A few weeks ago, The Chainsmokers duo of Alex Pall and Drew Taggart took a $300 UberX ride from Hollywood to Chris Martin’s Malibu pad just to chit-chat and jam. Not so long ago, Alex used to earn $500 a week. Yes, the two have come a long way. Ever since their 2014 bouncy viral hit #Selfie. After playing over 300 shows in 2015, they are waiting for the results of the MTV Europe Music Awards and American Music Awards, both scheduled for November. And while they wait, they spoke about the track that’s burning up dance floors... Closer!
Let’s get close to Closer (Sony Music India) with Halsey!
Drew Taggart: It’s been a long time coming. We made it last fall when we were on tour and we had been listening to a lot of R&B and a lot of Blink-182. We had some nights when we were listening to Taking Back Sunday, Blink-182, Dashboard Confessional — all this old emo music that we really liked. And we were talking about how we haven’t heard a conversational song where a person is so literal about what they mean, and we wanted to do something like that. We had this concept for a song that was like an un-sexy sex scene basically. The lyrics are what we came up with, and we produced it and we were sitting on it for a while. Roses was popping off at the time and then Don’t Let Me Down became a big song, and while those songs were happening, we ended up becoming friends with Halsey. We showed her the song and she made the second verse so it wasn’t my one-sided story about some chick I used to date. She made it a conversation between the two of us, which added a really cool dynamic — it makes the song complete. It’s crazy to see it come out and be the first song that we’ve written, produced and I’m singing on.
How have you been reacting to the success of the song?
Alex Pall: We aren’t the type of guys to go out and buy a Lamborghini or do anything crazy like that. We go out and have beers with our friends and keep it moving to the next thing. It’s been an amazing 18 months, everything’s just been rolling out, but we’ve always been just making music and we’re so far ahead of what everyone’s currently listening to. It’s really dope that songs like Closer, Don’t Let Me Down and Roses are doing super, but you should really get excited for the next thing. It’s really dope that we’re getting to do what we love and doing it how we like it — so we just want to keep doing that.
What was the process of developing The Chainsmokers sound?
Alex: Well we always really loved indie, we don’t really listen to dance music, our shit is hip hop and indie-alternative and everything in between. If you look back at where we started a couple years ago and you look at the songs we were remixing, we were finding these no-name bands that were up and coming (some of them are known now, but they weren’t at the time). We didn’t want to just take pop songs and make them EDM… that was not interesting to us… it didn’t come naturally to us. We liked picking indie songs, adding this cool dance side to it that also felt organic and natural with the song, so that’s kind of where our interests have always been rooted. When you’re starting out, you imitate other things and it’s a very intentional song-writing process. You’re trying to figure it out — you don’t know what’s cool; what’s going to work. You don’t really have a sound yet so you’re creating stuff based on other influences and eventually you hope that it develops into something that’s inherently yours and not anybody else’s. When we arrived at that moment, that was Roses.
Have you heard different remixes of your song? How do you like them?
Alex: What’s cool about remixes is that they allow us to make a song we want to make and not worry about how other DJs are gonna play it. Then we can give it to all these friends of ours who are really talented producers and they can make it festival-worthy, more dance radio station-worthy or more laid-back and chill. We always try to mix it up and get a good mix of remixers to give us a variation of different looks for our songs. I think that’s what’s been so fun because it brings in all these different audiences.
Tell us about your fashion on stage...
Drew: I think our look is very unintentional, but through the years it has become something that’s definitely “us”. We dress like dudes.
Alex: Kith (a NYC-based lifestyle brand) has really cool stuff. Vans (American manufacturer of shoes) is another one. I like button-downs and Hawaiian shirts. We also started our own line a year or so ago with a friend of ours. It’s called Our Thing.
What’s next for you guys?
Alex: We’ve got a ton of great music that we’re just sitting on, ready to put out.
YOU MAY BE WONDERING...
♦ Why are The Chainsmokers trending?
The duo have scored three Top 10 singles this year, including Closer, which remained at #1 for six weeks.
♦ Do they have a celeb fan?
Bono, according to Drew Taggart, has “rolled up to our studio, all by himself and played us some new U2 music. We played him some of our new stuff, and with this one song, he was like, ‘That’s great — will you send that to me?’ Which was so sick.”
♦ How high do their songs soar?
They literally started working on Don’t Let Me Down while on a flight. “I just grabbed a little segment of one of the sounds in a friend’s sample pack and stretched it and reversed it, put it in a different key,” Drew told The New York Times.
♦ Is there a song they leave out of their sets?
#Selfie, which served as an introduction to their fandom! These days they usually leave the song out of their sets because, “No one is like ‘#Selfie is my favourite song.’ But it taught us so much about the music business and ourselves – what type of artistes we wanted to be,” they told Rolling Stone.
I’m hooked to The Chainsmokers because....Tell t2@abp.in
