You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Imagine Dragons are a Grammy Award-winning band from Las Vegas.
They've sold over 20 million albums so far, and they were the most streamed band on Spotify in 2018.
In March of this year, they released the song Follow You.
Singer Dan Reynolds started the song at home.
And then later,
the band took the song to the studio Shangri-La to record parts of it with legendary producer Rick Rubin.
In this episode, Dan breaks down the song,
which tells a deeply personal story of his relationship to his wife.
My name is Dan Reynolds, and I sing for the band Imagine Dragons.
There were a lot of things that kind of led to this,
and we had gone through therapy and different things, but we decided, you know what?
After seven years of being married, this isn't going to work.
We're going to get a divorce.
And that was a really difficult decision, super heartbreaking.
We had actually been together for over a decade at that point.
We had three kids, and Imagine Dragons blew up after we got married.
And so I traveled a lot, which was really difficult.