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Dan Smith of Bastille on music helping make sense of "how confusing the world is"

Anna Rahmanan
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Anna Rahmanan
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Dan Smith, the lead singer of Grammy-nominated British band Bastille, is jealous.

“I’m jealous, I’m jealous,” he says over the phone after I tell him that I’ve recently seen Lauryn Hill live. “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was such a massive record [for me] growing up,” he explains while listing a variety of other musical influences that creep into the songs that the 30-year-old writes and performs alongside three other band members (Kyle Simmons on keyboard, Will Farquarson on bass and Chris Wood on drums).

Now embarking on a world-wide tour in support of their sophomore album, Wild World, the band first reached American audiences with the catchy single “Pompeii.” In the midst of sound checks and rehearsals, Smith spends a few minutes over the phone discussing the origin of the band’s name, the politics behind their music and more. 

Why did you call yourselves Bastille?
We searched high and low for a name. I think anyone who is in a band knows the slightly painful process of trying to name oneself. It’s a really weird thing. We arrived on Bastille because we like the connotations behind it and we like that it felt quite evocative. Also, my birthday is on Bastille Day so it fitted quite well and we’ve gone through so many options that when we arrived at something […] we were like: 'Yes, let’s just go with it and never talk about it again.' 

What inspired your latest album, Wild World?
The album came from three, four years of touring after our first record. A lot of this record came from writing in tour buses, in backstages and in hotel rooms. We went back to the place where we made our first album, in our friend’s tiny sort of basement studio in south London, and we finished it there. We just made loads and loads of music and we wanted […] a much more ambitious sounding record than our first one. I wanted it to be kind of like a film soundtrack. I love Tarantino soundtracks and the way that [he] brings all these different sounds together with film quotes and dialogue, so that was a big part of it as well.

Bastille

How does it differ from your first album, All This Bad Blood?
Thematically, overall, the first album was kind of about growing up and it was about using pop culture and fiction and history and other people’s stories to try and get your head around becoming an adult. The [new] album was very rooted in 2016 and 2017. We wanted to look at the way we see the world through the news and through the media and how confusing that can be and how worrying that can be sometimes but contrasting that with everyday life. Regardless of horrific things happening around the world and how you see them on the news, everyone is going to get up the next day and go to work: [the album is] about trying to paint a really human reaction to the world in 2016.

From your band name to the theme behind your album, you seem to be actively political in your music. What came first? The music or the political statement?
I definitely just made songs because I love making songs. I think music and writing came first. I wouldn’t say this album is political, it’s just acknowledging how confusing the world is and how fucked up it can be and it’s trying to find a way through that and trying to find different ways to get your head around it. We wanted to paint that feeling of hearing something that you find really shocking and disagreeable and wanting to argue against it or get the hell away from it rather than preaching—I don’t see it our place to be like that at all.

How will this massive tour be different from your previous smaller shows? 
When we were playing much smaller shows, […] people would always start shouting out and we’d get into conversations […] with the crowd. As someone who is quite nervous on stage, that was always a really nice way to break down my nerves. I’m really excited to see what Americans think of this tour because […] we’ve just put a lot of work into putting together something that was visually really arresting and had something to say politically. Overall, there’s a kind of narrative and a comment on news media and how we see the world and trying to find the good in what can sometimes feel quite fucked up. Ultimately, we just want [people] to have fun.

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