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AJR stopped by Valentine in the Morning on an off-day to talk about the Neotheater Tour, their new single "Dear Winter," being eco-friendly, and so much more!
You might be familiar with the band AJR (Adam, Jack, and Ryan) from their hit songs "I'm Ready," "Weak," "Sober Up" feat. Rivers Cuomo from Weezer, and "Burn The House Down." Well the band of brothers released their third studio album "Neotheater" earlier this year and they just kicked off their "Neotheater World Tour" with the second tour stop being Los Angeles. One thing you have to do at least once in your lifetime because it truly is an experience. They describe their show as a mix between a concert, broadway show, and a movie.
Producer Valerie went to the show at The Shrine Auditorium where they brought not only a high energy performance to the stage, but their own quirks like Jack dancing around the stage, Ryan's "penguin walk," and Adams funny comments. She told them her favorite part of the show is when they showed the audience how they created the song "Don't Throw Out My Legos" before going into it.
"It kind of looks like a TED talk where we basically explain how we produced one of our songs and building it with the kick drum and here's the snare. Then behind me are these visuals that we created of what music looks like inside of our imaginations. Fans don't really get the opportunity to see how a song is made and it's not that complicated so we thought we'd break it down for them. When we were doing club sized shows on our budget we would say let's do a concert meet Blue Man Group show, which eventually led to concert meets Broadway."
AJR's newest single "Dear Winter" was written by Ryan and he says it's always been his plan to name his future child Winter.
"We were at Columbia in college last semester, I asked a girl to hang out and she said no so I went home and wrote this song kind of about how hard it is to find 'the right one one.' We wanted to write a sad/emotional song in a fun quirky way and i'm really proud of what we came up with...If my future wife doesn't want to name our son/daughter Winter then we can name the fish Winter. I guess that's the real test if she's the right one or not and i'll know right away."
When Adam isn't on tour or working on music with his brothers, he's actually a PhD candidate in International Human Rights Law. He decided to get into it because it's a way for him to stem his mind outside of music, but he also does a lot of work with the United Nations on Climate Change and Human Rights. There are many people who are wondering how they are able to be a little more eco-friendly so Adam gave some helpful tips.
"There are three really easy things you can do like not using single-use plastic water bottles, that reusable bottle really makes a huge difference. LED lightbulbs are huge and save you so much money and they're great. Lastly, when you're going grocery shopping try and bring a bag with you. Those plastic bags, they kill sea turtles and sea lions, they're really terrible. Small actions make a really big difference. This new generation is really stepping up and adapting which will help save the planet."
In our ValShow Side Show podcast below, we got an update on the original versions of Weezer's Rivers Cuomo's part in "Sober Up" sent over to AJR. The collaboration came about when AJR released their song "Weak," Rivers heard the song and DM'd them telling them he loved the song. They were really nervous, but they decided to ask him to collaborate and he said yeah absolutely let's do it.
"We had the whole song of "Sober Up" written minus the bridge. We said hey man can you write this, but take a little bit of a left turn. We realized how cool, and crazy, and genius Rivers is because he really took a left turn and sent back 4 options. One of them was in Spanish, one of them was in another language with made up words, one of them was actually the chorus of Weezer's most recent single "Can't Knock The Hustle," and finally we hit the one that said "my favorite color is you." We said okay that's perfect, that's the one so he recorded it and sent it over. We didn't even meet him until after the album."