get away from digging yourself into that hole of AJR's voice on top of AJR's.

AJR:

Voice on top of a photocopy.

AJR:

Then it gets so diluted.

David Perell:

Let's follow that word, embarrassing, because the thing about embarrassing.

David Perell:

You're like, I shouldn't say that. You know, AJR can't say that. Hey, we're famous. We can't say that. We don't want people to know that. But then at the same time, you're like, no, that's the thing that we're going for. So how do you navigate that?

AJR:

Well, I mean, to start that, I think that there's a moment in every writer's career where they hit that point. We reached that. That wasn't what we were writing about from when we started. We were writing more like party songs that we feel people could get on top of a desk in a dorm too.

AJR:

And it did work for us a little bit, but then people stopped coming to shows, or people didn't really show up to shows or anything like that.

AJR:

People didn't connect.

AJR:

They didn't really care who was saying that, and I don't really care personally who's saying that. I wouldn't have.

Then we realized that people feel the same things as you. It's this crazy realization that you come to in writing that if I write about embarrassing, odds are that the audience is going to feel the exact same way or really understand what you're saying. Then all of a sudden, people started showing up to shows.

[07:43] Transitioning from party songs

AJR:

Started writing, and that becomes really addicting. That's what we found.

The little embarrassing thing, maybe the first embarrassing thing, was "Weak." If you even want to call that embarrassing, we had a song like, "I'm weak, and what's wrong with that?" About sort of giving into temptation, right? I wouldn't even say embarrassing. It's more just like, "Here's a vulnerable thing that's a personal, uncool thing to say."

Then just like, little by little, we wrote a song called "Joe," about a kid I went to high school with whose name was actually Joe, who I still think about to this day, even though I don't even see him anymore. It's like, "Joe, do you think I'm cool now? I'm playing MSG. Do you think I'm cool enough because I idolized him so much in high school?"

Pretty embarrassing thing to admit if you listen to the song, but the reward of finding an audience by going, "This is the truthful me," is so euphoric that it's kind of the reason to be alive. It's like, "I'm just fully connecting to you now." If I could give a tip to writers, lean into that because it's actually addicting. You're going to want to go deeper and deeper and deeper until you can't even write that stupid, silly party song anymore because that feels like it would be written by somebody else. That's not something you're really scared to admit.

On our last album, I had a song called "Turning Out Part Three," that was about a whole, it went into intimacy issues that I had, and my version of love was finding somebody where it was okay to admit. I'm being really vague here; I'm sure you know what I mean. Just after putting that out and seeing so much response of like, "I've been through that too. I've been there, and nobody writes songs about this." Nothing makes you feel more accepted, connected, and like one big organism with everybody else to just be yourself, no matter how embarrassing.

David Perell:

I'm thinking a lot about the moment in writing or speaking when you kind of find, you get to a place where it's like, "I'm not supposed to go there. I'm not supposed to say that." It's like the breaks show up. You know, I'm talking, I'm talking, and then you find that place goes.

What I'm hearing you say is you can actually push beyond that, and then that's really when you get to the deep stuff because what everybody feels versus what they actually express, there's a big delta between those things. The wrong takeaway here is, "Just wax poetic about all these sorts of things." That can be really overbearing.

AJR:

What's "wax poetic?"

David Perell:

Trauma dumping is probably a better way to put it. Thanks for the clarification. There's a way of you're talking about intimacy issues. I'm going to focus on this really specific thing.

AJR:

Yeah, really specific.

David Perell:

And I'm just going to go down and down and down and down, rather than the trauma dumping, which tends to be a little bit more broad in scope.

AJR:

Totally.

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

Trauma dumping, I feel like, often comes from a self-centered place of, "My dad messed me up this much." Not making fun of that, but I think a songwriter's job, a comedian's job, it's like I have this thing that's really personal to me, but I just have this instinct that a lot of other people are quietly noticing or observing the same thing or went through it, and it's going to strike a nerve with them.

AJR:

It's like the idea of the word "love" is not really interesting to us. That is kind of what you're saying of, "What is love? What is this?"

AJR:

That.

AJR:

That doesn't really make us feel much. It's the moment of talking about intimacy.

I think there was a quote; I forgot who said it, but when you're writing, it's not about you don't write about the brutality of war; you write about a child's burnt socks laying on the ground. I forgot who said it, but that's it's in on that one character, you know?

AJR:

Which is so much of what we try to do with character. We're not always just writing about the most specific thing that we went through. Right now, this most recent EP is probably more of that, we're more into that.

Even when we're like, we have a song called "Inertia" that is turned into a fan favorite. It's a list of examples of Inertia that we've observed. It's like our friend that keeps saying he's going to quit his bank job, and he never does. Or the couple that we know that keeps saying they're going to break up, but they're together for the next 20 years.

It's a huge concept, Inertia in society, but it's what you're saying. It's zooming in on these tiny little vignettes that you just know it when you hear it. If it's phrased in the right way with the right ten words in a row and the right melody, you're just like, I believe you. I know exactly what you're talking about, and I have a friend that went through that exact same thing. Zooming in on that character.

[12:39] Early career struggles and growth

David Perell:

Tell me about musical theater and pulling from there. You definitely see it in the overture songs at the beginning of your albums. How else have you pulled from musical theater?

AJR:

That was our first love. I think before we even thought of forming a band, we were like, we're so uncool, but we were putting on Broadway shows in our living room and making up the lyrics and everything like that. So I think we couldn't not pull from it in some way.

We feel like there's no limitations in musical theater, and there really aren't. You can just

AJR:

You can be as uncool as possible.

AJR:

It's Bohemian Rhapsody. It's change-up times. Talk about a random thing, and then there's a new character that comes in and it's constantly changing. We love that.

AJR:

And it's also pure emotion undiluted by society, where music or culture is at right now. So many of our AJR demos you would hear and you'd go, that's literally a Broadway song.

Then usually it's Jack's job. He comes in and goes, "This is, I can tell that my friends are not going to think this is cool. Add in a trap style, add in this thing." I'm sort of the villain in this.

David Perell:

Wait, so how does that happen? You come in, walk me through that.

AJR:

It's so hard to explain. It's become so much gut feeling at this point. What am I feeling? Is my attention going away now? Is it too far in the other direction?

AJR:

I don't know if it's so much uncool. It's just something that I'm not quite feeling is music. If we go too far in the musical theater of hold on now, we're even going to start having dialogue in between slides, then it's too far.

AJR:

This is where the partnership of us two really is everything and really works. More often than not, I'm starting the songs, I'm making the raw clay.

We have a song, "World's Smallest Violin," that turned into probably our biggest hit. The first version I showed Jack is a perfect example of this, extremely Broadway sounding. There were no 808s in it production-wise, but also the lyrics. There's a part in the song that's like, "Oh my God, that's so insane. Oh my God, that's such a shame." The original lyric was like, "That's the way it always is, and that's the way it's always been." That was the original lyric that I wrote.

AJR:

I'm being lectured at. It feels very Broadway. I need to see set pieces in order to really understand.

AJR:

I need to see other characters, and sometimes you just need to feel, "Oh my God, that's so like just." You need to just say something sort of simple.

AJR:

That was that moment.

AJR:

Having that outside perspective is like Joel and Ethan Cohen. Why there's so many partnerships that work well. Steve Martin says, "Your subconscious writes and your conscious edits."

David Perell:

Nice.

AJR:

So often I'm the subconscious and he's the conscious. I don't care what's cool. I don't care about anything. This is making me feel a lot.

Then I bring you in as an outside perspective, and you go, "You don't even realize it's right in front of you Ryan, put this here and this here and change it," and then we have a song that people actually like.

AJR:

I think I'm more in touch with the public than Ryan is, honestly. I think that's what makes it a good combination. I really observe what people like in music and what people don't like. I find it so fascinating.

David Perell:

How do you study that?

AJR:

Oh, in college, I just stared at people. Truly, I'm not even kidding.

AJR:

Why did you think to do that?

AJR:

I thought it was so much fun. Two songs that sound almost exactly the same. One people are sitting on the table, the other people are talking through. I was like, there's a DNA. There's something living within music that make people do that. That's so interesting to me. I kind of just fell in love with it, and it almost trained me to be very in touch.

David Perell:

Were there certain cultural songs where you got fascinated by why it resonates so much?

AJR:

Well, so often you call hits before they become hits.

AJR:

God, that's different, though. That's a truly a gut feeling. Benny Blanco described it perfectly when he did an interview recently, and he was like, "It's the feeling when you're about to kiss someone, and it's like that really good nervousness where you're leaning in." He just absolutely nailed it.

That's exactly what I feel. It's the excitement of something new. Take Me to Church, Hozier. I'm like, "Oh, my God, wait a sec. I haven't heard something like this in a while. This is so new, and I have a new energy in me."

That's what I feel when I'm looking for hit songs or what is a hit. I know it didn't fully answer the question, but I think that's sort of a different kind of world.

AJR:

I guess so. What was your question?

David Perell:

If there was a song that you got really interested in and saying, why did this hit so much?

AJR:

I mean, it is songs like Take Me to Church. Those are the most interesting ones when I forgot what the climate of music was like. But let's say it was like Soundcloud rap. That was the climate of music, and then Take Me to Church comes out.

Or Ho Hey by the Lumineers. That was the only song of its kind. Those are the ones that I've really become fascinated by because the whole tide of music is about to change.

What in the culture makes people want to grab a guitar now and get up on a table in a bar with their friends as opposed to rage in the club? That's the stuff that I really like to study.

David Perell:

What you're saying that I hadn't really thought about is how much the context matters. Basically there is a time and place that the culture is in right now, and what you want to do is you want to speak to that time and place. But if you fully speak to it and give into it, then you're blending in.

AJR:

Blending in with everybody else.

David Perell:

Everybody else, yeah. Whereas if you're too different, then it's like we're not this time and place right now.

AJR:

Yeah.

[18:53] Importance of live shows and albums

AJR:

I think that kind of falls back into what you were saying about World's Smallest Violin about the like, don't go too far. You gotta put it back in the setting. But also, still, World's Smallest Violin doesn't sound like anything else. It's sort of this silly blue grassy dance song.

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

I think that's the same kind of world that we're talking about.

AJR:

Yeah. You're right. Context. I don't think it's a crazy miracle that folk has been so in in the last few years because we're all just doing this all day and there's stimulation.

What do you want if you're doing this all day and see video after video? You want some kind of calming music. You want to—this sounds so cynical, but you want to be able to hear the guy talk over the music. So, of course it's going to be a little bit more stripped down where it's maybe just guitar and a voice because if it's a million instruments, you can't hear your favorite influencer talk over that.

You're also hearing it through a phone speaker a lot of music now. So you want just like three or four instruments as opposed to 100 instruments to shine through. In retrospect, it's so easy to look back and be like, "Of course folk was coming," but it's a new kind of folk that speaks to Gen Z a little more.

David Perell:

If you think of the rise of EDM, I think of sort of the glory days of that being 2011 to 2015. That was peak iPhone. That was when the iPhone was awesome. You would pull out the iPhone, you pulled out magic, you pulled out a portal to the cosmos and the universe.

Now, you pull out your iPhone and it's like you're being zapped with distraction. Now it's sort of an enemy.

So now what's more in? It's the nostalgia, it's the folk. Country music is booming because that's what I want for music. I used to want, okay, let's plug into the matrix of smartphone electronification, and now I want to tune out and retreat to the golden age of nostalgia and simplicity.

AJR:

No, it's just totally the climate, and people either can predict it or get lucky. It almost seemed like Noah Khan, who we know, has done such an amazing job at wrapping up what people are feeling now.

I feel like people could be moving away from the phone, throw away the phone, leave home and go backpacking through Oregon or something like that, and he's really tapped into that. It's these moments, these predictors that are really impressive in music.

AJR:

And how often do you feel like people are judging? How often do you think people are just getting lucky and it's just how they're feeling?

AJR:

I don't even know if it's getting lucky. I think that there's some people who are just like, it kind of goes back to what we're saying. He feels that, so the rest of the public must feel it too. This is something that he wants to describe, and odds are a lot of other people are going to feel the same. Similar to talking about embarrassing things, a lot of people are going to feel the same as well. I think society is way more connected than people think.

AJR:

Yeah.

David Perell:

Well, I have friends who I would say are bellwethers for the rest of culture. And then the question is, how far ahead are they of everybody else?

The term bellwether is almost like a canary in the coal mine. The bellwether sort of reflects what's going on, like the canary in the coal mine, what they do is sort of a leading indicator of what's going to happen. Our friend who's a designer, his taste is always a few years ahead of the culture. There's a guy who I follow named Balaji Srinivasan, a technologist. It's become a joke that Balaji was right, and it's just how far ahead are these people? I don't know the music world that well, but I guarantee there's got to be musicians who are like that with sound and lyric and whatever else.

AJR:

Kanye is the shining example.

AJR:

Rick Rubin.

AJR:

Rick Rubin, absolutely.

AJR:

They just have it.

AJR:

Yes. If you look back at every Kanye album, disclaimer, Kanye has gone crazy and I don't agree with anything he said, but that would be stupid to erase how he's the most transformative artist of the last 20 years, just because he went crazy after that.

If you look at every album, he's like two or three years ahead. And then you watch every other rapper sort of go, oh, I guess hip hop is leaning in more of like a gospel direction now, like two or three years later. And I think it's why everybody hears, at least for the last 20 years, everybody heard.

AJR:

Jesus? Oh, no, before.

AJR:

808s and Heartbreak.

AJR:

808s.

AJR:

Everybody hears that and goes, what is this garbage? And then it takes everybody like six months to catch up and go, oh, now this is what hip hop is. And then suddenly Drake fully sounds like 808s in Heartbreak. It takes a certain guts to just go, this is where I think music is going. This is my truth production wise. If it fails horribly, I'm willing to die on that hill. It's way easier to just sort of follow the trend, so I think that's admirable.

David Perell:

When you're writing, how would you describe the process of creating the wet clay? When is it frantic? When is it excitement? When does it come from? Sort of a slow drip.

[24:41] Writing process and collaboration

AJR:

My friends recognize it and call it work mode, like Ryan's in work mode. I think they all notice that I'm way less social. I'm sort of a creature version of myself while I'm in that mode.

I've heard this from other artists and directors while they're making a movie. There's no room in your brain to make small talk with anybody else. It doesn't make you an asshole, it just makes you, I don't know, a robot and you switch into work mode.

To me, I'm constantly a sponge, taking in things. I feel naked in terms of how vulnerable I am.

While we were making this EP for the last six months, I found myself so many times going to Jack or going to friends, being like, "When you said that, that was really offensive. Or when I said this, was that joke taken wrong? I feel really bad about that."

That's what I mean by you're just kind of naked because you're just wearing your heart on your sleeve, because you're constantly trying to mine from yourself, from your life, from your memories, from your therapy sessions of what's going to make good fodder for music.

So I guess when I sit down for the more emotional stuff, I have to start from somewhere, like with a dog song.

I have to start with, "Okay, there's a character here that thinks he's protecting us. We're actually protecting him. What's this story?"

I started writing a dog song about our life, and our dad got sick and passed away a few years ago. The song kind of came about of our dog watching that happen and going, there's a verse that's like, "I hope we don't move again. They lost half my shit, those dumb moving men. And where did your dad go? Did they also lose him? Well, I brought you this stick, I hope that it helps."

You just did the real timing exactly what I wanted the reaction to be.

I just found myself crying. I just saw myself from the dog's perspective and we have a thing where if I know I have something good, I text Jack the eye emojis that are like looking that way. I know, let's go, we have something.

I know if I'm crying, I know it's going to be truthful if we get it right.

David Perell:

So that work mode, it sounds like it's a semi-conscious transition that you make over the course of months. Work mode isn't Tuesday from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

AJR:

Oh, it's definitely not that. It's not a slow transition. It's a fast transition for us. As soon as we decided we're going to make an EP this year, and I knew we needed five songs and I just needed to buckle down, it took a day or so.

Then it was four months of me in this really volatile emotional state. If I think back, I can't even remember most of the stuff that happened.

David Perell:

Volatile, that's an interesting word.

AJR:

Yeah, I mean, I think you have to be. Some songs are criers, but you have to also be hyper-attuned to yourself because if you're feeling like this beat I just made is actually more badass, you have to be so malleable that, okay, now I'm not crying anymore. I'm badass now. That's such an unnatural thing for a human to do.

But you have to become a shell of yourself in order to be that nimble.

We have a song on this EP called "The Big Goodbye" that is a perfect example of that. We had this track for a really long time that samples this auctioneer guy. We wrote the song over and over again. We wrote it as this party bang kind of song. It didn't click, it didn't feel right. We wrote it as a sillier, more like, "Did you ever notice this kind of thing in society?" kind of song. It became more emotional at the last second.

We were like, "It's emotional plus badass."

That whole process is such a mind fuck that you just have to be able to pivot, I suppose.

AJR:

Well, there becomes a moment where a song becomes three-dimensional. It was two-dimensional the entire time.

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

And that's...

AJR:

What was that shift?

AJR:

I don't know, I've never thought about it before. It is a lot of feeling.

AJR:

But we both felt it. We were both like, "Oh, this now I believe this song." They're trying to write a song for me.

AJR:

Or it's something that I don't normally think about and I try to put myself outside and the song is kind of teaching me something. Maybe that's when it becomes three-dimensional.

AJR:

Huh?

AJR:

Yeah, I don't think we've ever really thought about this before, what is that based in? Yeah, it really is.

AJR:

Because we have tried to write a bunch of songs. They usually turn out like photocopies of photocopies of AJR songs. We wrote a song about how it's great to be weak. Let's try writing a song about how it's great to be insecure or whatever.

David Perell:

Right.

AJR:

That feels like we're just copying ourselves. That feels very two-dimensional. But then the second we either find a real example, or a twist.

AJR:

Right.

AJR:

Then we're like, this has to go on the album. Then we know we have something great.

AJR:

Yeah, because we want songs to go like this, just like you want a movie to go like this. If it's too long of a monologue about how happy someone is, you're probably gonna zone out or turn it off.

David Perell:

When you were talking about the two-dimensional to three-dimensional shift, I was thinking about how, in many writing projects when you start, you go from you or doing the writing, and towards the end, it's as if the piece has a drive, a momentum, and then you start listening to the thing that you've created, and you are actually in service of that.

AJR:

Totally. It's the characters kind of develop a life of their own. Right. And they start telling you. Instead of you telling them what to do, they start telling you what they want to do next.

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

I think that it's definitely a part in our music. We try to develop a good character, and I'm weak and a dog song. Then eventually it's like, I kind of know what would happen next, what their location is.

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

Create a bit of an arc for the character. I think that might be it. I think that's where the three-dimension comes in.

AJR:

Yeah.

David Perell:

A lot of novelists say that towards the end, the character starts surprising them.

AJR:

Yeah.

David Perell:

And the story has taken on a life of its own. They're responding to the way that it's moving.

AJR:

That must be the most fun feeling in the world.

David Perell:

That must be so surreal.

AJR:

Yeah.

David Perell:

I can't even imagine that.

AJR:

Yeah.

[31:11] Leveraging TikTok and social media

David Perell:

Okay, so I know you love making live shows. How does that process come together?

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

Live shows are something that we think about the entire time we're writing an album.

David Perell:

Oh, wow.

AJR:

The entire time. It's almost like the album is the Broadway soundtrack to the live show that we're doing.

AJR:

The tour is the end goal, the piece of art. The album is the soundtrack to that.

AJR:

Every single time we have a good song going, we know. As soon as we have a song that's not so good, we definitely stop ourselves. We know this isn't going to go any further; there's nothing else we could do. We throw it away, and it's a great feeling. Then we start over, and then we have a song we like. We immediately start talking about how on stage, you're going to be walking on a treadmill and doing this with the background.

AJR:

Just for context, for anybody that doesn't know, we try to lean into our Broadway influence a lot. For these tours, our goal has developed to just be like, let's put stuff on stage that has never been done before.

We take influence from our love of magic. We have a lot of these magic kind of illusions that work their way into the songs. Last tour, we had a whole shadow puppet thing where the shadows came to life and Jack was duetting himself on stage and a narrative throughout that ends with, culminates with this big speech where you think back and you go, oh, that thing that happened 45 minutes ago, that came back, that was an Easter egg to this thing.

That's what we mean by the end goal, the piece of art. We've definitely started reverse engineering the songs, knowing that for the finale for this album, we need a little musical pause here so that we could go, thank you, Charlotte, and take our bow, and then come back in with the music. We're definitely aware this is how we start the show. This is how we end the show. This is a great midpoint of the show. For this one, I feel like Jack is falling, so we should have Jack skydiving on stage. We did something last tour where he has these two 3D video walls, and he's in the middle hanging from a wire, and there's this illusion where he's skydiving.

AJR:

There are clouds on both sides rushing past me, so it looks like I'm falling.

AJR:

It's just become our favorite thing to do ever, to make these tours.

David Perell:

And do you work with a choreographer now?

AJR:

We really just do it ourselves.

AJR:

It's such a fun process of "what if?" It's like two guys in their underwear at home just being like, what if he's this? What if I'm doing this? It's like a weird drug trip.

AJR:

It also feels a lot like when we were young. We didn't have any video games or anything growing up, so I think we were just bored all the time. We were constantly just making up games or putting on plays for our parents. We went through a puppet phase where we loved puppets. And we went through a lightsaber phase and a magic phase.

AJR:

We're still in the lightsaber phase.

AJR:

We're just tapping into all of our cool loves when we were kids, but just making them on a grand scale now.

David Perell:

So what have you learned about making music from that live feedback?

AJR:

I think that it's to not be afraid to switch up time signature and to not be afraid to go in another direction. I think it's difficult these days to keep people entertained.

I think that doing a show where you don't know what's going to come next is really a good road to go down, and that also translates to the music as well.

Switch ups like this make you kind of lean in and go, "Wait, I didn't know that was going to happen. Where's it going to go next?" So I think that there's a good parallel there.

AJR:

I think we're finding more recently we're sort of bored by verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, which is like the typical structure of a song. No judgment to anybody that does that, but I don't think any of the songs on this new EP adhere to that structure.

I think some of that has to do with what you're saying live. We're like, "You've already heard this chorus two times. You don't need to hear this chorus again. Let's do a crazy outro with this weird thing where we're playing on the sampler." I'm seeing a human being and you're reacting better to that than a third chorus.

David Perell:

The iPhone ringtone remix.

AJR:

Oh, throwback.

David Perell:

So good.

AJR:

That is a big throwback.

David Perell:

That was so good.

AJR:

Thank you.

David Perell:

And I think that that was where you guys really nail it, which is I'm laughing and I'm vibing to it at the same time.

AJR:

Totally.

AJR:

It's like it's someone's phone ringing on stage too. There's the start with the confusion.

AJR:

We're big fans of magic, but we're big fans of Penn and Teller because they show you how they're doing the trick while they're doing the trick. They're deconstructing the art for you while giving you the dopamine you need to say that was great art.

I think so often that's what we want to do. We have these making ofs that has now become a staple that we do every tour where we're breaking down how we made this song, and there's all these visual elements. Then we're in the library and now there's a set piece over here, and we're in the library and a book falls, and we're like, "Let's sample that book." We tell the story basically of how we made a song while we're building out the song.

We see people's reactions. It's really fun as an audience to be confused, to suspend your disbelief a little, to be like, "Oh, I'm starting to recognize that song. I hope it is the song that I think it's going to be." And then to maybe throw them off or maybe explode to that song.

AJR:

Or to predict it and be wrong, because audiences secretly love that.

David Perell:

Right?

AJR:

No one wants to be right. They think they want to be right, and then they want to be...

AJR:

No way.

AJR:

It wasn't the thing that I predicted.

AJR:

Right. We're transparently showing you the skeleton of the human while being like, "Isn't this the coolest human ever?"

[37:16] Dealing with fame and expectations

David Perell:

One of the things that is very clear is that by looking at the way you guys have done things, it just reveals so much about the world that we live in and how the culture has changed. It used to be that the relationships between fans and their favorite musicians, there was such a distance between them.

Now we're talking and even coming into this, it's you guys allow yourselves to be known through interviews, through the live shows through a bit more of an improvisational style, much less polished. Everything you're saying speaks to how much the modern world has changed. You're even talking about making of videos.

AJR:

Yeah.

David Perell:

I don't think those were nearly as big of a deal 20 years ago compared to now.

AJR:

I think you're right.

AJR:

We were obsessed with the Lord of the Rings behind the scenes.

AJR:

We watched that more.

AJR:

Than the movie, of how they made the miniatures and how they did the force perspective, and we were like, "Why is this not more popular?"

AJR:

Because then we watch the movie and we like the movie ten times more. "Oh, that's miniature."

AJR:

And Frodo is like ten feet behind him, actually.

AJR:

There's a middle line. Exactly. Our experience with Lord of the Rings, we like Lord of the Rings more after knowing that that castle was only this tall.

But if I got that castle and I could play with it now and then I'm like, "This is the same thing in the movie." Now that's ruined the experience. I don't know how well this metaphor is working out, but...

AJR:

No, I get what you're saying.

AJR:

There’s a certain level where an artist should be up here, and the audience should be down here because they want it that way. They want, we're not crowdfunding, what should our songs be about everybody? Then why do you come to us as artists? I think you're coming to us because we've worked for a really long time to try to have a unique POV.

I don't think it should all be crowdsourced. I don't think it should all be fully transparent, but that's why I think the making of, the making of is art unto itself.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I'm not just showing you my pro tool session. I'm telling you a story that's fun, that's maybe enhancing your like of the song.

David Perell:

Right.

AJR:

So I think that's what we try to keep doing. Let's have you listen to the song and notice these little details that we worked hard on, but not just give you the whole pro tool session.

David Perell:

Was there a moment when you were on stage and you heard people singing and you were just like, "Whoa, we've, this is really a thing now?"

AJR:

Yeah, it was 2005 was the moment we decided to be a band, and we were street performing and playing shows around New York that no one was at.

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

Then in 2017, we had our first, we started putting out that music that we were talking about before, the more vulnerable, embarrassing stuff. People started liking it. Then we got on stage in Orlando, Florida, for the first date of our tour.

AJR:

Yeah, we're gonna have to win them over.

AJR:

We came out and there were only 200 people there, singing every single lyric. I remember just being thrown back to the back wall. I was like, "There is no way this is happening right now. In 10 years this hasn't happened."

That was the show at a place called The Social, I think, in Orlando, and it blew our mind, really.

AJR:

That's right.

David Perell:

Wow. I can't even imagine. That is one of the most unique things about music. You make it in silence. You work on it, and then you get to go out and people sing back what you've written. Did you feel that same show?

AJR:

Yeah. That was a moment where it was like, "Let's just do this forever." Let's just hope that we put on a good enough show that all these people tell one friend. The next time we could play double and double and double and double.

That's been really our long game with AJR. Chris Martin from Coldplay said the reason they've stuck around so long is that they've never been the coolest thing. They've always been something to be discovered.

I love that. I don't think that we were meant to be Justin Bieber. I just don't think we're interested in it. I think that can be really crippling to be that big.

That's who we are. I think if we want to keep writing songs from dogs perspectives, we can't get to that level of Ed Sheeran, and I think we're really proud of that. I think we're really proud of how slow it's been, year after year, just slowly growing and having these core fans because it's a scary industry now, especially. We could talk about TikTok and all of that, but in the last four years, the industry is just totally different. Nobody knows what they're doing.

David Perell:

Talk to me about that.

AJR:

In 2020, before 2020, it was, "This is our single. We're gonna push our single to radio and see how it does." It just felt so much simpler.

Now you don't really choose your own single, at least in our camp. Now it's like you make music that you want to make and hope that something goes viral. There's one weird avenue to having a hit song, and it's social media.

AJR:

Man.

David Perell:

That's so strange.

AJR:

It's so strange. It's kind of cool because it's happened to us a bunch of times, and that's a great feeling. Then when it doesn't happen to you, you feel like the piece of shit.

AJR:

And embarrassed.

AJR:

And a little embarrassed because it's all about self-promotion. It's like I pushed this one so hard and it didn't work.

David Perell:

The image that came to mind for me was some sort of game of roulette. You gotta hope that something works. Then the value of having an audience is it's like the NBA draft. You get more balls that you can have for the game of roulette, but still, if nothing pops.

AJR:

Yeah, yeah.

[43:24] The role of AI in music creation

AJR:

It's especially weird coming from us because we started in the days where radio was the thing. You had to travel to every single radio station twice in America and shake the hands and meet their kids and do a million interviews. That's what we really got used to.

Then it was the streaming services, going to Spotify and talking to them about it and having a hit on Spotify. That felt a little more understandable to us. Then transitioning into this world where radio is kind of less prevalent than it used to be has been very confusing for us.

AJR:

We're also now competing with Bill Maher and Trump. Suddenly, our competition is totally not other musicians anymore. It's such a weird thing. You have to try to catch people's attention with a song while they're watching a visual of something.

David Perell:

It's crazy that you would say that, because the idea of a song being to catch somebody's attention. Besides a jingle from a 1960s radio ad, that wasn't what artists were thinking.

AJR:

That's not what music is.

AJR:

It's a crazy thing that I just said, but it is the industry now. I think we're there everywhere in society a little bit where the new Lilo and Stitch movie is sort of a commercial for the old Lilo and Stitch movie. You go, "I remember seeing that when I was a kid." It's like the TikTok is a commercial for the song, which is a commercial for the tour.

David Perell:

Right.

AJR:

It's very weird, and in some ways it's not artistic, and we try to not let it affect us. I think we naturally, before TikTok, were writing TikTok type of songs for exactly the reason Jack is saying, with the switch-ups and with because we like showing, deconstructing and showing one instrument at a time and making weird beats and writing relatable things. If that's the agenda to make a TikTok song, we were already doing it anyway. I don't feel like we're selling out trying to write TikTok music at all.

You have to fight against that instinct of all that matters is catching people's attention. It really helps that we have this fan base. I think if we didn't, we'd be falling and wondering whose attention we can catch. But for us a little bit, the TikTok stuff feels like the cherry on top of the fans and the tours and the community we've already built.

David Perell:

I want to go back to what you were saying about that's not what music is at all.

AJR:

Music is natural. You sit down and you're feeling something so you want to write it. It's not a jingle, it's not 10 seconds that'll capture people's attention. That's not the thought process that goes into writing good music.

It's writing about something embarrassing. It's writing something thinking that maybe no one will hear it, and that's okay. That's something that we get into a lot. That's often when we're the most happy, too. We write a really weird song and we're like, "If no one likes this, we're gonna be okay with it."

AJR:

Yeah, we like it.

AJR:

We really like it and we're proud of it. We had a song called "The Trick," which was probably the least listened to song we've ever put out. Fans did not seem to like it. We got a lot of complaints about it, cause there's like a weird high pitched voice. People were like, "I don't know about this one, guys," but we just loved that song so much. I don't feel bad at all that the fans don't love it, because we really, really liked it and we're really proud of it.

I think that that's what music is, and TikTok can really make you feel embarrassed and ashamed, and it's not something that we want to feel.

David Perell:

Talk to me about the concept of truth because it's very core to what we've been talking about. This conversation is speaking truthfully.

When we think of truth, we think of Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and making sure that the logic adds up. You're making a good rigorous argument, but there's deeper levels of truth that we've been talking about in this conversation. We've been talking about truth of what you feel. When you were talking, it was like you're sitting down and you're just making sounds, and the sounds are somehow true to what you're feeling, what you're processing, what's going on.

AJR:

I think it's constantly changing for us. We're writing totally different songs now that I'm in my 30s, and Jack's about to be 30. Our truth is just totally different from when we wrote Weak and we were in our early 20s. I think it's pretty subjective.

One of the reasons that we get asked about AI and music is because I'm not really worried about AI and music because of exactly what we're talking about. I think that when you believe something about the way an artist's vocal cords are shaped, when Randy Newman goes, "I will go sailing no more" from Toy Story, I just believe the combination of his voice and the chords, the take he got, the melody, and the lyrics. I can't describe why, but I just believe him.

If Josh Groban sang, "I will go sailing no more," I love Josh Groban, but I wouldn't believe that as much. I would believe he's performing that line because it doesn't quite fit with him, and he didn't quite believe it in that moment. I feel that AI is only ever going to take Dua Lipa plus Billie Eilish plus Miley Cyrus and find some nebulous middle of all the artists that doesn't have a POV. It's just sort of like a basic conglomerate of all of the artists.

Don't get me wrong, as AI gets better in music, I think music is going to sound more and more different. That's definitely going to happen the way art now looks different. I'm scrolling, and I see art that I know has that AI too-perfect thing to it. Maybe the first time I saw it, I was like, cool, AI ChatGPT can make that. Now I'm so bored by it because there's no feeling behind it.

While we were looking for an album cover for this EP, we often find artists on Instagram. We found ourselves going, "Oh, that one looks too AI. That one looks too AI." We ended up going with an artist that created this picture of a reunion. It is how a family reunion feels, as opposed to just how a family reunion looks the way a computer could make it.

AJR:

You couldn't type that into ChatGPT: "How does a reunion feel? What are the mixed emotions that come with a family reunion? Happy and sad?" No, that's not it. I want to feel something deeper than that.

AJR:

I want to feel it, and I can't describe why. I think just as long as we can't describe why "Someone Like You" by Adele makes us cry and then this one doesn't, I don't know. Music probably is going to get better and better because it's going to get more autueristic, if that's a word. It's going to become more and more from one person's point of view, as opposed to "Here's a general pop song that everybody can relate to" that maybe ChatGPT could have written the way art is going that way.

David Perell:

Do you have musician friends who are excited about using AI? Are they using it in their art, like, "Hey, check this out. Check this out?"

AJR:

We used a program called Kits AI, where you can basically sing and then you make it sound like this girl. You can input a lot of data. We did it with Jack's voice, and we saw fans doing it. Like, "Here's Jack singing Hey There Delilah." It's a cool party trick.

It actually helped in the writing process because I was writing a song. It might have been Dog Song. I think I was writing a dog song. Often when I'm writing it, I'll record me singing a demo with my voice, and I wanted Jack to hear what it sounds like with him singing it without him actually having to sing it so that he could go in and actually re-record it. In that process of making a cool song, Jack was able to record it without actually recording it. No creativity was taken away from us, but it was just like a cool little tool to use. That's a good use of it.

AJR:

I think so. But a fan putting out a Drake song? I feel like that's kind of a mess.

AJR:

As soon as you're replacing people, that was our end goal with AI—to replace musicians. Now, have it do the shitty work that no one wants to have to do.

I really feel that, historically, the answer is never, "Now anybody could make a professional sounding song." It's now the definition of a professional sounding song shifts. That's just with every new technology. When Photoshop first came out and you could put like a paint filter, I don't know, 2003, I showed my dad that, and he was like, "Look, I acted like I painted this picture of me." It was cool for about a day, and then you move on and that effect is no longer cool.

I kind of think at an accelerated rate, that's going to be happening, where art is probably going to get more and more personal and move faster, but probably get better and better and more human as it runs away from the computer.

AJR:

What's going to be cool is "I made this."

AJR:

I made this. You can tell because it's exactly me as a person. There are off notes, and it changes, and it's not like anything you've heard before.

David Perell:

Well, the off notes thing is really interesting to think about how.

AJR:

You don't.

David Perell:

You don't want to have off notes for the sake of having off notes. But off notes are also a kind of proof of authenticity. It's the same thing in writing. When I read something with typos or there's some weird idiosyncrasies, I'm like, "All right, you actually wrote that."

I can't imagine anything more annoying than somebody putting typos and idiosyncrasies after having written with AI to be like, "Gotcha, dude." That would be such a dystopia.

AJR:

It really would.

AJR:

I want to believe that you could see through that. I don't know, maybe I'm being optimistic.

AJR:

Maybe the typos thing is tough, because it's just in writing, in a book. But I think you'd be able to tell if a voice crack or anything.

AJR:

Like that was on purpose versus they were just feeling the emotion. You could just tell in conversation. I could tell that I believe you and you really believe what you're saying. I want to believe that. That's the same with art.

David Perell:

A major thing is when we're at your shows, we want to be connected with you guys. This is probably—thank God I don't work in the music industry. I better be canceled for what I'm about to say. But I do think that music serves a few different functions, and sometimes the function is just purely functional, which is I'm working, and there's some people sitting next to me at the co-working space, and I just need some sound so that I can't hear their dang conversation that doesn't distract me, and I go on YouTube, and I'm like, "Focus piano." I don't really care if it's AI-generated. I just need to not hear them.

AJR:

Yeah.

David Perell:

At the same time, there's artists who I really adore where part of why I love their music is because I feel a connection with them as people. For them to be making things with AI, I'm like, "No, I've come to this for you, Jack and Ryan, and now you're gonna outsource this to AI? That's a complete betrayal of the implicit contract that we have going on here."

AJR:

I totally agree. And for what purpose? So they could save a few days of time. Why is the goal of making a song "I can make it this fast?" "This only took me five seconds to make with AI versus the two weeks." Is that where we're headed in the music industry? I don't think so.

I totally agree with what you're saying about the betrayal. Good music is like—it's a conversation. It's passing on wisdom. It's a cry for help. A computer doesn't know what any of those things are. It could replicate it by taking Randy Newman's cry for help and Brandy Carlisle's cry for help and combining it, but that's not my cry for help.

AJR:

It'll never perfect that. Maybe it'll get lucky once in a while, but it'll never perfect it. Just like it'll never predict trends too.

Going back to Hozier, I have with complete confidence that ChatGPT could not have written that song to be. Maybe by accident if you typed in a certain kind of thing, but it could never predict the next culture and what's coming next. That is just purely human. What human is feeling. They're only gonna go by what was popular. Maybe it's a Beatles-sounding thing. And that's not how songs, the new wave of songs, happen.

AJR:

Of real, long-lasting songs.

David Perell:

How do you guys think about improving your craft and retrospectives when things you could have done better? And how do you think about those retrospectives?

AJR:

I see.

David Perell:

And this general process of improving, you know, you're better artists now than you were 15 years ago. And part of that is subconscious, but I'm curious about the conscious part of what accounts for that improvement?

AJR:

Wow.

AJR:

It's a good question. I think an uninteresting answer is that it just kind of comes naturally with growing as people, especially in the style of music that we make. We're going to keep being honest no matter what.

AJR:

I think number one, it's going to become natural because we're going to have new experiences that fans relate to. Number two, we become really obsessed with doing something totally different than what we did last time.

AJR:

Yeah. That becomes like the death of creativity when we're like, okay, we did an overture for the last album. How are we gonna beat the last overture with an overture on this album?

David Perell:

Right.

AJR:

And that's so crippling to us that it makes us not even want to write. It's so hard to think, how are we gonna beat… it's a competition between the thing we put out last year and this year. So often we find ourselves just taking a left turn and going, this album actually is not gonna have an overture. It's gonna have a whole different thing that you can't compare it to.

AJR:

And it's worked out for us. Honestly, I think that that could go wrong, but that has always seemed to work out for us.

AJR:

Yeah. And it's just like, we keep saying truth, but it's like, write something that you can defend in front of a jury. Right.

We have some songs that I don't want to say regret, but I can't defend. We have a song called Thirsty that is silly and sounded like 2013. The hook is like, thirsty, Thirsty Thursday and yodeling and stuff. We were experimenting, and there's been countless TikTok trends about how it's the worst song ever made.

Not that that doesn't hurt me, but I can't get on the stand and defend that's actually how I was feeling Thursday.

But a lot of these other songs, if there was to be a trend about a dog song, how it's the worst song ever made, I could stand in front of a jury and go, it's actually how I was feeling, so fuck all of you. Like, this is my truth. And I think that's probably just something that we've learned. Just keep saying your truth, and then you can't possibly have regrets. Any kind of hate, which every artist gets hate now, it's just like the culture of that, any kind of hate just bounces off of you because you're like, what do you mean? I was just being myself. I can fully defend that till the end of time.

David Perell:

You guys seem remarkably secure in these things, and that must have been a process of… I would presume there were times when you had gotten hate and you're like, man, we should… maybe we shouldn't go that route. Maybe we shouldn't be like that. And now it seems like you've overcome something where you're just like, we're just going to be these people. Or maybe you just always had these spines of steel that I just cannot relate.

AJR:

Definitely not. It definitely hurt us at first. And then I think we quickly realized that the things they hate about us are the things that we love.

AJR:

We love about ourselves. Exactly. Yeah.

AJR:

At the end of the day, it feels like, okay, I guess we just wouldn't be friends with this guy. And I think you could zoom out and realize it's not hating us as people, it's just hating the music. And in the moment, it seems watching a video, it seems like they fuck these guys. They're pieces of shit and whatever.

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

But it's not really that. There are kinds of music I would never get on the internet and shit on songs. I think that's absolutely ridiculous and a waste of time. But there's songs that I really don't like and I hate and don't ever want to listen to again. And that has nothing to do with the person that made it.

AJR:

Yeah. And we've also just seen so many of our favorite artists put out their first album, and it's so unique. And then they naturally get a lot of hate because it's unique. Then their second album was like apologizing for how unique that first album was, and like, okay, now I'm gonna sound like the rest of hip hop, or, okay, I'm just gonna do an emo one because that will give me less hate.

For us, we're like, no, you had something that was real, and you inevitably those artists often go down in popularity after that because it's a race to the bottom of trying to sound like everybody else. For some reason, we were very aware of that this whole time of being like, no, no, we're just going to keep being unapologetically ourself.

David Perell:

So you have a new album coming out now. How are you thinking about distribution and marketing? How has that changed over time?

AJR:

Social media is just a thing that we've had to wrap our heads around. I know we talked about TikTok. It's also a really cool thing.

"World's Smallest Violin" wasn't supposed to be a single ever. It was the weird, deep cut for the fans, and now it's like our top song that we've ever made.

AJR:

We made that three years ago, and it took two years for it to start being noticed. Another one that got big on TikTok was five years before it started getting big. 2018 and then 2023.

AJR:

It started getting big, yes.

David Perell:

You guys must be super unique in how long it takes for some of your songs to get popular. Is that normal?

AJR:

Yeah, it's pretty normal these days. Lizzo, what's the song?

AJR:

Truth Hurts.

AJR:

Yeah, I think she made that in 2016 and it got big in, like, 2021 or something like that. I mean, look at Fleetwood Mac. They're, like, the biggest band ever now because all of their music.

Abba, I don't know how to pronounce it, but they're like the biggest band ever now because of TikTok. I mean, they were always huge, but now they're like the biggest modern pop band. It's pretty common.

AJR:

It's definitely easy to lament the old industry where you picked her single. But also, that's kind of a cool new industry where you get to just make a lot of songs that you like and go live your life and hope that in a couple years one of them blows up and crunches down history to forget that five years passed. It just goes, "Oh, AJR's blowing up again."

There's some optimism to it because you can never fail, because there's always just the chance that tomorrow it could blow up.

David Perell:

Right.

AJR:

Because you can never fail, because there's always just the chance that tomorrow it could blow up.

David Perell:

That is nice that you can put stuff out, and many years from now it could be taken up, because that is almost the antithesis of social media. Social media is this constant grind. Things don't get rediscovered.

AJR:

That's one of the great things. There's negatives and positives. We've talked about a lot of the frustration, but there's a lot of real positives with this.

Back in the times of when radio was the thing, if your song was done at radio—like, they didn't play it anymore—your song was never heard of again. You didn't even know who that person was or what that song was.

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

It's the total opposite these days. Anything could happen. Someone can use it in a trend.

"World's Smallest Violin" started in a trend of anime artists showing their work, like "I'll blow up into smithereens." It started cutting on the beat of different pieces of art. That's unbelievably random. And then all of a sudden, it…

AJR:

Blew up from there.

AJR:

There's no other time in history where that could be this.

David Perell:

What's so weird about the Internet is you could basically categorize the Internet as ephemeral and permanent, and ephemeral and permanent are antonyms. And yet the Internet's both.

AJR:

It's just a living thing that we're all a part of.

I'm picturing like a swirling thing that's constantly rolling. I think being an artist now—being in any industry now—is like, with AI, I'm rolling with the punches, ready to pivot with what people decide is in right now, and still being myself all along. It's hard and more fun at the same time.

David Perell:

What are the economics of AJR in terms of where revenue profit comes from? You were saying earlier that a song is an advertisement for the tour, and then merch factors into it. So how does that all work out?

AJR:

That sounds really cynical. I forgot I said that. You don't make a lot of money with streaming unless you're like Ed Sheeran, unless you're just in the billions of streams.

David Perell:

And does that bother you, or is that just how it is?

AJR:

We don't know the ins and outs. I mean, I don't know the ins and outs.

AJR:

We will tell you our surface-level understanding. For our first many tours, we lost money. We were bringing cool effects, thinking, "We'll lose money this tour, but I hope they tell friends about it, and in the next tour we can play a little bigger."

We very much played the long game with the tour. That has worked out for us financially. Now we're able to play arenas and amphitheaters and make that money back. It's cool that we were right about this very long, 15-year risk we were taking.

The songs—if you add up all the streaming and the music videos—you probably make some money, but it's definitely not what it used to be. You make money when your song gets in a commercial. That money is still very fertile.

David Perell:

Yeah, you guys have been in a lot of commercials.

AJR:

That world is like, when you're in, you're in. We were in a Microsoft commercial, and they must have internal conversations among all those music supervisors where they're like, something about AJR's music sells tech.

Apple asked us to use Bang in their commercial, so we've been really fortunate with that. I'm trying to think, yeah, merch makes money. How else do we make money?

AJR:

Merch does. It's so much touring these days.

AJR:

It's so much touring.

AJR:

That's why you're seeing so many people going on tour. It's just the way to make money.

David Perell:

It's funny that AJR makes music and then all of a sudden it's like the Samsung Galaxy S17 and both, there's something cool about that. That's honestly how I feel with ads for the show sometimes. I'm like, that's kind of cynical. My life's work will then be to sell some sort of. It's how you fund it.

AJR:

I don't know.

David Perell:

It's just sort of the world we live in.

AJR:

Yeah, I feel like when smaller artists ask us for advice, it's write a million songs. Write a lot, tour a lot, and play a lot of shows for people that don't come, for just a few people.

David Perell:

When you say write a lot, what does that mean? Does that mean you sit down from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. every single day? Does it mean you walk around with a notebook? What does it actually mean to write a lot?

AJR:

It's write a lot of bad songs. It's such an uncomfortable feeling to sit in that, and it makes you feel like a failure and inadequate, but that's just truly the only way. I'm sure every writer has said this. It's truly the only way to get better.

AJR:

Write a thousand bad songs. Write a thousand songs where you could clearly see, oh, you guys are just copying the Beach Boys with this song. Don't be afraid to wear your influences on your sleeve.

Naturally, the first 500 songs you write are just going to be like copies of your favorite artists, and that's okay. But now you have those skills in terms of writing, in terms of producing.

I feel like I know how to implement a hint of Frankie Valli because I made a fully Frankie Valli song 15 years ago. So now I could just take that little tool and implement it into, like, Week.

That's that Frankie Valli kind of tool that I had. I knew that our voices sound good with distortion and that kind of high falsetto thing. It's doing it a lot. Then you get really bored of copying your influences, and you watch your friend's reaction, and it doesn't feel so good when they go, oh, were you listening to a lot of Arcade Fire when you wrote this?

You feel a little ashamed, right? You feel like, I'm not an artist. I'm just like a proxy for Arcade Fire here. So you then start really working on, what can I bring to the table that no one else can?

David Perell:

What are the pros and cons of you guys not being classically trained, taking music lessons when you were kids, being like, I don't really like this, and we're going to teach ourselves.

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

I mean, there's that imperfection that we were talking about. I feel like when you're classically trained, you kind of get conditioned that you miss a note, start over. You got to be 100% on, and you got to punish yourself, and it's got to be perfect every single time.

AJR:

Yeah, totally. There's also the Dunning Kruger effect, where you're so naive that you.

David Perell:

Think you know a lot.

AJR:

You think you know a lot. Often those are the successful people because they don't know how difficult the road is actually going to be. They don't know what they don't know, so they just go for it.

That to me is like the history of us. If we had more knowledge growing up of this is the correct chord to go here, we wouldn't have taken all the musical risks that we've taken and switched up time signatures.

We've been genre a lot, I think, and we're very like, I don't care. Something in my brain and our brains are like, I don't feel that anything is so sacred. I feel like, why not take yodeling and combine it with classical piano and beatboxing and see how that sounds?

I think a lot of people's brains, probably, if they're a little more educated, don't naturally work that way because they're like, yodeling came from Scandinavia in 1600, and that has nothing to do with beatboxing, which came from Brooklyn. To me, it's just like, does it sound cool?

That's the benefit of living in a postmodern 2025 world where you can just. Everybody's doing it on TikTok. This random person can combine beatboxing and this and this and see if it sounds good, and then it might be a viral trend. So why can't the artists do it too?

AJR:

Honestly, I think that a con is that we tend to rely on the same chords and the same progressions. At least I do when I'm trying to write melodies and stuff like that. It'll be so nice if I can get to this seventh chord.

AJR:

That's true.

AJR:

If we just knew more in that way, I think it would broaden our.

AJR:

Especially with the Broadway stuff we're writing, we're a little bit like, okay, let's do a crash course in music theory to be able to get where we need to get.

David Perell:

How do you guys listen to music differently from an average person? Listening, collecting, sampling?

AJR:

I don't listen to a ton of music, really. I mostly listen to podcasts.

David Perell:

How I write. There we go. We can add it to your podcast.

AJR:

That's right. I guess the music that I do listen to is old. I listen to a lot of barbershop quartet stuff, like 1950s stuff, like Mellow Men, and a lot of Broadway stuff.

AJR:

If I send him a song, I think he'll listen to that.

AJR:

Yeah, then I'll listen to that. I don't have a good answer for you of why I don't listen to a lot of music, but you listen to everything.

AJR:

Tons.

AJR:

I'll go so deep into Spotify, of the radio, of this, of this, of this, and then I'll get into songs that have no streams. I like looking for a great song.

A lot of it can blend together, but then when I find that, I'm going to go into. I'm going to listen to it a little scientifically first. I'll listen to it and see if I like it, and then I'll get that feeling.

AJR:

I think I'm missing that first step that you're talking about where you're just consuming. I feel like I only can listen; I just know too much about the production. I can only listen for like, cool snare they used here as opposed to, let me let this thing wash all over me.

AJR:

It's exciting that I know there's going to be one in the next hundred that I listen to that's going to be a new song. There's nothing better than finding a new song that you're obsessed with. Where has this been my whole life? That feeling?

I'll let it wash over me. I'll probably over listen to it and I'll hate it after the hundredth listen. But I'll also be listening pretty scientifically. In the back of my mind, I'm obsessed with knowing why I love it and listening to a hook that I wish I had written. It makes me so annoyed and excited.

David Perell:

So you follow the radio of.

AJR:

I'm talking about on Spotify.

AJR:

Like this artist or this. I think you can do radio of songs.

AJR:

So we could hear a song and radio another radio.

AJR:

Keep going and keep going, and eventually you will find artists that are unknown.

David Perell:

I remember when I got to college, there was a dorm room of ten of us, and the entire status game was who could find the coolest music. So we were on different music blogs. This song is sick, whatever else.

We would just hang out on Fridays and Saturdays, and Will and Vince in the back, they always had the best music. If you had aux control, you were the coolest guy in the group.

Now it doesn't feel like there's any sort of social capital to be gained in the same way from just finding new music because it's all on Spotify.

AJR:

A lot of the songs I find are pretty unknown, and it makes me excited to send it to people.

AJR:

There's nothing better than a good recommendation. Like when you recommend a movie to someone that they like, it feels so good. I did it.

David Perell:

You know that song Sign of the Times by Harry Styles?

David Perell:

When I heard that song for the first time, it was like I was being born again.

David Perell:

It's the sign of the times. It was so grand. It was unlike anything else. I listened to it a hundred times. The gift and the curse that I have is I don't have the musical knowledge to get caught on the snares and stuff.

David Perell:

Sometimes I watch Rick Beato videos, and he did one about Smells Like Teen Spirit.

AJR:

Does that ruin the song for you a little or enhance it?

David Perell:

It makes me appreciate it more, but the problem is, then that's the only thing I know. So then that's the only thing that I can hear.

With writing, it's sometimes harder for me to get lost in words because, just like you guys with sound, I'm like that with paragraph transition, sentence structure, word choice, all that sort of stuff. I can't turn off X ray vision in my reading, but I don't have it when I listen to music.

David Perell:

I don't know enough.

AJR:

I hear a lot of comedians talk about jokes like that. Oh, I see what you did there. You did a turn, and that was a classic misstep or whatever.

AJR:

That's especially bad. I think in comedy, that's where it goes to die, right? What is it? Dissecting the frog. You learn how it works, but you kill it in the process.

AJR:

Oh, yeah. I could see how that would ruin a joke. Especially jokes; just let that thing wash over you and either laugh or don't laugh.

David Perell:

The hard part of getting good at something is you lose your childlike approach to it.

AJR:

Totally.

I think I've developed the ability to go back and forth. I've almost trained myself to. I really think I can listen from that stranger's point of view.

For some reason, I've developed that ability, and then I could listen from Jack's point of view. It has come from just watching and really asking friends of their type of their taste in music and having them recommend songs to me.

AJR:

Okay, I know what you like. You must like this weird offbeat kind of thing.

AJR:

I think that's just one of my few skills that I can contribute.

AJR:

It's such an interesting line that you walk between, "This is the most extreme. I'm the artist. I'll tell you what's good," and, "It seems like you like this," or, "It seems like you're the overeager."

You have to constantly be going back and forth in any kind of art and walking the line. It has to be somewhere in the middle of the two. Because if you were just making music based on, "It seems like people like this," we'd be a pretty boring artist.

AJR:

Totally. But you need some of that. You're right. You need a little bit of that.

AJR:

A little bit of that, because there are a lot of artists we see where they're like, "I make the art for myself." That can be dangerous, because don't you want your art to be seen by other people and to connect with people? That's too far in that extreme. It's just constantly riding that line.

David Perell:

In your partnership, you're saying that you come up with the early words and create it, and then you get the feedback. The very fact that you have each other means that you don't need to play both sides all the time.

AJR:

That's a really good point. When I made "World's Smallest Violin" or whatever, some of the more uncool kind of stuff, I was just thinking about how I feel in that moment. That's the subconscious creates the conscious edit.

You have to just be thinking about yourself, and then the next step is, let me craft this into something that's digestible enough that people won't just turn it off and be like, "This was a narcissistic exercise."

David Perell:

Have you guys pulled from hip hop in terms of inspiration?

AJR:

Yeah, 100%.

AJR:

Production.

AJR:

Yes, for sure. Beats wise, but also honesty wise. Our first album that he talked about was very much us trying to figure out who we were.

We have a song; it's called "Living Room," the album. We have a song on "Living Room" that's so clearly an Imagine Dragons copy, and this one is so clearly a Beach Boys copy.

I think I was listening to Macklemore at the time because it was around that time, and he just had all these great stories on his first album about the shoe culture and how someone was murdered for their Nikes. I remember being really jealous of rappers that get to tell these stories that are so personal. I'm yearning to be that personal, but I have to wrap it up in a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, 3 minute, 30 second catchy pop song.

AJR:

And then we wrote a song called "3:30."

AJR:

We wrote a song about that.

AJR:

Rappers have it easy because they can kind of say whatever they want to do in whatever phrasing they want, and we have to keep it this way.

AJR:

Along with "3:30," the first moment of us trying to bridge that was a song called "Netflix Trip." That's about "The Office," the TV show, which is another example of a laugh, then cry.

That felt like probably the first moment where we were like, okay, I can't—it's not our life to talk about someone being murdered for their Nikes. I can't talk a lot about the stuff that most rappers talk about. But here's how I can get personal in something that's truthful to me: how much a TV show shaped the way I cross my legs or the way I hugged my mom at this age. Here's my way of getting as personal as hip hop can get.

David Perell:

Who are the craziest, most faraway artists that you guys pull from for inspiration? Obviously, we talk about the Beach Boys and Imagine Dragons, and there's things you're pulling right in. Who is just 7 million miles away?

AJR:

There's a guy named Dan Reader that we're really big fans of. He might be my favorite artist. He's old, probably in his 70s or something. He builds his own guitars, and he writes a lot of the kind of stuff that I'm talking about. He would write a song from a dog's perspective.

AJR:

But then there's also the Mellow Men, which is like a barbershop quartet. On our album, Neo Theater, it was almost like the theme. It was close harmony that we fell in love with.

AJR:

That's that Peter Pan, 1950s Disney choir thing that we love.

David Perell:

How about musical theater? Do you guys go to a lot of shows? Broadway shows?

AJR:

Constantly.

David Perell:

Constantly.

AJR:

Yeah, we grew up going.

I think there's a feeling in Les Mis. Right before intermission, they're all about to go off to war, and they're going "One Day More." It ends, and then the audience stands up and can't wait to see the second half. That's pure emotion uncloaked by, "Is this cool that we're going off to war?" or "Are we dressed cool?" All of that is diluting the pure emotion.

It's about the revolutionary war in France. France is coming together to overthrow the upper class, and they're all singing about it. To me, that kind of pure, unadulterated emotion is what I want to feel in our music.

David Perell:

Broadway really is just the place where you have the most permission to be expressive with your body.

AJR:

Yeah.

David Perell:

And with body and voice. Whenever I go to a show, I'm just like, wow, it's so grand.

AJR:

And you don't get judged.

AJR:

It's the new church, honestly. We grew up Jewish. We're not super religious, but I've been to church a few times. The first time, and this is just my experience, you're looking around at people that are like this, and you roll your eyes at it, because it's a new weird thing. Then you go a few more times, and you're like, "Oh, I'm the villain in this story. They're just being fully themselves. Who am I to look down on them?"

It turned into the most magical experience ever. That is what religion is. We're all one big organism here, and there's nothing like disconnecting all of us. We're all just gonna be ourselves.

That's how Broadway makes me feel, and that's what we're trying to do with the music.

David Perell:

The other thing with Broadway is it's close enough to your work that you can definitely pull from it, but it's far away enough that other artists probably aren't pulling from it.

If I was making a live show, I'd be like, "Okay, I went and I saw Hamilton. Hamilton had the rotating stage. Maybe we do that. We have a rotating stage for our next live show. Okay, I just went to Moulin Rouge and they have the actors and actresses on the stage before the show begins. They're just walking around." Every time I go to a live show, it's just dark. How do we pull into that?

AJR:

Yeah.

David Perell:

Now you just start going to shows, and every time I go to a Broadway show, I always find one or two things. Then I'm like, "I'm gonna add this to my mental bank."

It's a lot of things to do.

AJR:

Totally. David Perell Byrne had a Broadway show a few years ago, American Utopia, where there was a curtain that came down and a light down here, and it shined like a big shadow of him up there, and he's playing. I saw it with my girlfriend at the time, and I was like, "How cool would it be if we all believed that this is his shadow, if his shadow just started doing different stuff than he was doing, started duetting her?"

I just felt that as a consumer in that moment, and we literally just took that and put it into Mantour last year.

David Perell:

I laugh because Maddian, who's one of my favorite artists, he did a live show called Good Faith Live. There's this part inside the show where he's dressed as this black silhouette, and the lights behind him are really bright, so you don't get a lot of depth and dimensionality.

Then what happens is there's this white background, and all of a sudden you get like six to eight Maddians. I'm with my friend, and I'm like, "Where did they all show up from?" And we were totally tricked.

He's like, "You guys really into magic and stuff?" We're totally tricked. We're looking at each other, probably last 10 to 12 seconds, and then all of a sudden, they all disappear. He's standing right there in the middle, and we just looked at each other being like, whoa. We had just totally been burned or roasted by the artist.

AJR:

Yes, that we love magic. Are you into just magic in general?

David Perell:

I hate magic.

AJR:

Perfect.

David Perell

I hate magic. It bothers me so much to not know what's bothering you.

I just feel like I'm being tricked. I can't figure it out. It's one of those things where I think some people enjoy that sensation. The fact that I can't figure it out infuriates me.

AJR

That's why we know so many people like that just cannot stand it. Get it away from me.

AJR

I don't even want to do the exercise of thinking how you could get that done. For us, it's like if we could live in a world where that guy could be nine people at once, what else is possible?

It feels like that's where kids are again.

David Perell

Yes.

AJR

That's like, "Oh, okay, we don't understand all of reality." That's fun. I think we like the feeling of you trusting us on stage because we do a lot of magic. We establish a trust and connection.

We're always one step ahead of you. I think people, especially nowadays with phones, know what their vacation is going to be before they even go. They've booked out everything and seen all the pictures.

It's a really fun feeling to go to a place and just not know what you're in for. A song ends, and then suddenly Jack's skydiving. In magic, he takes out cards, puts that away, and then all of a sudden, an elephant is here.

To just be a kid again, consuming the world for the first time and not knowing what you're in for, it's so fun.

For our last tour for Maybeman, there was a whole narrative. At the end, there's this big reveal of a 50-foot version of Jack that we had an animatronic built.

It was really tied into an emotional story about being the biggest version of yourself, stuff that our dad used to say to us. We kept that really close to the vest. We tease a lot on social media, but we decided to have you be there in the moment when that big thing gets revealed.

Let's have everybody just be on the same page of bewilderment and start to think back. Oh, that's why they were putting Easter eggs in the show throughout to lead up to this thing. Let's make everybody in the audience little kids again in that moment.

David Perell

How do you guys think about themes on your album? Have you heard of the album The Great American Bar Scene by Zach Bryan?

AJR

No.

David Perell

Zach is a big country artist now, and the album starts with a really beautiful poem. I quite like it. I've listened to the poem many times.

He talks about it, and then the final line in the poem is "The Great American Bar Scene."

It's cool because the album starts and he creates the world of the great American bar scene, and then he repeats the line. I've been grappling with whether he was too explicit about the theme of the album. Do I really enjoy that it feels cohesive, or is that cohesiveness forced?

AJR

Is he trying too much? I think that it's different per album. We find it along the way.

With Maybe Man, we found it along the way. We started writing a bunch of songs.

AJR

It was all pointed in different directions.

AJR

We didn't know what it was. Then we wrote this one song called Maybeman, the titular track.

We realized this is what the album is about. It was about not knowing who we are as people. We're this kind of person with our friends, this kind of person with our girlfriend. At the end of the day, who is the real me? I think we were like, okay, this is the song we're most resonating with right now, so this should be the arc of the album.

AJR:

Throughout that process, our dad got sick and ended up passing away while we were making that album. By the time we wrote the last song for the album, which is 2085, that's a song about what we're going to be like in 2085 when we're old, and what will have been important at the end of our life.

Then there's a wrap-up to that first song of, "Oh, these are the things that are important in life." We only could have learned that by watching everybody that came to my dad's bedside.

Nobody said he was a great architect. Everybody was like, he was the nicest guy ever. He had this little conversation with me. It really is about these small, little moments that you have with people, and friendship and family.

It's all this obvious stuff that now seems obvious, but wasn't obvious to us when we started the album. I feel like we literally learned that lesson along the way. So I think that's part of it.

Be open to changing the course. A lot of times when people write movies, by the end of the movie, they're like, "I didn't even realize the movie was about this thing." Be open to that, because that will give you the best movies.

David Perell:

That was so fun. It was so good to meet you guys.

AJR:

Amazing.

David Perell:

That was so fun.

AJR:

We covered everything.

David Perell:

We covered a lot. It's just great to hear how you guys think about things, the freedom that you guys have, the joy that you guys bring to the craft, and the goofiness. I really admire it. I hope we can hang out in New York.

AJR:

I'm sure we'll see each other around the neighborhood. That was an amazing interview.

AJR:

Yeah.

AJR:

Thanks so much.

AJR:

Thank you, man.