Nate Ruess, frontman for chart-toppers fun., tells Noise11 that he’d be “cool” with being a “one hit wonder”.
Fun’s ‘We Are Young’ with Janelle Monae has been a global smash, topping the charts in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and even in Iceland, Mexico, Austria and selling multi-millions of copies.
Ruess agrees that ‘We Are Young’ was a surprising number one: “It changes tempo, that lyrics aren’t exactly ‘Hey, I just met you, this is crazy’,” and he admits “we were all shocked about it [going to number one]. We were really surprised.”
“I was signed to a major label when I was 18 and dropped,” he reveals. “Somewhere along the way in my last band we started getting a really great cult following and that came from being ourselves and moving to the beat of our own drum and playing a whole bunch of live shows.”
“The concept of having a hit song went out the window then, because it seems very fickle and very fleeting,” Ruess says. “To be able to have done this for twelve years now, and never really feel like I’ve had a moment when it has started to go down…”
But he’s bracing for it. “Oh, of course,” he says. But now, with their second Australian, New Zealand and Israeli number one hit in the title track to their album Some Nights, he can laugh and say “Okay, cool, I’m done.”
While he says that it’s cool that they’ve now had two hits, “I’m even cool with the one hit wonder thing.”
“I’m so confiden
t in what we do as artists, not as chart-toppers but as artists,” he declares. “People just need to come to the show, because it’s a whole different experience. You’re going to get something else. And live with the album. You’re going to get so much more gratification out of that. I don’t care if we lose millions of people along the way. As long as we can hold on to some people, we’re doing something right.”
“I want this band to be as big as possible, so if this is what it’s going to be then hopefully we can stay here as long as possible.”
Check out the whole interview below, where we cover their hip-hop producer, Japanese Kit Kats and crowds, and how surprised he was that their music worked so well on a Chevy commercial.
