Photo by Kari Rowe
By any measure, Aaron Bruno achieved massive success with Megalithic Symphony, his first album under the band name Awolnation. That 2011 release spent 111 weeks on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart and its hit single “Sail” hit nearly six million in sales while becoming the second longest-charting song on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart.
But even though he felt he had proven himself with Megalithic Symphony, that didn’t stop Bruno from feeling he still had some doubters to deal with when he went to work on the recently released Awolnation follow-up album, Run.
“I’ve always worked best when I’ve had sort of an imaginary or sometimes real enemy, almost,” Bruno said in a recent phone interview. “I kind of knew that there were going to be a lot of people who didn’t think I could possibly repeat the same kind of success. So that was a fun little chip on my shoulder that I got to tap into.
“There are plenty of critics that overlooked the first record,” he added. “They didn’t know that it even happened. Then all of a sudden ‘Sail’ was this massive success, so of course they were going to want to hate on me and say, ‘OK, this guy can’t do this again.’”
Bruno, though, took his success as a license to challenge himself musically, and not only did he believe he could avoid a sophomore slipup; he believed he could push his music well beyond the musical template created with Megalithic Symphony.
“I think the success of the first record gave me a lot of confidence that people could relate to what a lot of people probably thought was insane in the first record,” Bruno said. “So it gave me artistic freedom to push myself even further after seeing what really translated and reacted live, and obviously commercially as well. [It] certainly gave me a newfound confidence to make the sophomore freak out record that I’ve always wanted to make. In fact, I’ve been looking forward to having this opportunity my whole career, but it just never happened. When this opportunity presented itself, I was very ready to do it. It was difficult, but a wonderful challenge that I took head on and I’m extremely proud.”
As Bruno’s last comment suggests, he’s not exactly a newcomer to the music business.
In a career that stretches back some 15 years, he had been a key member of two major-label bands, Home Town Hero and Under The Influence Of Giants, that seemed positioned to make an impact on the music scene.
It didn’t happen. Home Town Hero, which was signed to the Warner Bros.-affiliated Maverick Records (owned by Madonna), had some modest success with its 2002 self-titled debut, but broke up shortly before the release of its second album, 2004’s Bitch City.
Bruno and Hometown Hero bandmate Drew Stewart then formed Under The Influence Of Giants and landed a deal with Island Records. But the group’s 2006 self-titled debut album stiffed and the band ended. Bruno began developing the Awolnation sound not long after.
The music Bruno created on Run—he writes, plays and produces all the music himself on the album—retains the keyboard/electronics-based sound of Megalithic Symphony, but Run is more involved and quirkier than the debut, and several of its songs expand the musical range Bruno showed on its predecessor. The new album starts off with a curveball in the title track, a moody, deliberately paced tune that mixes piano and strings with a repeating synthesizer coda before turning heavier and more foreboding, while “Drinking Lightening” mixes a dirge-ish sound with Brian Wilson-esque harmonies and moments of pop brightness.
Bruno said he and his four-piece backing band are giving the music a different feel live as he begins touring behind Run.
“It’s much heavier and dirtier,” Bruno said of the live sound. “It’s just really good. I didn’t know how it was going to go. But rather than trying to make it sound like the record on stage, we’re trying to make it sound better and more brutal and dirtier and more interactive—and more human. When you make a record, it’s just a time capsule of where you are at that time. Hopefully you get better at playing these songs live, all along keeping in mind that I don’t want to alienate our fans and flip out a song so much that it’s not even familiar to them. I tried to keep what are my favorite elements of the song, the most important parts, and then add new as well.”
Awolnation headlines the U.S. Cellular Connection Stage at Summerfest on Friday, July 3 at 10 p.m.
