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Before We Cared:
Fun.

This one is a bit of a cheat.

First of all, there’s no guarantee that Fun. will have another popular song beyond “We Are Young”, so saying that we care about them might be a bit premature.

 But as of writing this, “We Are Young” has been on the charts for over six months, which is a long time for a song to remain so consistently popular. I’d be surprised if they didn’t have a few more hits in them.

Second, I’m not going to focus entirely on the band Fun., since they’ve only been around for three years.

However, the vocalist and chief songwriter of the band has been making music for over ten years and has four albums and a smattering of EPs to his name.

He is Nate Ruess, former lead singer for indie rock band The Format and the world’s most precious little snowflake, and it is his journey to pop-semi-stardom that we’ll be looking at today.

The Format’s first album, Interventions and Lullabies, is a pretty straightforward bit of indie rock, occasionally veering towards emo (the late-90’s, Get Up Kids kind of emo, I mean.) They certainly weren’t shy about their pop influences; there are handclaps and harmonies all over this album. Still, it wouldn’t be a stretch to file it under “alternative rock”, since every song is guitar-driven and most of them keep to a steady backbeat.

There are a few songs that slow things down with a more acoustic sound, but that’s pretty much expected of an indie rock band with an introspective lead singer.

Ruess’s lyrics followed the confessional style of countless other indie rockers. He focused mainly on his own personal failings and unhappiness, particularly in relationships. On the cheekily named “The First Single,” Ruess declares, “I hate what I’ve become.” Another song compares his treatment at some nameless woman’s hands to being hanged to death.

There are some songs that break away from the “my-woman-done-left-me” subject matter, and a standout of these is “On Your Porch”. Over an acoustic guitar, Ruess recounts a time when his father fell ill and was nursed back to health by his mother. The chorus is built around a bit of advice his dad gave him, and the whole song has a low-key, hopeful attitude. It’s a simple and lovely song, the sort of thing Ruess would rarely write again.

There was a major shift in Ruess’s songwriting on the band’s second full release, Dog Problems. His lyrics became fussier and more self-conscious. He was still digging through his personal life for inspiration, but the sentiments he expressed were so overblown and the lyrics so polished that the songs were often difficult to relate to. He hadn’t stopped dissecting his personal failures, but now he wanted you to know that he was dissecting the dissection, too.

In the titular track, he references “The First Single”: “When I said ‘I hate what I’ve become’/I lied, I hated who I was.” It’s a clever callback, but it only serves to make the listener question everything else Ruess says, obfuscating the immediate emotional connection of the first album and putting up a barrier between the artist and his audience.

Floyd Pinkerton would be proud.

It’s telling that the second song on the album opens with the Ruess asking, “Can we take the next hour and talk about me/Talk about me, and we’ll talk about me/Talk about me, and we’ll only talk about me”.

There’s a certain amount of irony in those lines, but how much of it is intentional?

The fact that I’m not sure is a bad sign.

It wasn’t just the lyrics that were different. The instrumentation became more extravagant; with more overtly “pop” songs, many of which completely abandon the guitar-based sound of their first album. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a band expanding their sound.

The problem with the music on this album is that it’s bent every which way in service of the lyrics.

The backbeat that gave Interventions its rock-and-roll flavor will sometimes drop out entirely so that Ruess can be accompanied by a choral arrangement, singing along with him as he complains about everyone having the same haircut.

Things only got worse when The Format broke up and Ruess formed Fun..

He continued to lyrically wall himself off from the rest of the world, apparently preferring to stay sealed in a neurotic world of baroque pop music. For Fun.’s second album, Some Nights, the band worked some hip-hop influence into their sound, which cut down on the number of instruments used in each song, but only opened Ruess up to different means of extravagance.

The lyrics are still frustratingly self-referential. Roughly five minutes into the album, Ruess sings, “This is it guys, that is all/Five minutes in and I’m bored again”. I guess that’s pretty clever, but if Nate Ruess can’t muster up any enthusiasm for his songs, why should I be expected to?

But even though I liked Nate’s work a lot more when he showed some restraint, I think that breaking away from the pop-rock structure of the first Format album was the right choice for him. He’s a wildly creative person, and while I usually find his ambitions off-putting, he’s produced a few songs that I can’t help but like.

“Benson Hedges,” “All The Pretty Girls,” and the title track from Some Nights make big, wonderful use of the Queen-inspired harmonies that Ruess seems to find so fascinating. On Aim and Ignite’s “The Gambler”, he once again writes about his parents’ relationship and the lovely, affecting song that he produces proves that Ruess can actually write a straightforward lyric, provided that it’s not about himself.

Even when Ruess’s songwriting is at its most self-obsessed, freewheeling and inconsistent, it can produce some fascinating songs like “At Least I’m Not As Sad” and, yes, “We Are Young.”

For every interesting failure, though, there’s a straight-up annoying song like “Why Am I The One?” which meanders its way to an overbearing chorus where Ruess bemoans, “For once, I’ve got the feeling that I’m right where I belong/why am I the one/always packing up my stuff?”

This may come as a shock, Nate, but there are plenty of people going through heartbreak besides you. You are not “the one”. I understand that it’s hard to see beyond your own pain when you’re in a bad place, but geez, you can’t be in a bad place all the time.

I don’t want to sink into armchair psychoanalyzing here. I don’t know Nate Ruess. It’s possible that he’s a calm, well-adjusted guy in real life. But if he’s anything like the person presented in his lyrics, then I don’t think I’d want to hang out with him.

But I’ll say this for Mr. Ruess: he’s nothing if not self-aware. Even at the beginning of his career, in the opening song of The Format’s debut album, he knew exactly what his biggest flaw was: “I just got to get myself over me.”

If only, Nate. If only.

Fun.
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