Brighter Than The Sun: The Story of fun.'s 'We Are Young'

Success in the music industry is a funny thing isn’t it? 

Whether you’re a Legendary Icon of the industry, or a One Hit Wonder, Pop Music truly feeds on a ‘what have you done for me lately’ model, where you’re almost always only as popular as your last hit.

When you hit a certain level of success as an artist and it’s time to follow that successful project up - even if you’ve blown every realistic expectation of success out of the water - you’re still gonna try something right?

Not necessarily. 

Which brings us to the curious case of fun.

This is the story of fun.'s 'We Are Young'.

Written by Clayton Taylor for iHeartRadio

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Certain songs bring you back to a moment or a
trip or a feeling. Let's find out what this is
for you. I'm Ruby Carr and this is the story
of fun. We are young.
You know the songs just making people feel something. It's
been a pleasure to work on this song with her,
but do you know the history to struggle making any
kind of record? I don't always have the direction or concept.

(00:22):
This is Encore, an in-depth look at the stories behind
the music. Here's Iart Radio's Ruby Carr.
Success in the music industry is a funny thing, isn't it?
Whether you're a legendary icon in the industry or a
one hit wonder, pop music truly feeds on a What

(00:42):
have you done for me lately model where you're almost
always only as popular as your last hit. I think
a lot about this when I see comment sections and
Twitter threads online, declaring.
A particular artist to be like in their flop era, uh,
which can sometimes actually just translate into making slightly less
popular music than they did 2 or 3 years ago.

(01:04):
Or when someone who's barely done anything with their life
refers to a pop star as past their prime, like, um,
excuse me, who are you to decide that?
In fact, just as this episode is being written, Halsey,
she's come out to the press to mention that because
her last album, The Great Impersonator, didn't perform as well
as Manic, for example, her label is actually not letting

(01:27):
her release new music for the time being.
Now I'm sure that there's plenty of nuance on either
side here in terms of Halsey's situation, but the point
I'm making here is that in most cases, when you
hit a certain level of success as an artist and
it's time to follow that successful project up, even if
you've blown every realistic expectation of success out of the water,

(01:50):
you're still gonna try something, right? Not necessarily, which brings
us to the curious case of fun.
Formed in the dying days of the MySpace era of
music in 2008, Fun was the brainchild of the quirky
indie pop band The Formats frontman Nate Roose. After announcing
the indefinite hiatus slash breakup of the format, Roos already

(02:14):
had the pieces of fun in mind, quickly calling upon
members of two other.
in the bands he was familiar with. Andrew Dost of
Anathallo and Jack Antonoff, ever heard of him, of Steel Train.
Both Dost and Antonoff had been tour mates of Roos
and the format. Andrew had played with the format as
a backup musician, and Steel Train had hit the road

(02:36):
with the format as openers over the years. Roos would
tell
Interview magazine. As soon as the format ended, I called
Jack and Andrew. I had always kept note that those
were the two people that if anything ever happened, maybe
I could see the writing on the wall or something
like that. As soon as that became a possibility, I
just called them up right away. I asked if there
was something we can do. Next thing I knew, I

(02:57):
found myself in New Jersey a week later.
Fun stylized as lowercase Funn with a period at the
end to avoid litigation from a Swedish metal band also
called Fun, worked quickly. By 2009, they would release their
debut album Aim and Ignite, a progressive and experimental album
that sounded a bit like the format's back catalog, a

(03:20):
bit like an overheatrical killer's record, and a bit like,
you know, the kind of orchestral anthemic fun that we'd
eventually know and love.
Fronted by Roos, who also wrote most of the lyrics
and melodies, Antonoff would handle lead guitar, drums, and percussion,
while Dost would chip in with the rest of the instrumentation,

(03:41):
which varied from everything from piano, guitars, and synths to flugelhorn, trumpet,
and glockenspiel.
Aim and Ignite was mostly well received, if not slightly
overlooked by most outlets at the time. Nate Ruse's lyrics
were praised, as was the overall ambition of the record,
but singles, at least I'm not as sad as I
used to be, all the Pretty Girls and Walking the

(04:03):
Dog failed to make any real impact. In the few
years that followed, a fun would find success on the
road opening for emo pop darlings like Jack's Mannequin, Paramore,
and Panic at the Disco.
Fun would make the astute career move to join Paramore
and Panic at the Disco's label fueled by Ramen in
2010 and would soft launch their new era of music

(04:26):
with a joint single with Panic called Come On in
May 2011. For what it's worth, Roos in particular was
skeptical about joining Fueled by Ramen, peeling back the curtain
for fans in an open letter explaining why they made
the jump to a major.
Label writing. This has been in the works for almost
9 months. When the head of the label, someone who's

(04:46):
reached out to me since even before I was in
the format, did his biannual check-in just to have the
door slammed in his face, except the difference is this
time we took the time to listen to what he
had to say. I haven't been involved with a label
in almost 6 years, and to be honest, I never
had any intention to go back. But it really means
something when you've been able to watch.
A label grow over the years and just continue to

(05:09):
grow with massive commercial success while maintaining some of the
ethics and understanding of what it means to be an
independent artist. When the people who work for Fueled by
Ramen buy their own tickets to our shows and talk
about us with the passion you generally reserve for an
artist you're working with, that really means something. So after
lengthy discussions, we figured why not if this is the

(05:29):
perfect time for us to give it a try.
And I wouldn't worry about us selling out or changing
for the wrong reasons. Signing to Fueled by Rain opened
some major doors for fun. With Fuel by Ramen being
a subsidiary of major label Warner Music Group. Fun suddenly
had a golden Rolodex of contacts at their disposal for
album number 2, and likely the financial backing to make

(05:52):
even the loftiest of ambitions a reality as well.
After naturally gravitating towards writing songs that were inspired by
hip hop music during a particularly fruitful band getaway to
a studio in Woodstock, New York, Fun would do everything
in their power to manifest the services of hip hop
super producer Jeff Bhasker for their sophomore album Some Nights.

(06:16):
Vaskar was already well respected but had recently come off
the massive success of producing and writing with Kanye West
for his 2010 Magnum opus, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
And like many people at the time, Roos in particular
was obsessed with my beautiful dark twisted fantasy, although I'm

(06:37):
sure he probably wouldn't want to talk about that now.
But then Nate would tell Billboard that with My Beautiful
Dark Twisted Fantasy as his starting point, he began reading
the liner notes of his other favorite hip hop records
and noticed that Bhasker's name was all over a lot
of them.
The writing was on the wall for fun, and they
would accept no substitutes. But would Bhasker accept them? Rus

(07:01):
would say, I thought I absolutely have to meet with
this guy, and every day we tried to make these
meetings work. I think Jeff was blowing me off a
couple of times. He was working with Beyonce and just
didn't have any time when some kid from some random
band really wants to sit down and meet with you.
Luckily someone twisted his arm and made him.
In a true sliding doors moment, We Are Young may

(07:25):
never have happened without Bhasker, and Basker may have never
worked out for fun without We Are Young. Let me explain.
As Roos would admit to Rolling Stone in 2012, the
bones of We Are Young existed before Bhasker's services were
secured for the group, and it would take a chance
meeting with Jeff and a little bit of liquid courage

(07:45):
to pull the song out of him. Uh,

Speaker 2 (07:48):
when We Are Young first came to be.
Um
I was driving somewhere I was meeting we're meeting with
a producer um who we thought was gonna make the album.
And so I was, I was driving to meet Andrew
in the city for, for dinner with this producer and
I think I was really inspired because we had just
had a weekend.
Where, uh, we went up to Woodstock and we, we

(08:08):
started to try and suss out a few of the
songs talk conceptually about what the album was kind of
gonna be about and so I think I felt a
lot of pressure relief and that those are good times
when songs just kind of come to you. So I'm
I'm driving and suddenly it's like tonight, tonight, tonight we
are young. I had a lyric that was like we
are young, having fun, so that's set and you know,

(08:31):
kind of just like went from there. It really like
wrote itself.
Um, and I lived with it for about a week
thinking like, alright, well those are great lyrics, but I'm
not so sure about the melody and so I started
to try and write a completely different song, like a
completely different version of We Are Young. It's like it
was started to become a political song of like the

(08:53):
arrogance of America and like let's set the world on
fire just so that we can be like better than
even the sun, something like that and.
I felt like that's cool on one hand, but uh
but that the chorus and that melody really started to
stick to me and really like like started to feel.
Feel a lot like
All right, I, I, I think I need to explore
this as, as a chorus and, um, and by the

(09:15):
end of the week I finally got a chance to
meet up with Jeff and so, um, when I sat
down with Jeff Bhasker and and he and I are
sitting there talking, then he takes me up to his
room to play me some of the Beyonce demos that
he he'd been working on.
And uh I think I was drunk at the time
so I just started singing him that chorus because it
was so fresh on my mind and.
He just kind of like stopped right there and.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
Yes, as legend has it, it was a quick inebriated
10 minute meeting with Jeff in which Bhasker either saw
something in Roos during their incredibly brief initial chat. I,
I don't know, maybe he just felt sorry for him,
that compelled him to invite the singer up to his
hotel to check out some Beyonce tracks, which, by the way,
is just a huge flex. Like, yeah, come up and

(09:56):
listen to some unreleased Beyonce tracks I have that I
didn't steal out of the back of a car. No
big deal.
Bhasker corroborated this messy yet beautiful series of events to fuse.
Nate brought the song to me.
And saying that
To me, you know, most people are familiar with the

(10:18):
song now. This was the very, very beginning of how
the song was created.
And
And I made a little drum beat on one of
these guys here.
And I said, OK, Nate, just sing over this sing

(10:39):
the song.
Oh we
And one of the interesting things about this song is
um Nate had never multi-tracked his vocals before and I said, OK,
just sing it over and over and over again. And
after he was done, I said, you know, normally we'd

(10:59):
go back and overdub. OK, do an overdub, do an overdub.
He just sang it a bunch of times and then
I chopped out all the takes he did.
And put them all together.
It was the sloppy unfinished chorus of We Are Young
sang at Jeff Bhasker that night that actually got the

(11:20):
partnership between Bhasker and the boys over the line and
Bhasker's keen ear and quick thinking that inspired him to
take a risk on fun.
From there, the partners in Crime wasted no time. The
demo for We Are Young was recorded the very next day.
Despite it being a seemingly left field approach, Bhasker had
never worked with an indie pop rock band, and Fun

(11:42):
had never worked with a hip hop producer. The two
parties would eventually catch lightning in a bottle. Of the
writing process, Doss would tell Huffington Post. Typically, Nate will
come in with lyrics and a melody, then Jack and
I will build the music around that and set up
the chord structure.
Which instruments are going to enter and where and how
best we're going to support that melody. That's usually the

(12:05):
way it goes. Other times Jack or I will bring
an instrumental piece and Nate will write lyrics to that.
It's one of those starting points, whether it's either Nate, Jack,
or I, we just build it all together from there.
Even when someone has a pretty well-defined framework to start with,
there's much give and take with the three of us,
where the egos pretty much disappear and everybody is happy

(12:27):
to work towards the best possible song.
From there, they would bring the music to Bhasker, who
would implore them to tighten the songs up, then punch
the songs up with hip hop production techniques. Doss would
tell LA Music blog, on Aim and Ignite, there was
a tendency to overdo things thousands of times. These twists
and turns and inversions and different instruments because we had

(12:49):
them around and we were in the studio and figured,
why not? With some nights, it was about what to
do to give the songs what they really need. Jeff.
He was a proponent of sometimes the biggest sound was
a single instrument. He said, Let's not over cram songs
with ideas and everything that makes the song should be
well chosen. If you can't hear it or don't care
about it, let's cut it. It resonated with us. It

(13:12):
was important for us to realize what songs need and
don't need. On Aim and Ignite, it was about making
songs full, and these songs breathe more. Nate is a
once in a lifetime talent, and we try to use
his voice as an instrument as much as possible too.
I think one of the coolest parts of this story
is that by the sounds of things, partially because it
was such a long shot, Nate, Andrew, and Jack really

(13:34):
did seem to have an earnest sense of reverence for
the work Jeff Bhasker was doing in modern hip hop.
And now they didn't just get to make music that
sounded Jeff Bhasker-esque. They were actually working with a.
Temporary hero of theirs. Jack Antonoff and Nate Roose would
tell Rolling Stone.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
My first thought wasn't necessarily that like the the hit song,
it was just I couldn't believe how because we were
obsessed with Dark Twisted Fantasy and Jeff made that album
and like it was one of those scenarios of like
you're obsessed with something and you dream about working someone
and hopefully it happens 10 years later, but it happened
like 2 weeks later so I was just kind of
freaking out about like the way you know Nate's voice
sounded with like, you know, 8 layers that's something we've

(14:15):
never done before and that was such like a.
I guess Jeff move and then the, the production like
those and those beats the, that huge snare that like
big gunshot and those timesms that's stole from the original
demo actually pretty much the original demo at least the
chorus is exactly what it sounds like now and it
was like hearing.
Actually, to get real specific, it was like hearing um

(14:36):
the very thing that inspired us to make the album
was what made our album physically, like that person, so
that was like a bizarre circle of events. Yeah, it was,
it was really weird to come.
Uh, Jeff and I got out of the studio on
on that early early version of We Are Young, um,
and we spent until because that was when I learned

(14:57):
about hip hop studio time so we were there until
5 o'clock in the morning.
And I got out and I wasn't living in the
city at the time so I stayed at the Ace
Hotel and I had to just like run back I
think I was still like like rather drunk but also
just drunk off of this this experience of working with
Jeff having this this fantasy that we'd worked with this
guy who did this these Kanye West these Drake albums, um,

(15:19):
and suddenly it happened and we had a a very
tangible song to play and so I sent them the chorus, um.
That night at about 5 o'clock in the morning and
I was just so nervous about everything that had happened
that I woke up about 3 or 4 hours later
just got like no sleep and uh and then called

(15:40):
Jack first thing and he was just like blown away
by it it was it was really good it felt
it felt like.
Something that we, yeah, just, just maybe 3 weeks before
had really started to conceptualize and thought like in a
dream world we would get to work with this guy
and then suddenly it never happens like that. You always
get like the guy 5 guys below that like this
guy worked with this guy once and he was influenced
by him so this is perfect, but we actually got

(16:02):
to go right there, which has really never happened to
us with anything.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
You
can hear how giddy a young Antonov was in that clip,
so fun, literally.
From there, Bhasker would recommend a still relatively unknown but
critically acclaimed Janelle Monae to feature on the song, although
to be fair, you can barely tell it's her, and
the rest is history. OK, not exactly. Let's talk about that.

(16:26):
Like we alluded to earlier this season in our episode
on Ariana Grande's One Last Time and actually discussed quite
a bit when Miles profiled Florence and the Machine's Dog
Days Are Over for a brief time in music history,
the music industry. It ran on Glee, baby. Yes, in
the early 2010s, let me tell you, the Fox helmed

(16:46):
musical sitcom was the biggest thing.
In music since Napster for Pop Heads defined their favorite
new songs as the quirky and campy cast of characters
not only covered some of the most famous songs in
the world, but also made songs famous simply by belting
out their own renditions, and a teenage Ruby was obsessed

(17:08):
with Glee. I won't lie, I still try to break
out into songs sometimes.
So it was a real coup for fun that after
an initial release of We Are Young in September 2011,
that basically went nowhere, the song was re-released to radio
on December 6, 2011, the exact date that Glee season 3,
episode eight aired.

(17:29):
Featured on that episode called Hold On to 16 were
covers of Toby Keith, Destiny's Child, Janet and Michael Jackson,
and as a closing number, you guessed it, Funs We
Are Young. Critics and fans alike were buzzing over the cover,
which for many people may have been their blind introduction
to the song.

(17:49):
And by the way, that's not just me saying it, OK?
The data backs it up. Get this. When the Billboard
charts came out the following week, which obviously included We
Are Young, the Gleecast version debuted at number 12 on
the Hot 100. The original, number 53, making its debut

(18:09):
on the same chart.
And in sales the following week when the Glee version
was available, total sales for the track jumped 1,650% from
3000 to 49,000 copies sold. The power of Glee, man,
I'm telling you. Things stayed at a gentle simmer for
the better part of two months for the band before

(18:30):
We Are Young made its commercial debut at the Super
Bowl in 2012.
Appearing in the Chevrolet Sonic stunt commercial, the song is
featured in the background as the Chevy Sonic Subcompact does
stunts that you would mostly associate with extreme sports. For example,
the car does a skateboard kick flip, bungee jumps, and skydives.

(18:52):
The marketing execs were thrilled with the integration with creative
directors quoted in Billboard as saying, It's a beautiful song
with a number of different projections.
In that driving beat and very sweet melody, Chevrolet instantly
fell in love with it too. We could go through
trying a couple of different tracks, but it turned out
once we played this song, even during a rough, rough
early cut, there was no question, it was just great.

(19:15):
Roose and the band, to their credit, understood the assignment
and noting in the same chat with Billboard, I've been
doing this for 10 years and never had anything happen
quite the way it's happened in the last year.
The exposure brought to the band by having a commercial
air during the most watched event in America. Yeah, it
paid off and We Are Young went from strength to strength. Suddenly,

(19:37):
everyone wanted a piece of the action and fun went
from quirky little indie band to full-on pop superstardom. It
was covered by a cappella mega group Pentat.
Tonics, which quickly went viral, and X Factor winners Little Mix.
It was used in Gossip Girl. This is 4,090,210, another
Super Bowl ad the following year for Taco Bell and

(19:59):
in a John Cena versus Dwayne The Rock Johnson hype
package for WrestleMania 28. Now, looking back on it all
in 2025, it doesn't seem like
Such a big deal that one of the biggest pop
songs ever was highly coveted by brands for their marketing
campaigns or used as Sonic product placement in shows and movies.
But as a reminder, Nate himself did mention in their

(20:21):
open letter to fun fans when they signed to Fueled
by Ramen, they explicitly were not going to sell out.
Here's what the band told much about their openness to,
let's call it corporate synergy in 2012. Like, it's completely
different than it used to be, the idea of doing that, right?

Speaker 2 (20:40):
I think to an extent as long as you're not
pushing cigarettes or.
Uh, you know, something that's sending a, a wrong message
or or if we knew that maybe the company had, um,
like political agenda is not in line with ours, stuff
like that, and we would do it, but I mean,

(21:01):
we
Example, we love corporate America. We ride in Chevys. We
do all those type of things and, and if they're,
if they're going to use our song tastefully, which they did,
there's a car doing a kick flip or something like,
and it ended up being epic, then like we have
no opposition to that because look at what it did
for us. It introduced us to a whole different demographic

(21:23):
and and um.
That's just one commercial that doesn't define who we are.
We let people come to the show and see who
we are, and they can see that we're not, we're
not just based off of a car commercial. So, so
it's some money in our pocket and some

Speaker 1 (21:36):
exposure. By March 7, 2012, We Are Young became a
number one Billboard Hot 100 hit, and it stayed there
for six consecutive.
Weeks. As we were just pre-digital streaming era, it also
became the first and only song to record 300,000 digital
downloads a week for 7 weeks straight, pushing it to
5 times platinum status in 2012 alone. It's now been

(22:00):
certified diamond as of 2019.
On radio, it topped the Hot 100 airplay chart for
7 weeks, becoming the first group since Destiny's Child with
Survivor in 2001 to do so. With all of the
charting and commercial success, it came as no surprise when
Fun were nominated for 6 Grammy Awards in 2013. The

(22:21):
band would win the Grammy Award for Best New Artist,
and of course We Are Young won the Grammy Award
for Song of the Year, beating out former encore subject
Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe.
Of their 4 Grammy losses that year, you might be
surprised to hear two of them were to Gauthier and
Kimbrough's Somebody that I used to know. The Flash in

(22:42):
the Pan song also had a massive year, taking home
Record of the Year and pop duo performance at that
same year ceremony. But based on the strength of their
follow-up singles, Fun were decidedly not a flash in the pan.
The single, Some Nights was another massive hit for the group,
going 7 times platinum in the US and 5 times

(23:02):
platinum here in Canada, while 3rd single, Carry On also
became a comfortable top 20 hit for the band. All
in all, some nights, the album would go 3 times
platinum in the US and achieve platinum status in Canada,
and the group would tour the album tire.
through to the end of 2013, seemingly on top of
the world. That year, they came to the Ottawa Blues Fest,

(23:25):
and I know this because I drove from Nova Scotia
to Ottawa for the show, which is about 14 hours.
And I think we listened to some nights the whole time.
So fun and we are young will forever take me
back to that drive and eating pepperoni sticks from the
gas station.
2014 saw the band do a few music festival dates

(23:45):
while Jack Antonoff announced the formation of his at the
time assumed side project, the band Bleachers. Speaking of Antonoff
and side projects in late 2013, Jack Antonoff and, I
don't know if you've ever heard of her, Taylor Swift, uh,
they teamed up for the very first time on a
lesser known.
Soundtrack cut entitled Sweeter Than Fiction for the movie One Chance.

(24:09):
The Simon Cowell produced film was a box office bomb,
but did spark the creative relationship between Jack and Taylor.
And by the time 2014 rolled around, Antonoff and Swift
had written and produced three songs together for her now
iconic and my favorite album, 1989.
Less than 4 months after the release of 1989 in

(24:31):
February of 2015, Fun announced on their Facebook page that
for all intents and purposes, fun was done.
On their breakup, Fun would officially say, Fun was founded
by the three of us at a time when we
were coming out of our own bands. One thing that
has always been so special about fun is that we
exist as three individuals in music who come together to

(24:52):
do something collaborative. We make fun records when we are
super inspired to do so. Currently, Nate is working.
On his first solo album, Andrew is scoring films, and
Jack is on tour and working on Bleacher's music. The
three of us have always followed inspiration wherever it leads us.
Sometimes that inspiration leads to fun music, sometimes it leads
to musical endeavors outside of fun. We see all of

(25:15):
it as part of the ecosystem that makes fun fun.
The relatively boilerplate statement and sudden breakup confounded fans, but
Nate Roose would open up quite a bit more to
Rolling Stone that very same month.
While insisting that Antonoff's choice to front his new band
Bleachers had nothing to do with the split, Roos instead

(25:36):
admitted he was the major catalyst of the split as
he was writing a ton of new music and didn't
feel like they were songs he needed to share. He
said people were expecting a lot out of the next
fun album. Everybody wanted to squeeze every last drop out
of it, but those things are.
Hard to duplicate. People thought I was nuts, but I'm
not out to chase something. I'm out to be happy.

(25:58):
You get a little selfish about the songs that you write,
and it's really hard to do that in a group
setting where there are two other people and you have
to think about everybody else's feelings. I'm writing and singing
these songs about myself. When you work with producers versus bandmates,
that line becomes a lot less blurry.
Finally, Rus would admit that to be honest, the other
two guys in fun weren't too happy with his decision, saying,

(26:22):
I handled things poorly. It was a sloppy, long kind
of guys. I've got something that I really want to
do and I need the opportunity to do that.
Roos would release his solo album called Grand Romantic in 2015,
featuring production once again from Jeff Bhasker and a couple
of writing credits from Andrew Dost, leading fans to speculate
that the solo project was kind of a co-opted fun

(26:45):
record in Everything But Name.
The album sold modestly and the single was not a success.
Bruce has transitioned into a comfortably successful songwriter for hire
in the years that have followed, writing songs for Halsey, Eminem,
and the Kid Leroy, to name a few.
Over in Antonoffland though, things would go from strength to strength.

(27:06):
Swift's 1989 would of course win Album of the Year
and Best Pop Vocal Album at the 2016 Grammy Awards.
And our boy Jack was essentially a made man. While
bleachers have never truly broken through as a cultural phenomenon,
Antonoff's work with Taylor.
has transformed his career into one of a producer-songwriter extraordinaire.

(27:28):
Antonoff credits Swift immensely for his success as a producer,
telling The New York Times in 2020, Taylor's the first
person who let me produce a song. Before Taylor, everybody said,
you're not a producer. It took Taylor Swift to say,
I like the way this sounds.
In the years following Fun, Jack Antonoff has received massive
critical acclaim for his work with Lorde for her albums

(27:49):
Melodrama and Solar Power, as well as Lana Del Rey's
Norman fucking Rockwell, and Did You Know that there's a
tunnel under Ocean Boulevard, Sabrina.
Short and sweet and man's best friend, as well as
a countless amount of work with Taylor Swift, providing writing
and production on reputation, lover, folklore, Evermore, Midnight's, the Tortured
Poet's Department, and the Taylor's version catalog of re-releases. For

(28:14):
the most part, Ansanop just kept mum on fun, but
late last year, in an interview with the LA Times,
he provided a glimpse into his feelings on his late band,
which is now more than 10 years removed from a breakup.
When music critic Michael Wood would note that fun was
once the biggest thing since sliced bread, and now nobody
talks about them, Antonov was pretty blunt in his response.

(28:36):
I think you're illustrating why I chose to not do
that much longer. I know when something will age well,
and that's why I stay with the things that I
want to do. There was something very accidental about fun,
which is also what stressed me out about it. It
wasn't my band. I'm a bandleader and I've always been
a bandleader.
I like singing my lyrics. I like telling my story.

(28:57):
So if I'm not getting that, I don't really want
to do it much. Of the three members, Andrew Dost
has been the most low-key post fun. After starting his
jazz fusion band Metal Bubble Trio soon after the breakup,
he would do some work composing music for films and
TV shows before returning to his home state of Michigan
to work as an instructor for the singer-songwriter program at

(29:18):
Interlochen Center for the Arts.
So that's the story of the song you remember, but
the band maybe you forgot. Fun, We Are Young. Thanks
for listening to Encore. I'm Ruby Carr. New episodes every Thursday.
Encore is an iHeart Radio Canada podcast. Download the free
iHeartRadio app and subscribe. Thank you. Thank you so much

(29:41):
for coming.