FMM: Did you guys have any imaginary friends as kids or do you have one now still?
Picture This: I had one as a kid. I don’t really remember anything else, but I do remember it’s a memory in the back of my head. I think I have one now. It’s a good idea, actually. I might pick that back up.
I had a few when I was a kid and one of them was a caterpillar. My parents started to get worried because I started talking about them a lot, but they’re gone now.
FMM: Do you think that message hits differently for fans now given how heavy the last few years have been?
Picture This: I think it does, yeah. I think now more than ever, the world has become so not innocent. That’s a terrible, terrible way for the world and for civilisation to go. I think in us you need innocence. You need an ability to not be looking at everything through a cynical lens, and it’s really difficult to not do that in the times we’re living in. So I think if we, especially as adults, can reclaim a bit of innocence and a bit of childlike wonder and a bit of empathy… I think when you’re young, you have a lot of empathy for yourself and for everything around you. You feel everything. I know I did when I was younger, and you maybe lose that. You can get a bit jaded as you get older and bit worn by the world. I think now more than ever, having a bit of naivety is good, because everybody knows everything about everything, or thinks they do, and that takes up a lot of mental energy.
I think it’s okay to kind of let your mind wander off into more creative realms and more interesting kind of prospects than always being stuck in the hard fact world that we kind of are forced to live in.
FMM: You guys described the Hamburg session as effortless. What was it like being in the room together, creating that song in real time?
Picture This: I remember that day being quite interesting because we had spent a lot of time in Berlin. We got on a train to Hamburg, and were meeting Michael for the first time, who is a superstar in Germany, and we’ve heard about him a lot. When you’re meeting someone to write a song with them, it’s weird, because you’re strangers. It’s something that we don’t like necessarily. But then, it was just nice to find someone who was similar to us and treated it similarly to the way we would treat it, and very natural. It’s an interesting thing when you’re writing a song with strangers. It can go a million different ways, and you always hope that it goes the way that it went for us when we were writing Giants. You always kind of want to aim for that kind of session, so we were lucky we got that. But ,I think it is down to the kind of person Michael is, and the two guys. We also wrote with Patrick and Ricardo, and we were all on a similar mindset. We wanted to do a similar thing. Ryan brought in a brilliant idea, which was the verse you hear now, and the concept was already there, which Ryan brought in. Sometimes that’s great – you just inject a great into into a room of creative people and it just grows legs. We’re just thankful that’s exactly what happened.
FMM: The turnaround was pretty quick on creating this song, yeah?
Picture This: Yeah, we just did in a day, and we just thought, ‘That’s it – Let’s go release it.’ And Michael and Ryan both sang their verses in their parts, and it just felt like it clicked. It was 100. There was nothing else to think about and it was done. That’s the dream for creative people.
FMM: Is there anyone else you’re thinking you’d like to collaborate with in the future?
Picture This: We’re always open to that, for sure. We’ve collaborated with a few people now, actually. It’s always fun. We’re in between album cycles at the moment – we’re not in the middle of an album campaign and we don’t have one coming out anytime soon. I always love collaborating with other artists in that period because we just love writing and creating all the time. We could just go away and not release anything, but this is a period where we can experiment a bit. We’re always open to it. I think there’s a lot of artists who never want to collaborate and that’s cool., but for us, we’ve always kind of enjoyed it. You always learn something from a collaboration. Like with Michael, he was just such a professional I found in the studio when it came to cutting his vocal and doing everything. I learned a lot from him. Even if the song never comes out, learning something is enough. Well, it’s not enough. You want something to come out, but learning something is a great bonus and we definitely want to collaborate again.
FMM: What’s the most random or unexpected thing that’s inspired a song for you?
Picture This: We have a song called LA House Party. That was a totally random night we had. We are from a small town in Ireland and it’s very different to an LA house party. We showed up to a house party and there was security outside, which I’d never seen before. There were a lot of blacked-out cars and it was a guy who owned a record label. When we got in, it was just crazy – low lights, people with their hoods up, a lot of looking around to see who’s who. We’re just used to fun at a house party in Ireland – everybody’s chatting, telling stories and playing music. This was the opposite. I was just so compelled to mark that in history by writing a song about it, because that was so strange that we can’t just move on from that.
FMM: Did you party hard? Or did you take it more relaxed?
Picture This: We had just come from the club and we were ready to go, but it was just buzz kill when we got there.