Imagine Dragons returned last month with two new songs "Follow You" and "Cutthroat" to gear up for the band's upcoming album. Frontman Dan Reynolds announced in 2019 that he was taking some time away to focus on family and personal growth...then came the pandemic. It took Dan walking away from everything to find more clarity and happiness. Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons chatted with Valentine in the Morning to talk about new music, working on a brand new video game, building his own commune and more!
Dan wrote the song "Follow You" a few years ago during a turning point in his marriage,
"'Follow You' is a song that I wrote 7 years into the marriage with my wife. We came to a turning point where we were going to get a divorce, we'd been touring the band incessantly and we'd grown apart. I went on tour for 7 months and we didn't talk at all. Just through attorneys to sign these divorce papers, which with kids involved to anybody who's been through that knows this horrible horrible hard experience. Anyways, I came home to meet with her and to sit down and sign those papers and she sent me a lengthy text message on the way andI hate saying text message because it sounds so trite. But she had gone through a spiritual journey and talked all about it and talked about some revelations she had about us. It just hit me in the deepest way and made me remember why and how much I love this woman. I came to the meeting and I just said why are we here let's get out of here and we both started crying. We stood up and left and the attorneys were super upset obviously and we went to lunch and then proceeded to start date and fall in love all over again. Since then, I've re-proposed even though we never got divorced and this was 3 years ago and we just celebrated our 10 year anniversary. We had a child after that so this song I wrote right after we had gotten back together years ago and we wanted to be the first to come out from the record because it's just a celebration of loyalty in life...it's a song about loyalty with those that you love and someone who knows you even at your worse and still sees and loves you."
Besides working on new music and just simply being a dad to four kids, Dan Reynolds has also been working on a computer game he started coding about a year and a half ago.
"Learned how to code is probably an overstatement, I more took a couple courses. I got knowledgeable enough to be able to build a team who were very great at coding and to oversee the art and the sound tracking and it's been awesome. I'm not a huge gamer per se, but I really love a few games that I played when I was young. I was into kind of weird, strange games so my goal was to make a game that's like Tarantino meets LucasArts so weird kind of strange, funny, eccentric kind of game. I had this basic idea and been working on all the art and the soundtrack and development of it for now for over a year...it will come out at some point."
Dan is a big family man as he grew up up in a household with 9 kids and he has 4 kids of his very own. He exclusively told Valentine in the Morning that right now his family is basically building a commune.
"We're actually building a new house right now on a property [in Las Vegas] that I purchased with all of my family so 9 kids plus mom and dad so everyone is going to live on a communal property. We're all going to live together and have farming and it's going to be very old. There's already over 40 grandkids to give you an idea. Everybody in my family is already doing it so there's going to be 10 houses and then a communal lot in the middle. We're already a year into the build where our framing is all done and there's already 4 houses that are complete and moved in already those families and 40 plus grand kids are going to be living there."
Don't forget to stream "Follow You" and "Cutthroat" and keep in touch with MYfm on Instagram/Twitter/Facebook!
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