If your household appliances wrote love songs while you were away on vacation, their cheerful blips and bleeps would pour out the windows, sweep through the neighborhood like candy-coated tidal waves, and you would return home to find crowds of people standing on your lawn, clapping and singing along to the happiest pop melodies imaginable. Welcome to Owl City.
When did you realize that you wanted to pursue music seriously and what made you realize this?
I used to work for Coca-Cola and I’ll be the first to admit, I spent more than my fair share of time daydreaming about writing music for a living. I had no intention of “succeeding” so to speak, I just started writing songs before and after work and that’s when I realized I wanted to MAKE time for music, rather than just write music in my free time. I remember being at home in the middle of a song, looking at the clock and realizing I had to be at work in 5 minutes. Horrible feeling. I couldn’t wait to clock out for the night so I could rush home and keep working on whatever I left off. I definitely wouldn’t choose to be doing anything else with my life right now.
Do you have any other passions besides music?
I have a deep passionate love for strawberry smoothies and grape Laffy Taffy. And ring pops.
Who were your main musical influences growing up? Where do you get your inspiration from now?
I’ve always been a big fan of wordless music. Unwed Sailor, Saxon Shore, Invert, Boards of Canada, Rachel’s, Helios and Eluvium are some of my favorite bands. They all have subtle influences in the way I write in terms of melody. I really love music with subtle, often abstract optimistic overtones and I like the idea of pop music being abstract. Owl City is certainly not abstract in terms of genre or structure but I enjoy trying to inject this sort of ethereal “idealism” via metaphors in my lyrics. I think the thing that’s always drawn me to instrumental music as a listener, is the idea that it doesn’t tell you how to feel. It’s limitless. No one is telling you what emotions you’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment in a song. That, to me, is a wonderfully inspiring thing.
What kind of process do you go through when writing a song, like putting the lyrics and the music together?
I start with music, then add lyrics. I usually sit down at the piano and fool around until I come up with something I can stand playing over and over, then I build the rest of the song around that riff. Lyrics are the final thing and they usually take the longest.
If you could back in time and tell yourself one thing, to what point of your life would you go back to, and what would you say?
I would go back to my 7th grade year in school and tell myself I had the stupidest looking haircut on the face of the earth.
Do you like the East coast or West coast better? why?
I’ve yet to experience either coast, though they’ve been the subject of millions of my daydreams. I have a fascination with the ocean and the coasts have always been enchanting to me. I have a feeling I’ll favor the west coast. Particularly around the Seattle area.
If you could travel/live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
I would live on the top floor of the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. The view is spectacular. An endless oceanic vista on one side, the Dubai skyline on the other… I would be in seventh heaven. They have a suspended outdoor tennis court at the top of the hotel and I imagine I would become quite the tennis enthusiast as well.
A fan would be surprised to know that I __________.
Own and occasionally wear in public, an incredibly sweet pair of bowling shoes I found at a thrift store last summer.
What do you hope to accomplish in 2009, personally and as a musician?
Keep writing songs, playing shows, eating burgers and sharing my art with whoever is willing to listen.
