Choosing a New Year’s Eve party has an eggs-in-one-basket quality to it: Once you commit, you’re stuck there until it’s time to grab an Uber ride home.
This year, you won’t likely find a bigger spectacle than Imagine Dragons’ New Year’s Eve show at Foxwoods. The Las Vegas quartet — singer Dan Reynolds, guitarist Wayne Sermon, bassist Ben McKee and drummer Daniel Platzman — scooped up Best Rock Album honors at last year’s Grammy Awards (and also performed their single “Radioactive” with Kendrick Lamar).
“Smoke + Mirrors,” the band’s latest release, gathers up 13 stadium-friendly rock songs that are equal parts bombast and introspection. Festivities begin at 10 p.m.; tickets are $95 to $275.
Sermon spoke to CTNOW about previous New Year’s Eve shows and what to expect this year.
Q: I’ll bet an Imagine Dragons New Year’s Eve show is pretty over the top.
A: I think there’s definitely something special about it. We usually end up saying, “Maybe we won’t do one this year. Maybe we’ll just spend this New Year’s Eve at home.” And then we get asked to play, and it’s like, “Sure, why not?” A few days pass and we’re already kind of antsy at home over the holidays. As much as we like having a break, we’re always just like, “OK, let’s do it.” We definitely do some special stuff. We play some special songs.
One year we did it in Vegas, which was really cool. Another year we did it in California at over 10,000 feet elevation. You could barely even sing, we ran so short of breath. I don’t think we’ll have that problem in Connecticut.
There’s definitely a certain kind of energy that comes out in a New Year’s show. Everyone is feeling optimistic and everyone is excited to bring in the New Year. It’s pretty easy for us, honestly. It’s not really a show you have to work for too hard, because everyone is already so excited to be there. The liquor is often times running freely, which helps us, too.
Q: Which New Year’s Eve show comes to mind?
A: We’ve done two or three in Vegas, and the first one was probably the more typical early Imagine Dragons experience. It was actually at South Point, which is a casino, but it’s not actually anywhere near the Strip. I love South Point, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the most glamorous place. It was actually the lounge. Coming up in the world as a band, we played a lot of lounges and bars, pretty much anywhere that would have us.
I remember South Point made us an offer to play. I think it was $1,500. At the time, that was, like, “Are you kidding me?” It paid our rent for a month. It was beautiful. So we said yes, and it was us and 50-100 drunk gamblers. Some had had some good luck and some had had some bad luck that night, but everyone was pretty drunk. We counted in the new year on stage, and some inebriated hotel guests somehow got onstage. It got pretty debaucherous.
Q: Imagine Dragons songs are so huge-sounding, but I imagine at some point they existed as sketches for acoustic guitar and voice, or something like that.
A: Absolutely. “I Bet My Life” started just like that. [Singer] Dan [Reynolds] was like, “Hey, can you send me some simple guitar ideas to sing over?” We do a lot of stuff over email. I’ll write a guitar part and send it to Dan, and he’ll sing on it, or I’ll send him a demo. With that one, I just sent him a really simple, acoustic idea, and he came back with this song that was really simple. It was really undressed and bare-bones. I think for any song to stand the test of time, or even just to be a decent song, it has to hold up to just an acoustic guitar and a voice.
We don’t really like to write the same way. It’s very boring to us. We’re easily bored with any situation we’re in, and that’s the same for our music. If we write the same way, it just feels like a chore. A lot of times, it’s a full production idea that we send off, and a lot of times it’s all of us in a room together. Pretty much any way you can write a song, we do it that way.
Q: For a rock band, the guitar parts you gravitate toward aren’t riff-heavy. The parts you play are textural. Is that something you think about during the translation from sketch to finished song? Do you find yourself pulling back a lot of times?
A: I do, actually. I love guitar riffs. Boston is one of my favorite bands of all time. “Don’t Look Back,” the riff in that song: that was me with a tennis racquet when I was 7 years old, rocking out to my dad’s vinyl. That’s one of my best memories. For whatever reason, in this band, with Dan’s voice and the music that we write, everyone in this band has a lot of talent and is capable of doing many things. For this band, this is the guitar-playing that fits.
It’s not always that way. The song “I’m So Sorry,” on the new record [“Smoke + Mirrors”], is pretty guitar-driven. I kind of wanted to show that side of things. But more often than not, I just feel like it would get in the way, and the last thing I want to do as a guitar player is get in the way of anything: melody, vocals, what the song truly is about. More often than not, it’s something that’s a little more simple, a little more understated, and that’s trickier than it sounds to someone who doesn’t play the guitar, who doesn’t understand production. Guitar players are notorious noodlers, and they love to play. To not play actually takes more practice than playing sometimes.
Q: As Imagine Dragons got bigger and bigger and progressed from clubs and bars to arenas, did you have to figure out ways of stay connected to the audience?
A: At the risk of sounding very arrogant, I would say no. It’s sort of in our DNA. Even when we were playing lounges in Las Vegas growing up, we’ve always been a band that feels most comfortable playing in big spaces. I don’t mean that we were destined to be huge, but that’s what our music is about. We were fully aware there was a very good chance we would never even play an arena in our entire life. We didn’t feel entitled, but at the same time, that was always the music we were making, even from the beginning. We were making music that was meant for big spaces.
Q: What’s on the horizon for Imagine Dragons in 2016?
A: We’re going back to Europe to finish up the tour. We started in South America and then went to North America. We did Asia and Europe, and now we’re going to go back to Europe and do the eastern part: Russia, Latvia, Poland, Belarus, a lot of places we haven’t been to before. Then we’re going to take a break. For the first time ever in the history of the band, there’s going to be months of no scheduling anything. Pretty much what we do is to say, “OK, we’re going to take a month off,” and then things come up that we can’t possibly say no to, so our schedule ends up getting filled up.
Obviously, these are awesome problems to have, and it’s amazing, but we just need a break. We went straight in from the first to the second album. We didn’t take much time for resting. We’re kind of feeling it on this album. It’s been pretty grueling. Everyone’s ready to take a little bit of a break and just write.
I say “break,” but it’s not really a break, because we’ll be writing like crazy and sending demos back and forth. We’ll never go a day without doing something for the band. But we’ll be in one place and not touring. I would think by the end of 2016 we’ll be restless again and we’ll be doing something with another album.
IMAGINE DRAGONS performs at the Grand Theater at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket on Dec. 31 at 10 p.m. Tickets are $95 to $275. Information: foxwoods.com.
