Night Visions

I feel like the bands that enter the business like it’s a business are the ones who have the biggest careers. Maroon 5, The Killers, OneRepublic and Imagine Dragons all seem to have a grand design from the start, producing debut albums that can’t fail. They study each other’s success, and I in turn study theirs. I’ve been singing the same two karaoke songs for years, “Radioactive” and “Demons”, and guess what – wherever I am, some drunk girl wants to duet with me. For those few moments, I am indistinguishable from a rockstar. Night Visions has a sing along sound that is huge without being intimidating. We can all clap along with our Moms to this awesome non offensive sound. If you are a band making songs that can move a crowd of any age or soundtrack a commercial for any car, you are going to make millions of dollars, no question about it.

As hard as it looks, it’s about ten times that. When Night Visions came out, I was taking on a single pitch at 120 feet. The cliff wall was completely vertical. This was the music that got me to the belay point, after a lot of trial and error. “And you tell me to hold on” states the lyrics to “Bleeding Out”, which I adopted for my various endeavors. The song motivated me on several levels, from the swift claps that sharpened my focus, coupled with the soothing, almost meditative way the melody flows, perfect for those moments where I needed to rest and think before my next move. The track itself is one of martyrdom, and proved to be very effective in the end, because to climb higher and higher, you have to be willing to put it all on the line. Now I’m doing multi-pitch climbing, 4 albums later.

While I adore all the songs on Night Visions, I have a special place in my heart for the folky tune “It’s Time.” For starters, I am a country meets city girl, and I’ve always been caught between those two worlds, and if all of you out there will indulge me in this, listen to this song and hear the beautiful balance between banjo playing and electronic hard rock n roll. This is the sound that probably most describes me. You see, I was raised in the sticks in Lost Valley CA and Antelope Valley, and contrary to what everyone thinks about the West Coast, it really can be very rural. Yet, as soon as I was old enough to drive, me and my girlfriends would take the Tacoma and head to Downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood and Santa Monica to party. It was only an hour and change away, but a world away from where I lived. The sound of LA at that time was Imagine Dragons all the way. Driving on the highway to “Amsterdam”, watching the lights come into view.

Night Visions is the first album I got, on CD. 2012 and I was 16, and David, my Mom’s boyfriend at the time, gave it to me as a gesture of good will, a peace offering, because if I have to be honest, I was not really happy about the whole him and my mother thing. Plus I was 16, still going through puberty, acne all over my face, angry about everything, and basically conflicted about being loyal to my real Dad and my Mom’s happiness both at the same time. David was in the industry and it was not the last CD he would give me. The CDs always said on them ‘for promotional use only – not for resale.” I pretended to not like Night Visions, but the truth is, I would listen to it a lot, and whenever he would try to talk shop, it was like pulling teeth from me. To this day though, it is one of my favorite albums.

If I’m being completely honest, I’ve sadly spent a grossly unnecessary amount of my career both as a musician & as a writer trashing Las Vegas-born Pop Rock band Imagine Dragons, going to great lengths to discredit their fame out of jealousy, disinterest & a generally misguidedly elitist mindset that somehow saw them as inferior songwriters who preyed on mainstream formulas to produce exceptionally-generic tunes audiences absolutely adored, essentially putting a stain on my status as a credible source for musical opinions since I couldn’t feasibly separate my prejudices from the hard facts of their incredible successes. Perhaps I was angry that they’d broken through to the waning MTV generation through what I believed to be sellout-level techniques, or maybe their initial promotional material left a bad taste in my mouth that prevented me from exploring the rest of the unknown tracks on their albums, but a casual playthrough of their latest record Origins piqued my interest as I found genuinely compelling compositions amidst its track-list full of anachronisms & progressive techniques worthy of my attention, persuading me to go back & thumb through their earlier entries in case there was something I’d been missing all this time – Naturally, I figured the best place to start on this adventure would be the very first studio album Dragons ever released, the nondescriptly-titled Night Visions from 2012 which sealed their fate as the industry’s replacement for aging Pop Rockers Coldplay, displaying in full their methodical application of music theory techniques learned at prestigious schools like Brigham Young University & Berklee College Of Music scientifically-proved to satisfy the vast majority of modern listeners. Coincidentally, I’d actually been exposed to & already-spiteful of the band by the time this record released after having learned of their existence whilst living on the East Coast & witnessing their decidedly-spineless promotion of Sharpie products on a FuseTV commercial, clearly contributing to my harsh criticism of the group as the scene I was involved in back then was all about integrity & the pursuit of narrative expressionism through music rather than Pop-centric ideals. As such, I went into this analysis with an open mind, hoping my maturation as a listener would help me appreciate Night Visions for the double-platinum certified, 2,500,000+ record selling behemoth that it is – Unfortunately, or perhaps delightfully, my hard-headed opinions would soon be validated by the utter lack of cohesion Imagine Dragons enacted in this album, confirming the 53% Metacritic rating it has so-rightfully earned by others in the industry; Still, as reaffirming as it may be for my own sense of pride, no musician truly finds pleasure in pouring salt into old wounds that’ve already suffered enough pain in the past.