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I’m still too terrified to try it personally, but… I’ve heard good ayahuasca stories from people, but that might be the the most positive one. It brought me to really healthy ground and self-love that I hadn’t been able to come to. It brought us back together, and we’ve been happily married for years since then, and we have a 16-month-old child. In such a profound way that it’s hard to put into words without it sounding corny. She said, “Hey, I’m gonna do it next weekend, if you want to do with me.” So I did a little research on my own, and then we went into it together and it just really changed my life, man. She told me that she had done ayahuasca and it had changed her life. We’re like, “This is not where we need to be, we need to go to lunch or something.” So we left and went to lunch. She had texted me right before the meeting all these things that were just so revelatory and really hit me on a deep level and were places we had never explored together, that were really healing for me. And we kind of just looked at each other across the table. And I came home, and we were going to meet together to sign the papers in a room with our attorneys. We’re just going through an attorney at that point. This was during Evolve, our last record, and I was out on the road, and we hadn’t talked for seven months. What were the circumstances like? Did you go to the jungle, or just sit in your living room?Īctually, me and my wife had been separated for seven months. It helped me to make leaps and strides in my mental health. Obviously, I’m not looking to come out and be, like, Mr. So that really transformed this whole record for me. It was really transformative for me, in helping me to see things that don’t matter and letting go of those things and seeing things that do matter and embracing those things.
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Something I explored that was really life-changing for me is, I did ayahuasca. People will hear it and think the song is angry at someone else. It just makes you grateful for your health, grateful for each day. The year before that, one of my best friends took his life. It was the first time I’d ever actually been in the room with someone who passed away, and that really hit me in in a different way, making me think about every day differently, and how am I spending my time. I was actually in the room with my brother when she passed. I lost my sister-in-law to cancer last year. A big theme of “Cutthroat” and a lot of the songs on the record is the finality of life. And that song is about kind of exorcising, trying to cut out, that self-pity, and embracing life and all that I’ve been given. That was the focus of all my music, and a great amount of focus on self. But for whatever reason, around my teenage years, I really started to deal with mental illness, seeing a therapist and trying different medications. That was hard for me to come to terms with in my brain. I was raised in Mormonism, and it wasn’t really for me. I feel like I’ve spent a lot of years of my life kind of “woe is me.” I don’t know if depression is a genetic thing for me or whether it came from religious crisis. Yeah, that song is really an exorcism of self-loathing. Given the references to Wellbutrin and serotonin on that song, I take it you’re addressing your experiences with depression. But he helped me embrace that and love that about myself. I would have never put that song out, or never explored that demo, because it’s too strange for Imagine Dragons or something. With “Cutthroat,” for instance, he embraced the parts of Imagine Dragons that were a little uncomfortable for me, that usually I would kind of hide. I feel like one of our biggest flaws as a band is comfort.
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And I think Imagine Dragons has needed that. Especially with Kanye, I heard him pushing in ways that almost felt uncomfortable. He worked on records that were very influential to me, whether it was Kanye or whether it was the Beastie Boys. Well, I was really familiar with his work because I grew up on a lot of hip-hop. How did the two of you get connected in the first place? But he dug in on all of them and gave me very direct comments. I felt like he was going to say, “This is too much for me to listen to,” or not really dig in. This is when we were just talking about whether or not to work together and getting to know each other. And he wrote comments on every single song in an email. During Covid, I sent him 100 songs that I’d worked on over the prior three years.