What's interesting about it to me was, topically, [the song] struck a chord and resonated with people, which is why the song became what it did. But it took people a while to really let the lyrics get into their bones, and I think that once the lyrics got under their skin, it was a bit of a slap in the face. And I think some people were embarrassed that they didn't realize it in the beginning -- that they had been dancing to it.
But I also want to say that 10 years ago when I wrote it, it was a warning. That's where it was coming from for me. What moves me is culture.
I'm watching culture and responding to it. I remember that week [that I wrote the song], there was some shooting that happened, and it really bothered me, because I recognized that it was going to continue to get worse.
And that nothing was going to change. And then that song popped out. I don't remember which one but I can tell you I wrote the song in January It wasn't necessarily reacting to the shooting itself, it was reacting to the idea, realizing that this isn't going to change and that this is going to get so bad.
It was like peeling back time and looking into the future and being like, "This is going to get so bad before anything changes that a lot of people are going to die and this is going to be a really dark period of American history. Did I write it specifically to try to warn the public? No, I didn't think anybody was ever going to hear the song.
I was a starving artist, I didn't have an audience. I never in a million years thought that it was going to become a global phenomenon. Walk me through what it was like in the studio recording the song. I saw that you did nearly everything on it -- you wrote it, produced it, engineered it, and played all the instruments, even the whistling and the clapping. How did you make the decision to make the melody upbeat and cheery?
Well it's funny, I was about to leave the studio that day because I was across town in L. And as I was about to leave the studio, I had this thought. It was like, "You know what, you're here, why don't you just start a new idea. Just write something, start a song, experiment, try something. And then I added the harmonies that were like late-'60s-early-'70s, like Mamas and Papas, kind of Phil Spector-y. Everything happened really quickly -- I didn't overthink anything.
When I picked up the guitar for the bridge, I wanted to do something in a style like Jimi Hendrix -- like, if he was just casually riffing over this with his hammer-ons and blues influence, Americana style. So it was little things like that where I was pulling from little bits of history and just experimenting. After that, I just turned on the mic and when I started singing, both of those verses pretty much came out of me verbatim.
A lot of times when I'm writing, I try to leave it open for the universe to try to serve as some kind of a channel, or some kind of a lightning rod, for whatever comes out. And in that first verse, I didn't change one word that came out. I wrote that song in eight hours, and for me it wasn't necessarily more special than any other song.
The thing that made that song special was the public, and the fact that people thought it was special, and it resonated and it created a conversation. And I'm proud of the conversation that it created. But now I've been very seriously thinking of retiring the song forever. Is it because shootings have continued to happen in this country or is it something else?
Yeah, exactly. Because shootings have continued to happen, and I feel like there are so many people that have been touched, either personally or by proxy, by a mass shooting in this country -- and that song has become almost a trigger of something painful they might have experienced. And that's not why I make music. We're still talking about it 10 years later. It still gets brought up. And I'll tell you, that kid Nikolas Cruz.
It's probably too hard to put into a small soundbite for this interview… It's a lot of different things. Like I said, I've been thinking about retiring the song and just not playing it live anymore. I can't ask other people not to play it live, but the public made the song what it is -- and if the song has become another symbol for something, I can't control that.
But I can control my involvement in it. The way that people perceive the song is their choice, and it becomes a separate entity that I don't have control over. But I do have control over whether I'm going to take part in playing it over and over again. It's like pushing your song in somebody's wound -- I don't really want to do it. On April 20th, , two students stormed their school and killed thirteen people. This included a teacher. They then proceeded to engage in a firefight with police, before turning their weapons on themselves.
This became known as the Columbine Massacre and would go down in history. It was the first truly terrible school shooting in the United States but by no means the last.
There would be countless instances that followed, some arguably much worse. In a lot of the cases, successive shooters were discovered to have been inspired by the events at Columbine. It also remained at the forefront of controversy, such was its content. Mark Foster, the group's Cleveland-bred frontman, did not respond to an e-mail request to address some of the questions raised by the song. But in interviews, when the song's dark subject matter has been an issue, he's seemed able to satisfy questioners by referencing Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood.
But acknowledging that the song is dark is about as far as most critics who have reviewed "Torches," Foster the People's debut album, have come to engaging with "Pumped Up Kicks. Foster is no Katy Perry, brazenly exploiting teen sexuality for the sake of "controversy. There's just not enough information there. You might argue that the tune's cheeriness is a symbol of just how far off the deep end this kid has gone.
That would be a more reasonable interpretation, though, if Foster were more in control of his lyrics: if he were not, for instance, switching from third to first person in the few lines he's written or offering as the only possible bits of explanation for the shootings sneaker envy and the tidbit that "Daddy works a long day.
Popular music, to be sure, is full of murder songs, many of them classics: Johnny Cash "shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" opens with a son confessing murder.
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