It was the perfect fit, and we all knew it.” Alex had that expertise to say, ‘Let’s EQ this and throw distortion on that.’ Sonically everything started to come together and sound big and a little more edgy. “We didn’t have the tech savvy to get the bass to hit hard enough and the snare to be big enough. “He complemented our sound, because we were so rhythmic, but we couldn’t get to the place we wanted to sonically,” Reynolds says. Write they did, and what started out as a collaborative effort for other artists on Alex Da Kid’s roster soon became bigger-“big” being the operative word. The email was to the point: “Yo, I dig your music. Dre (“I Need a Doctor”), B.o.B (“Airplanes”) and Eminem (“Love the Way You Lie”) and founder of label/publisher Kidinakorner. Then, perhaps the luckiest thing of all happened: Reynolds received an email from Alex Da Kid (real name Alexander Grant), producer of massive hits for Dr. Imagine Dragons independently released three EPs and toured extensively before signing with Interscope or APA (Coda books the group in Europe and the United Kingdom), building a following one show at a time. It’s a scary thing, if you think about it.” “You can either have the crowd in the palm of your hand or you get bottled.
“That prepared us to go overseas, go out onstage and feel comfortable playing for people that aren’t singing every word, or know every song,” Reynolds says. Vegas is a town of out-of-towners, and the band performed in front of new people every night. Playing casinos were hometown gigs, but not to hometown crowds. Together with drummer Daniel Platzman, a friend of Sermon’s from Boston’s Berklee College of Music, and bassist Ben McKee they made Vegas home base. Vegas native Reynolds met guitarist Wayne Sermon while attending Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
The band learned early on how to convert the uninitiated into fans, doing six-hour gigs-half covers, half originals-at places like Mandalay Bay, O’Sheas and Caesars Palace. That’s even what we did in the casinos in the beginning.”
You just come out and give it everything you’ve got and try to win over the crowd. As touring musicians, we tried to break new cities, where you played for maybe 20 people whose friends had told them about us. “This is what we live for as a band, playing to an audience that’s never seen us before,” Reynolds says. And as Night Visions continues to gain steam, the group is reaping the benefits of a solid foundation and a global vision, still in that one-chance-only position of playing to crowds for the very first time. Imagine Dragons had a musical plan, and they aligned themselves with the people who could bring that plan to fruition. Open up or be kicked down, because it’s not all luck. Then, hopefully, those doors will finally open up.” “It’s a matter of biting at the apple as many times as possible.
So what’s the second thing? “Vegas luck,” Reynolds says-which, for a group that rose out of the Las Vegas casinos, isn’t such a bad thing to have. We wanted to perform and create as much as possible.” “We’d play birthday parties, weddings, casinos. “Bands have asked me, ‘What do you attribute your success to?’ The two things I always say are one, we never said ‘no’ to anything,” Reynolds says. A lot of people call it ‘anthemic,’ but I’d shy away from that because it sounds almost pompous.”Īs he grinds it out at the European festivals, Reynolds is humble as he marvels at Imagine Dragons’ rise to platinum status and headlining dates. But frontman Reynolds comes across as anything but a self-styled savior. “In a genre that many people thought was dying, these guys came in like a breath of fresh air,” says Nick Chappell, PD of WROX Norfolk, Va., one of the first stations in the country to spin “It’s Time.” “They are three singles deep into their debut album and are already a core artist for us,” he says. With any rock band’s success these days comes the added pressure of having to “save” the genre.