When the Plane Went Down, Dan Reynolds Felt Nothing

Lex Fridman starts in an unexpected place. Dan Reynolds, lead singer of Imagine Dragons, has spent two years learning to code because he is building a computer game with a team out of Kyiv. The project now has a playable prototype, and the team members, he is careful to add, are in safe places. He decided he needed base-level C# so he would not sound like an idiot on the calls. He is not claiming a beautiful program. He is still at the tutorial stage, and the reward is smaller than that.

What he loves is completion. There is nothing, then some blocks and tools, then a thing that looks the way he wanted, and he gets to stand back and look at it. Object-oriented programming gave him that on the smallest canvas: making a cube move. Because he built the cube, the cube was enough. He says that feeling is exactly why he is addicted to songwriting.

Fridman presses the difference. Code can be done: the cube moves. A song is never done. Reynolds says it is the same problem, because it is art, and he has to keep forcing himself to let go. He looks at finished tracks and wonders what would have happened if he had stayed on the road a little longer. The box he fits into is pop: a song should not run past three minutes and thirty seconds, and if you cannot remember the chorus you may need to hear it three times instead of two.

Nobody in his house, and no major-label president, told Imagine Dragons they had to make pop. His manager does not tell him that either. He imposes the rules because he grew up on pop and because he thinks that is what people enjoy. Fridman names the bind: a prisoner of a prison he constructed. Reynolds accepts it. "I'm a happy prisoner of the prison that I have created for myself," he says, "and I made that prison thinking that it was a mansion."

Rick Rubin, on first meeting, told him Imagine Dragons fans were more forgiving than most rock audiences because the band already hopped genres. Reynolds grew up stacking Cat Stevens next to Biggie, Nirvana, Billy Joel, and Enya. Alanis Morissette's *Jagged Little Pill* is one of his favorite records, intimate and full of angst. The 1990s, which some people write off, are his favorite decade of music because they refused to stay in one lane. Boy bands and Pearl Jam and Nirvana all lived in the same years.

Fridman puts on Harry Nilsson's "Without You," a love song so bald it would cringe on paper. Reynolds does not want to talk over it. He tells young artists that people have a really good bullshit detector, and that understanding this is the most important part of being an artist. They need to believe that you believe what you are doing. Nilsson, he says, could transport himself to the feeling; the same timber, EQ, and compression from a skilled faker would not land. Energy, or some still-unnamed scientific thing, is what people read as true or false.

It does not even require writing the words. Reynolds was a little heartbroken to learn Elvis did not write his songs, and that Elton John did not know the depths of "Rocket Man" as a lyricist. The greats still go to a place. They find meaning in someone else's lines and take the audience with them. Reynolds has always written his own lyrics, which is personal to him, but he will not deny that a performer can mean a borrowed line as much as he means his own. A few words — even mixed metaphors, even Bush singing "Glycerine" — can do the work if the feeling is in the voice.

Nilsson's song, for Reynolds, is not a simple breakup. He hears a man in a destructive place who cannot love someone properly — cannot live with them, cannot live without them. He identifies with the struggle to love yourself enough, forgive yourself, and then let yourself love someone else. He and his wife went through a difficult separation, and the nuance of that is what the song brings back. Love, he says, is more complex than attraction, jokes, or a switch that flips from on to off.

Fridman asks about the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial, which Reynolds has watched because his wife plays it in bed at night. He does not care about the celebrity of it. He cares that the toxicity, the passion, the drugs and drinking, the vows to die for each other, are laid out in raw form for the world. His honest feeling is sadness. Parts of it are funny; he does not deny that. What he sees is two people with deep hurt and anger, and that anger is poisonous to both of them. There is no hero.

The internet needs a villain and a winner, and Depp's charisma has made that assignment easy. Reynolds's question is blunt: were any of you in their bedroom? Being more charming, funnier, or more believable on camera does not make a version the truth. The hardest part, for him, is that love still seems to be there. Depp will not look at her; he looks down the whole time. The way she looks hurts him to watch. Fridman adds that seeing a famous love laid out in mundane struggle gives ordinary people room to admit their own relationships are a mess. Reynolds agrees it is art. He just thinks it is silly to put right and wrong in a box unless it is your life.

Reynolds grew up in a very conservative Mormon family in a city he says was established by the Mormons and the mob. Those two worlds still show. There is the Strip, the parties, the craziness; there are also neighborhoods, big families, conservatives and liberals living together in a strange mix. A typical childhood memory is the freeway, his mother saying children close your eyes, there is a naked woman on that billboard, and the family driving on to church. He took in whatever he could when he could.

He is grateful he did not grow up as a Mormon in Utah. He saw both sides and appreciated something from each, and as someone who is no longer religious but spiritually minded he tries to apply that dual edge to everything. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, any coin, any story: there are two sides, and there is something to be said for both. He was not allowed PG-13 movies as a child and did not have cable, so the famous dark Vegas films — *Casino*, *Leaving Las Vegas*, *Fear and Loathing* — did not form him. He cannot name a movie that feels honest about his city.

Nightlife does not define him; he is not a party person. Drugs are not romantic either. He has lost friends to overdoses, and he has friends who lost everything to gambling. If there is an open spot in the culture, he says, someone still needs to make the dark Vegas picture: Mormons in Vegas, dying of overdose, or getting shot by the mob. The highs and lows of the town are real. They just have not been filmed in a way that matches the life he knows.

Seeking God has been an obsession since he was young, unhealthily committed, he says, to finding answers about God or the lack thereof. Mortality is what he sings about. He is OCD by nature and does not give up: somewhere in Tibet, or somewhere not yet found, there must be an answer. The closest he has come to experiencing God is ayahuasca. He had almost given up hope of anything beyond evolving, dying, and nothingness. After those sessions he still does not know what God looks like, or whether the word fits, but he believes fervently that there is more to be found.

He cannot even smoke weed. Losing control is one of his biggest weaknesses. Mid-conversation a light bulb dies; he climbs a chair to change it, Fridman steadies him, and they joke that it would be ironic to die while talking about mortality. That is the man who then drank ayahuasca. His wife went first. He watched her heal from a lot of trauma and move onto a spiritual path he wanted. American stigma had told him psychedelics make you crazy; he had never touched drugs or a cigarette. He did it twice. The first time had no effect, which happens. The second time, twenty or thirty minutes in, the curtain of reality was pulled open.

There were no psychedelic cartoons. He felt he was communicating, without words, with something that seemed like God, highest self, or mother earth — something incredibly wise, showing him his life from a bird's-eye view, as if through a video camera onto a younger him. It addressed a wound he still struggles with: feeling undeserving of success. It did not feel like himself telling himself that. It also recast his faith crisis. In his twenties he was angry at his parents and community for raising him in what he saw as falsehoods; the bedrock had been ripped out. Ayahuasca showed him a map: you are concerning yourself with a grain of sand called Mormonism. There may be truths and falsities in that grain, as in every other. Focus on the truth, forgive, and stop needing to control everything.

He does not think his current mind, unaided, had the mindfulness to reach those conclusions. None of it arrived as spoken sentences; it felt like telepathy, clearer than the words he is now stuck using with Fridman. He is not recruiting anyone. It was the scariest experience of his life, heaven and also the darkest hell. Fridman notes how little we understand consciousness, the unconscious, or whether the mind connects only inside the skull. Humans hand out PhDs and Nobel Prizes as if the question were settled. Humility, he says, is useful here.

Fridman puts Camus on the table: why live, especially when you feel hopeless and surrounded by lies. Kids, Reynolds says, make the easy answer too easy — a father feels wired to stay. Take that away and he is honest. Early in the band's career they were on a tiny jet overseas when the lights went out, red lights flashed, and the plane started to dive. His manager, who is his brother, was crying and texting his wife a goodbye. It was the scariest flight of Reynolds's life. He felt nothing. He sat there and thought it might actually be nice if it went down.

Life at that moment was primarily suffering. He had been depressed for years, trying medications since he was young, and had not found anything that worked. He was also in a faith crisis, having lost all of it. The band that would sell tens of millions of records was a side project. When you call a group Imagine Dragons, he says, you are not thinking it will be big. He was in biology class, hating it, writing down band names. It happened. He is an introvert by nature. A perfect night is a couple of friends, a late conversation over good food, a book, a podcast, a walk. Then he was supposed to be someone he did not want to be — except on stage, where he feels free, exuberant, like an extrovert, and then shrivels back into his shell.

The high of the stage is walking out, singing songs he wrote, and watching them resonate across cultures. For a while the world seems like a fantastic place, everyone on the same team, one big hug. Then he walks off, turns on the news, and sees everyone against each other. That is why live music matters to people, even in headphones: Tracy Chapman singing "Fast Car" can make you feel less alone. His uncle, a Nashville heart surgeon whom other surgeons consult, keeps warning him that musicians die because the heart and cortisol spike on stage and then crash. After that drop, nothing is enough except meth, except heroin. Reynolds does not say it as a sermon. He has struggled with drug abuse himself. He understands why artists turn to it.

Fame, Reynolds says, is a thing you cannot take back. You do not get a trial vacation in Hawaii. A few years earlier he would have been too guarded to say any of this, terrified of sounding like an ungrateful celebrity. He is done with that. He will speak his truth because that is the only reason he is in the chair. The pitfall is not the money. It is that you become the public version of yourself. Anyone who meets you meets that version, and you start to feel confined to playing it — including with family, who are also thinking, this is crazy, you are Dan Reynolds from Imagine Dragons. He wanted to be the goofball he had always been with his brothers. Instead he found himself switching into the role.

A lot of artists are empaths. They feel the room, never want to burden anyone, and people-please their way into the job. They know how to look someone in the eye and make them feel like the only person present, which is how they got the part. Then fame slips and they ask who they are. He has lost friends in this career to that cycle. Happiness as a destination — when I get the job, the money, the surgery — is the opposite of self-love. You never arrive. You die having chased the wrong thing.

He is lucky that one older brother is his manager and another is his lawyer, but it still gets weird with everyone. The best advice he got was from Charlie Sheen, sitting next to him at a late-night television taping at the very beginning: boys, mark my words, your life is about to get really weird. Reynolds thought, I am not Charlie Sheen, it will not get weird. It got really weird, really quick. Before fame, if someone liked you after a conversation, they liked you. After fame you can say "dumpster fire" and the room will call it brilliant. That breaks what you knew about being human, and it is lonely. Family is the closest fix, but even family has to get over coworkers asking for autographs from the young stupid brother. Then you meet people who perform indifference, who will call a genuine sentence stupid to prove they do not subscribe. You are still hunting for a few deep connections. The struggle is the same. The room is not.

For depression he goes back to what every psychiatrist says on day one: exercise, eat healthy, make time every day for something you love. In the thick of it those things feel like nothing, because joy has stopped working. He looks for what he can clean up. Cutting alcohol helped; he still drinks on occasion and is not judging, but he felt less drive and less happiness the next day, as if it were playing with his serotonin. He also repeats a line that sounds like a cliché until you need it: this too shall pass. Winter is worse. He has major depressive disorder with a seasonal edge, and when January arrives everything sucks on a deeper level. He keeps the basics and waits for the season to move.

Destigmatizing therapy is one of the few things he really cares about on stage. He delayed it for a long time because it felt like admitting he was broken — weaker than Lex, who does not need a therapist, weaker than six older brothers who never went. They are a plastic surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a dentist, two attorneys; Stanford, NYU, Eagle Scouts, valedictorians. High standards, no therapy. He did not want to be the one who could not hack life. That idea, he says, is incredibly dangerous. It almost cost him his life because he waited so long. He wants kids to know that people who achieve great things almost all have help. It is going to the gym, except it is a mental gym.

Finding the right person was a comedy of errors. The first therapist was Mormon, focused on whether he was reading the Book of Mormon and praying at night, which made a faith crisis worse. The next was a Scientology therapist, because he had just come home from a Mormon mission and his wife was a Scientologist; they fell in love arguing that each other's religion was insane. That therapy consisted of asking, over and over, what he had done wrong to Scientology, until he was pulling the darkest things from the recesses of his mind. It was marriage therapy. Then he found therapy not attached to any religion, and that was a great experience.

The relief of confession is not the real work. The work is sitting with someone trained who can say that was a trigger, this became that trigger, you are probably hearing your mother. Some of the maps will be wrong; some will resonate, and then you call your mom. He compares it to coding. If therapy is not difficult, he does not think it is good therapy. One therapist, a former neurologist, heard he was going to do ayahuasca and said it was like fifty sessions at once — intensive, possible, but he preferred one session at a time. Reynolds underlines the point he keeps making about the plants: he is not telling everybody to go. It felt like heaven and the darkest hell.

Fridman asks about "Believer," a song that puts pain at the center: you break me down, you build me up. Reynolds says the greatest things in his life have come from the deepest hurt. Losing someone you love to death is, so far, the hardest part of the human path, and it also made him more present and less interested in controlling what other people think. That is the basic idea of the song. He had lost faith in everything, then started rebuilding a spiritual thought process after ayahuasca — not a believer in God or heaven and hell, but a believer in goodness, in some light. He does not fear dying. He fears not seeing his kids again.

He never starts with an opening, a finale, or a theme. He hears a soundscape of how he feels right now, which might be the middle of the song. Lyrics, melody, and music arrive together: the whole orchestra, all the buttons at once, and his voice is one instrument. A word here and there shows up as part of the landscape. He sits down as if to write a journal entry. He does not decide today is the hard-beat song or the anthem. He finds out how the day feels by writing it. The process is joyful, or at least fulfilling, and often cathartic in the way a good therapy hour is.

Most of what he writes is never heard. He writes over a hundred songs a year and releases twenty every three years — less than ten percent. He finishes every idea. He could open his computer and play hundreds of tracks that already sound like songs: rhythm, melody, multiple instruments, lyrics. Only later does the band pull them apart. Fridman asks the painful fan question: is there genius on that hard drive that he walked away from? Reynolds, thirty-four, does not feel he has achieved greatness. He does not know which unreleased songs the masses would love. "It may be our best stuff is that we don't put out," he says. Maybe one day he will die and people will find a track they like, or they will say it all sounds like shit. He really does not know.

The tragedy of being an artist, Fridman says, is that you want to connect and you do not know what will do it. Kafka was wrong about his own work. Reynolds's only gauge is whether a song moves him. Nobody knows the formula for what the masses will like. The single that did the worst of all their singles was the one he wanted to listen to the least, chosen because it made sense as a single. "I Bet My Life," off the second album, began as guitar and vocal, quiet and laid back. They tried to dial it up, self-produced it, and overproduced it. It did fine as a song and poorly for them. If you do not want to listen to your own song, he learned, that is already a sign.

The main lesson from working with Rick Rubin was a sentence Rubin kept using. He is not the type to call a song good or bad. He would say he did not really believe Reynolds on that song. Reynolds knew that meant the song was a no-go. Once Rubin said it about a track Reynolds genuinely felt and meant. Rubin still did not believe it, and that was enough. You can believe it all you want; if the listener does not feel the honesty, the detector goes off. Going line by line through lyrics with Rubin was excruciating. Reynolds had to remind himself that the man who made some of his favorite records was still human, and that two strongly opinionated people were going to fight.

On a song called "Number One," the chorus ran: I don't know what I'm meant to be, I don't need no one to believe, when it's all been said and done, I'm still my number one. Rubin said it made him cringe. Could it be you're still my number one, about someone else? Reynolds said no: it was about self-love, and he felt he needed to say it that way. He tried changing it; the rewrite made no sense. He finally told Rubin he was sorry — if it sounded cringey to Rubin it was sounding cringey to other people too — but he did not know how else to say it and still want the song out. Other fights Rubin won: a word that felt trite, a line already used. The hard craft, they agree, is saying the heaviest thing in the simplest words without making it cringe. Nilsson's lyric fails that test on paper and passes when sung by someone who believes it.

He tried to explain the same thing to his brother with a stage example. If he walks on and does a gesture because it is the move, the crowd reads cringe. If he is not thinking about the gesture and means what he says, people resonate, even if the motion and the eyes look the same. If he is not in the right headspace to be real, it will not be a good show. For "Believer," the beat came first. The first line he wrote was "first things first," then "second things second," then "don't you tell me what you think that I could be, I'm the one at the sail, I'm the master of my sea." His father had a saying in his office about a sailor being master of the sea. Simple, zero cringe, and powerful. The percussion is almost in the lyrics. He was a drummer first, and before he could play an instrument he would beatbox; he has heard Michael Jackson worked that way in the studio too. Brain in rhythm, then words on top.

He likes divisiveness. He wants people to love a song or hate it, not live in the middle. "Pain" had to carry weight, a striking entrance into the chorus, sung with a baritone pushing into tenor range so the gruffness is built in. Fridman asks about the pause before the word. Reynolds had first let "pain" land on the beat; it did not hit. He inserted silence so the first listen would fail to predict it. He would rather someone be confused, play it a second time, and come along more committed, even if that turns some people off. Gutsy, Fridman says, to insert silence. Reynolds would rather lose the middle than smooth the blow.

His father grew up on a farm, quiet and humble, and starts most sentences with this is just my two cents — take it or leave it. The humility is real. The two cents is usually gold. Reynolds started writing at twelve and showed no one for about six months. The first song was a twelve-year-old's blues: a boy standing all alone, wondering when he would be found, whether he wanted company, why he had no friend. Acne, hated school, depressed for the first time. There were nine kids; dad worked eight to six and came home tired; Reynolds was a middle child and got very little of him. He finally sat his father down after work, played the song, and watched him take the headphones off and look at him. That was really good, his father said, and then named what a specific line made him feel.

Reynolds thinks he would have given up music if the reaction had been thinner. He did not know if the songs were good or embarrassing, and he had already wrapped the lyrics in extra metaphor so dad would not hear that he was questioning Joseph Smith. Because his father was a no-bullshit person, the praise counted. He still sends every song to him. The criticism is never malicious; kids know when you are trying to get out of the room, and that day he knew his father was not. Fridman plays Cat Stevens's "Father and Son," which Reynolds hears as a loving father saying what the son needs. Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" is the other pole: parallel lives that never quite connect. Reynolds hears both truths in the Stevens song — the father looking out, the son needing to pave his own path — which is the same dual vision he has been arguing for since the start of the conversation.

Advice for young people is not a gadget. He wants his kids to learn to love themselves. It is easy to pick on yourself in the mirror, to wish you looked different or were as successful as the person over there. The people he sees who truly succeed — not money, not audience — are happy and real. They have self-love. Rick Rubin has a calmness people read as zen mastery; Reynolds thinks Rubin is a loving person who also loves himself, which is why his intentions in the studio are always clear. Artists otherwise wonder whether a producer wants a hit for the label or a proof about himself. Service is a true principle, and he thinks you love yourself more when you serve, but you also have to take the walk and the audiobook. That is how he is a better dad. And forgive yourself. Everybody hurts people, says unkind words, fails. You will do it again. You can punish yourself every day and become a lesser version, or you can try not to repeat it and forgive the times you do.

Fridman asks whether a drop of poison — Tom Waits's little poison in the town — is required. Reynolds has spent years trying not to be overly critical, and to let go of control. It is really easy to kill an artist. If his father had only said good job son and stood up, that might have altered everything. Fragility is the beauty of art, and it is also lethal. At a MusiCares event he heard that about 75 percent of musicians say they struggle with severe depression, which he guesses is higher than the national average. Self-doubt is still necessary. If he ever thought he had written a genius song, he would probably stop; if he had written "Imagine," the perfect song would already exist. Criticism, inside and out, pushes you. The middle ground is that a young artist must also love themselves enough to believe the song while they play it. Otherwise the performance, and the song, will not come out.

Fridman asks what sits at the core of his support for LGBTQ people. From a young age in the artist community, many of his closest friends were LGBTQ, starting in middle school. He watched them torn between faith and sexuality. In high school, a Mormon LGBTQ kid who felt there was no place for him in the church — told the orientation was evil, believing the faith, unable to change — went in front of the Las Vegas Mormon temple and shot himself. Reynolds does not want to marry a man; forcing a gay kid into lifelong loneliness or a straight marriage is a dangerous bind. The 1990s bullying, the slur thrown around constantly, stayed with him. Any social-justice issue, he argues, needs all sides of the puzzle. If only the affected contribute, there will never be a resolution.

It was also family. When he met his wife she was living with her two best friends, both LGBTQ, who did not want her to marry a Mormon. It was the Prop 8 era, when the church was fighting gay marriage. They did not come to the wedding, and that broke his wife's heart. Imagine Dragons was getting labeled a Mormon band. Mormons, in public, meant Prop 8; Prop 8 meant bigotry toward LGBTQ people. He could spend every interview saying that is not me, or he could be more active. By not saying anything, he felt he was saying everything. The path presented itself through friends, family, and a dead kid in front of a temple.

Religion, he will not pretend, has brought war and slaughter. It also gave his family something real. Mormon teaching says families are forever; they die and go to heaven together. That closeness, even if naïve, shaped a way of living, and it comforted him as a child: if I die today I will see mom again. Then his kid asked, when you die, am I going to see you again? He had three options: the answer he now thinks is bullshit, the answer he currently believes, or I don't know. He chose the third, which is not the easiest thing to tell a child who also wants to hear that dad is the strongest person alive — a line he will say without shame, because some certainties help a kid sleep. On death he said he did not know, but he hoped, because it would be awesome to hang out forever, and if there was any way to make it happen he would. His six brothers and his sister are hyper-intelligent, still practicing Mormons, and smarter than he is. He is not going to call them all stupid. Maybe South Park is right and the answer was Mormonism. An atheist lecturing atheism is as laughable to him as a Mormon lecturing Mormonism. How do you know?

Fridman forbids "I don't know" on the meaning of life. Reynolds borrows his father's disclaimer — two cents, take it or leave it — and then answers. His purpose, at least right now, is to wake up and try to bring light and love to the world, light and love to himself, and to have integrity. He does not know what happens when he dies. Ayahuasca gave him a sense that there is more to be known, and he is looking for the next thing that gives him hope, even just so he will not have to bullshit his kids. He wants more not-knowing. He wants to meet things that confuse him and undo what he already knew. He wants to surround himself with seekers, not finger-pointers. Life is too short. The final song on the new record is his best answer, and he recites the chorus: take it easy on me, I need some lullaby, they tell me heaven's just a lie, well I'm not surprised. Tell me that you know — no you don't, you're just like me. Can we just hope for the best? Take it easy. Be easier on each other. Look for truth wherever it lies. Above all, know that we do not know jack shit.