Imagine Dragons Reveal Psychiatric Woes, Question Themselves, Others on 'Smoke + Mirrors'

Las Vegas quartet Imagine Dragons have come a long way since the days in 2010, when they played four hours a night at casinos for $100 a member. “Many times we’d be there at 3 in the morning and the room would be almost empty,” guitarist and songwriter Daniel Wayne Sermon tells Yahoo Music. “Drunk people spilled beer on us while we played and yelled ‘Free Bird’ every 30 minutes. Remembering those days kind of makes us appreciate the success we’ve had.”

Most bands would sacrifice their drummer for the kind of success Imagine Dragons have had. The group’s second full-length Smoke + Mirrors debuted this week at #1 on the Billboard album chart, knocking Drake from the top slot. At the same time, the first single from Smoke + Mirrors, “I Bet My Life” rocketed from #54 to #28 on the Hot 100 chart, and their new single “Shots” jumped nine slots to #89. In addition, Imagine Dragons’ 2012 debut Night Visions climbed 26 positions to #20. Despite the popularity of Imagine Dragons’ debut, Sermon said the group had no idea how fans would react to their new record and he still can’t figure out how the first one sold more than 2 million copies.

"If I knew what made that album so popular, I’d bottle it up and sell it myself," he says. "It’s was one of those right-place-at-the-right-time situations, but we also put a lot of love into it. It was four years in the making. We wrote some of it during our first year as a band, and some were done just a week before we finished recording. So I felt the album really tracked our growth from the beginning to the point it was released. But we never imagined it would do so well and keep selling."

The honesty, excitement, and time Imagine Dragons spent on Night Visions were paramount to its popularity. The songs were euphoric, but they felt real, and everyone from teens to soccer moms could relate to them. The all-pervasive popularity of the record made Imagine Dragons nervous heading into the writing sessions for Smoke + Mirrors. They knew they had an incredibly high standard to live up to and didn’t know if they had enough time to make an album that would take them to a higher artistic level. Worse still, they didn’t want to write what they thought people expected from them.

"It’s a tough situation to be in, because as a musician you can only do what you do, but you don’t want to repeat what you’ve already done," Sermon says. "If you’re writing a record and basing it on a fear of something or comparing it to something else, no matter what you do it’s not going to be good because you’re not being yourselves. Feeling that way is suffocating. Fortunately, we were able to get over that and just be honest about how we felt when we were writing the songs.

There’s a strong duality that runs throughout Smoke + Mirrors. Many of the songs are melodic and uplifting, but a sense of melancholy and confusion pervades “Hopeless Opus,” “Second Chances,” and “Gold,” the latter of which features the lines, “Only at first did it have its appeal/But now you can’t tell the false from the real/Who can you trust when everything you touch turns to gold?”

"There’s a lot of meaning behind us calling the album Smoke + Mirrors,” Sermon says. “There’s a lot of questioning on the album as far as what things in life are real and what things aren’t. What parts of this career and lifestyle are completely bogus and what parts aren’t and what parts of people are real?”

Imagine Dragons have been both thrilled and mystified by the opportunities they’ve had since Night Visions became a big seller and the band began to sell out large venues. They performed “Radioactive” with Kendrick Lamar, both on Saturday Night Live and at the 2014 Grammy Awards. And they were invited to exclusive parties reserved for elite celebrities.

"It was weird, "Sermon says. "It was like, ‘Are you treating me this way because of who I am, or do you genuinely care about me as a person?’ Honestly, we still feel a little bit like outsiders when it comes to celebrity. It’s not something that interests any of us. We’re all pretty big music nerds. We would rather make music on our laptops than go to a raging party at 3 in the morning."

Equally perplexing was the way they were treated by people around them. Everyone wanted to buy them dinner, and clothing companies started showering them with free goods. The only strings attached were the laces.

"A few years ago we would have killed to go to a nice restaurant and have someone else pay for it," Sermon says. "But now that we can afford it, it just feels weird. That’s one of the biggest ironies of being established. People give you shoes; I have more shoes than I’m comfortable with having as a dude. But when the band started I only had two pairs of shoes. I had sneakers and nice shoes I wore out."

Feeling uncomfortable in your own shoes affected the tone of Smoke + Mirrors and leant much of the album a slightly claustrophobic quality. “In every song you can hear the good with the bad and there’s juxtaposition on the record of dark and light,” Sermon says. “There’s this feeling of being happy, but somehow always feeling unsettled and feeling like you don’t have your feet in a solid place. It was very surreal for us, because over a two-year period we went from playing dive bars where no one knew who we were to playing a festival in Sao Paulo and having 80,000 people there.”

The emotional turmoil Sermon and vocalist and lyricist Dan Reynolds experienced over the past couple years was compounded by chemical imbalances they’ve struggled with years. Both continue to battle depression, and Sermon has been an insomniac since he was 12, which is why the band called its first album Night Visions. “We’ve all been on this crazy schedule touring, which means getting two or three hours of sleep for days on end,” he says. “That definitely weighs on your well-being. Maybe 99 percent of our distrust of people is in our own heads. It’s not even real, but we still have to work through it. I feel like this record was really therapeutic not only for Dan as the lyricist, but for all of us.”

If Imagine Dragons were a jumble of frustration and heightened emotions during the songwriting process for Smoke + Mirrors, it didn’t affect their creativity. They wrote most of the album while touring for Night Visions and had 125 demos to work with by the time they got back to Vegas and entered their home studio. There, they chose the best songs, fleshed them out, and recorded them on-and-off over much of 2014. Unlike Night Visions, which was produced by Brandon Danner, Imagine Dragons self-produced Smoke + Mirrors, and Alex Da Kid returned to executive-produce. In total, the band spent about five months tracking, and there was no shortage of strong material, as evidenced by the deluxe edition of the album, which features 21 songs.

"We gutted an old ’70s bachelor house," Sermon says. "We tore out a bunch of walls and it ended up being acoustically perfect. It turned out to be an awesome studio and allowed us to record at our own pace instead of being on the clock. We did Night Visions in a couple of months and recorded it during long 15-hour days. We kind of lost our minds after being in the same place for that long, doing the same thing every day. So it was great to be able to break it up this time and have more of a nine-to-five existence. That was a lot healthier for us.”

While much of Smoke + Mirrors features widescreen atmospherics reminiscent of U2 and Coldplay, there’s less of hip-hop production and fewer electronic passages than were on Night Vision. Throughout, the band exposes its affinity for classic rock and strives to create songs that ebb and flow in intensity without ever losing the impact of strong verses and soaring choruses

"When you’ve had commercial success, you can approach a new record a few different ways," says Sermon. "You can make a repeat of the first record, hoping that people want the same thing and they’ll like it as much as the first record. You can make this totally artsy, conceptual record to prove to people that you have cred and that you’re super-alternative and can garner critical acclaim. Or you can make something that doesn’t alienate your fans but somehow manage to reinvent the band a little bit. We chose the latter path. No one’s going to listen to this record and think it’s anyone else but us. But it’s not like 12 versions of ‘Radioactive’ or 12 ‘Demons.’ If you can’t explore new ideas and really express yourself, what’s the point of even doing a new album?"