Photo credit: Danilo Lewis
Alexander "Alex" Pall (left) and Andrew “Drew” Taggart (right) make up the EDM-pop duo The Chainsmokers.
With sinking album sales forcing the majority of bands to make the bulk of their income through touring, it makes sense for musicians to put more effort than ever into their live shows.
The Chainsmokers’ Andrew “Drew” Taggart gave this some thought when planning their tour in support of their next album, World War Joy. “There have been a lot of really impressive shows this past year that we’ve been paying attention to, and I feel like a lot of artists are taking production to the next level, and we knew it was time for us to like step up,” Taggart says.
The main stage is made up of three separate sections that form what Taggart and the other half of the Chainsmokers’ duo, Alex Pall, call the Triad. “They’re all suspended, and they can lift up and then lift down and form the triad shape, and then they can lift up in the air with pyro, and then on one staircase it has this reflective shield that you can blow light into,” Taggart says. “The stage looks absolutely insane.”
Expect other visual bells and whistles, as well as something called the Globe of Death. “Probably midway through the show, we have these dirt bikes that show up on stage and get into the Globe of Death, and they start spinning circles while we’re performing some of our more like intense songs,” Taggart explains. “It’s really going to take those songs to the next level, just the adrenaline. Even the sound of the motors is going to be really powerful.”
There will also be surprises with the music, as Taggart and Pall will be joined by Matt McGuire on drums, helping to move the music toward more of a live band sound.
“We reimagined pretty much everything,” Taggart says. “You get all of our more popular songs, and a lot of them will start like how you’ve heard them on the radio or whatever, and they start to get reimagined as they go on. We had a lot of fun with it, and there’s definitely stuff you’ll hear on this tour that you’ll only be able to hear on this tour.”
|
|
Top of the Dance Charts
Creating elaborate live shows is nothing new for The Chainsmokers, who first toured U.S. arenas in 2017 after making regular visits to the top of dance-electronic singles chart.
Joining forces in 2012, Pall and Taggart started out by doing remixes of songs by indie bands before beginning to create original material, often collaborating with other artists from the EDM and pop worlds. An early single, “#Selfie,” became a hit on dance-electronic charts in 2014, before the song “Roses,” arrived in June 2015 and went multi-platinum in multiple countries.
The Chainsmokers then hit a new level in summer 2016 with “Closer,” which featured Taggart doing his first lead vocal in a duet with Halsey. The song spent 12 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart and set the stage for the duo’s first full-length album, Memories Do Not Open, which arrived in April 2017.
The album debuted at No. 1 on the “Billboard 200” album chart and went platinum, spawning the hit singles “Something Just Like Us” (a collaboration with Coldplay) and “The One.” A second album, Sick Boy, followed in 2018. It produced a half-dozen dance hits (including “This Feeling,” “Side Effects” and “Everybody Hates Me”). The Chainsmokers were ranked by Billboard as the top dance music act of 2018.
Up next will be World War Joy. The album is expected to arrive this year, but the release date has not been announced. The singles that have been released so far move the group’s sound in more of a pop direction, as the top five dance-electronic hits “Call You Mine” (featuring Bebe Rexha), “Takeaway” (featuring Illenium and Lennon Stella) and “Who Do You Love” (featuring 5 Seconds of Summer) all lean in a pop-ballad direction with some EDM and hip-hop touches.
“Takeaway” and “Who Do You Love” will be easy enough to perform on tour since 5 Seconds of Summer and Stella are opening for the Chainsmokers. But Taggart and Pall have something special in mind for songs that feature other female guest vocalists.
Says Pall, “We have created this character that will exist and transform and evolve over the course of the show, that is enough of a presence where you’re kind of like, it doesn’t feel like, ‘OK, where is the singer?,’ which is something we’ve definitely found challenging over the last two years when you’re performing songs where the singer is not there. So, she kind of takes the role of the frontman in the cases where there’s a female lead vocal.”
The Chainsmokers perform at Fiserv Forum on Tuesday, Nov. 12, at 7 p.m.
