Indie rock band fun. (yes, with the full-stop) have had a whirlwind two years since their breakout hit “We Are Young” culminated in a Best New Artist win at this year’s Grammys. However, shocker alert: they still have not received their trophies.
“We heard it takes months before we actually get them, but we haven’t been home, so it may have shown up,” said lead vocalist Nate Ruess in Singapore on Friday.
The band are in town to perform a one-night-only gig Friday night under SingTel’s music app AMPed at The Coliseum, located at Hard Rock Hotel in Resorts World Sentosa. The band, also made up of lead guitarist Jack Antonoff and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Dost, gamely put on their jester hats during the press conference in the afternoon.
Antonoff replied back to Ruess’s statement, “What’s funny is that we heard it takes months and months – if you said just ‘months’, it would have been one or two months but with the term ‘months and months’, decades can go by and we’ll be calling each other and be like “Do you have your Grammy yet?””
“I’m not mad or poking fun at the Grammys, but it all sounds a bit wishy-wishy. I remember playing T-ball when I was a kid and we got our trophies at the end of the match, but this one takes a few months? I think the T-ball and Grammy trophies are made out of similar material,” Ruess reasoned.
Grammy trophy in their hands or not, the band certainly do not need the award to justify their meteoric rise to fame and their legions of fans. The casual mood permeated much of the press conference, with all members trading jokes and friendly barbs.
Jokes and Singapore perspectives
Case-in-point: after Dost said that he did not know whether he would give his Grammy to his parents or keep it for himself, Antonoff joked that he would offer his Grammy to Dost’s parents to keep safe. After a interviewer asked the band what they would do with $1 million, Dost fired back: he would give it to Antonoff’s parents as a token for the Grammy exchange.
“I’d open a Singapore Sling bar called Slings,” Ruess replied to the million-dollar question in jest, after he earlier said that the only thing he heard about the country prior to arrival was the famed alcoholic beverage.
The band had great things to say about Singapore, even if the answers were a tad clichéd. “It looks like how people perceived the future in the ‘80s, with angular buildings. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said Antonoff.
“I’ve had a couple of family friends out here and all I’ve ever heard of the city was that it is clean and everyone is super respectful. People here take things seriously in a right way, like they take their job seriously. I’ve grown up hearing all these wonderful stories about Singapore, so I am very excited to be here,” Dost added.
Getting serious
Fun. is technically not a new band; their first single debuted in April 2009, so was it weird that the band was being recognised as new artists when they have been around for much longer? Multi-instrumentalist Andrew Dost said no.
“It makes sense just because this is our first year being recognised by the mainstream, so we felt like new artists – and we’ve been around for a long time,” Dost said.
When Yahoo! Singapore asked if the Grammy turn-around in snubbing Justin Bieber for Mumford Sons solidifies the rise of alternative acts in mainstream consciousness, Antonoff said that it was part of the evolving music cycle. “This is the moment when people are ready to make records that don’t sound like any other kind of music and that these records can get big on a mainstream level,” he added.
Is the band worried about topping their wildly-successful singles? Nate Ruess does not think so. “I think it’s not so much as we want to top it, because we know that’s the thing that comes around so early, and very seldom do bands have that degree of exposure and success. We know that is something we might not have again.”
“We like to make albums, we like to tour, to make new songs – we’ll get to do these other things no matter what. We still love to do what we do, so we’re not really thinking about that so much,” said Ruess.
Dost added, “If we sort of boil it down to what elements made it successful, we would lose the heart of why we wanted to make music in the first place. We can’t define a lot of what we do. Looking back to “We Are Young”, you can point to the melody or beat but, with music, there are these intangible qualities that are what we strive for.”
Watch their music video for hit single “We Are Young” below:
Fun. kid around over their Grammy trophy and S"pore slings
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