A Great Big World On New LP ‘When The Morning Comes’ & Life After “Say Something”: Idolator Interview

Mike Wass | November 12, 2015 11:30 am
A Great Big World Return With "Hold Each Other"
A Great Big World tease their sophomore LP with new single "Hold Each Other."

A Great Big World arrived with a bang in 2013 when Christina Aguilera discovered “Say Something” and asked to re-record the ballad as a duet. The new version peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100, sold quadruple platinum and won all involved a Grammy for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. It established Ian Axel and Chad King as songwriters to be reckoned with, but also set the bar exceedingly high for everything that follows.

Instead of being suffocated by the weight of expectations, A Great Big World stick to their creative guns on sophomore LP When The Morning Comes and deliver an overwhelmingly optimistic collection of pop songs that are shaped by the joy of Ian’s upcoming nuptials and the honesty of Chad’s coming out. I recently spoke to the duo about the album and they opened up about the evolution of lead single “Hold Each Other” and life after “Say Something.” Find out more below.

“Hold Each Other” is unique in that it shows both a straight and gay perspective on love. Were you a little apprehensive at first?
Chad: Yeah, I was really apprehensive at first. Ian was pushing full speed ahead. Because you don’t hear a guy singing “him” or “he” on the radio. You don’t hear that pronoun used. Sam Smith uses the pronoun “you” because he doesn’t want to alienate people, which is interesting and I understand it halfway. I also think it’s a context thing.

I think in this context it was appropriate for Ian to sing “she” and me to sing “he.” The lyrics originally had “something happens when I hold her.” That was the chorus. And then, we weren’t even thinking about it until we were like “well how are we going to divide these lyrics?” And I guess we don’t really write songs with those types of pronouns. That was the first time we ever encountered it.

What inspired you to use the male pronoun?
Chad: Well, because I was uncomfortable with it, and if I’m uncomfortable with it, being gay, then there’s a problem. And it’s like, I shouldn’t be uncomfortable with that. And I should be okay spreaking my truth.
Ian: When I first heard Chad sing “something happens when I hold him,” when we tried it out, it transformed from just being a love song to something so much more profound. It became a love song for everyone, you know? It was different. Hearing Chad sing those words, it was actually mind blowing for me.
Chad: When we write, I actually never say “he.” It’s not the pronoun that I go to. It’s usually “she” or “that girl.” It’s just out of habit.
Ian: Because you’re so used to hearing that.
Chad: So, it was that discomfort which made me realize, “Holy shit, I need to be singing ‘he’ because that’s what I feel inside and there are people that need to hear this.” And it needs to change. It needs to shift. Guys shouldn’t be afraid. Hopefully we’re able to do that in a subtle way. That’s also what I love about the song, too. We’re not jamming it down your throat.

Is it just a one-off situation or are you going to use “he” moving forward?
Chad: I am absolutely going to start using it. I am going to run towards that. Because I’m tired of being afraid of it or even avoiding it. It’s just lying by omission.
Ian: Right, but that was actually the first time we ever had to make the decision. I mean, most of our songs don’t write themselves like that. So I don’t know that we’ll be trying to write songs for that purpose. But if it comes across this situation again, where the he/she pronoun thing comes up, then we’ll definitely go for it.

It’s also unusual for a piano pop song to have a rap feature. How did that come up?
Chad: I feel like you don’t hear something like this being embraced by the hip hop community. So I think to have a rapper involved, someone like Futuristic, who we really respect, it was really meaningful for us. It was like, “This is going to take it to another level.” This song is going to reach a completely new fan base.
Ian: It was an opportunity to reach as many people as possible who need to hear this. And also, Futuristic covered “Say Something” on YouTube a couple years ago, so we’ve been fans and we’ve been following him. So, we were looking for an opportunity to collaborate.

Futuristic is the only feature on the album.
Ian: We toyed around with collaborating with a couple other people, but we didn’t want to force anything. That one definitely felt the most organic.

After experiencing so much success with Christina Aguilera on “Say Something,” did you want to go it alone?
Ian: That’s interesting. I think there might be a little bit of that, because we want people to know who we are as a band and that A Great Big World is me and Chad. And “Say Something” was so interesting because it was the only song on the last album that I sang alone. And then we have someone like Christina’s voice on it, which was the biggest blessing ever. I think this album that we’re about to release feels like our debut album.

Why is that? Is it so much different from the first?
Ian: I think it is.
Chad: It feels like an album that is more focused. We really focused on the arrangement part to each song and making sure that if you heard one song you’d realize that there are two male vocals here and two lead singers.
Ian: There aren’t a lot of bands with two lead singers. So we’re definitely in an interesting lane.

There’s something almost vintage about having two male vocalists.
Ian: I think we tried to channel some of the Simon & Garfunkel thing for this record as well.

Why did you name the album When The Morning Comes?
Ian: Touching upon what we were just talking about, this feels like a clean slate for us. It feels like we just want to wipe it clean. And a lot of the songs are about when you fall in love and everything looks different and you see the world for the first time. I feel like that’s our perspective on writing this record. We did a lot of soul searching. Who is A Great Big World? What do we sound like? The last album was recorded over eight years and this one we only had a few months. So it’s definitely more focused and more present and this is who we are now versus last album was who we were in our twenties.
Chad: Also, this may relate, but you know when you have a first kiss moment with someone that you like, there’s all this anticipation and build up to that kiss. And then once the kiss happens all of the sudden the floodgates are open and then all the sudden the world looks new and I know you said that, but that’s sort of where we want to go. It’s like we’re starting anew. We’re starting again. When the morning comes, it’s a new day, it’s a new perspective.
Ian: There has been a lot of pressure that we put on ourselves. Do we have what it takes to write another “Say Something?” How are we going to fit into the world that “Say Something” put us in? We tried writing in a couple of different uncomfortable ways only to realize that it wasn’t us. We just wanted to get rid of all of that noise and get back to why we write music.

That’s interesting. Was there pressure to go for a more top 40 pop sound?
Ian: We have an amazing team around us now. Music is driven by sales and top 40 radio drives sales. So there’s definitely a lot of that. We felt like we need to write a hit. But we never wrote “Say Something” to be a hit song. It was actually probably the least likely of the album to be a hit song if we were to rewind and ask anybody two years ago what song would do well on the radio.
Chad: I think we definitely felt like walls came up and there was structure and limitations. We are writing a Broadway musical as well, and so it felt like the Broadway musical is a place where we could go wherever we want to expand, as far as we wanted and just go crazy. And then with this, we had to write within a three to four minute time frame.
Ian: We also want to reach the most amount of people as possible. To me, that’s what top 40 means. It’s like we got to connect to millions and millions of people, and that’s the dream.
Chad: Our goal is to be as honest as possible with ourselves and each other while writing, even if we had to stay strictly to the structure that is common for pop music. We did adapt a tiny bit to make this record a little more accessible.

Which producers did you work with?
Ian: I think Chad and I only wrote one song on it just between the two of us. The rest of the songs were co-writes through a third person. So it was interesting. It was definitely out of our comfort zone for most of it and we had some really uncomfortable, terrible experiences.
Chad: But a big goal for us was to learn from these other co-writers because they’ve had their successes.

Who did you end up working with?
Ian: When we wrote with Aloe Blacc, we had met him a bunch of times and wanted to write and we were just seeing what happened. We actually wrote a really great song that didn’t make our record, so I don’t know if he’s going to sing it. I don’t know what the deal is. And then we wrote a song with Gavin Degraw that’s really amazing that we didn’t end up using for our album, but I think is still going to have a life somewhere.

I believe you also worked with Mozella?
Ian: Oh yeah. The song we wrote with her is called “Oasis” and I feel like I’m most proud of that song.
Chad: She’s someone that we would write with again and again and again.

Can you talk about “The Future’s Right In Front Of Me”? It sounds like an affirmation.
Chad: You’re kind of spot on. That song is the most reminiscent of our last album. It’s just super positive.
Ian: Optimistic.
Chad: We’ve had that hook for probably six years and we just never wrote it into a song. It was one of the first songs we wrote for this album too. It was just about trying to figure out who we are and what we want to do.

Is there another “Say Something” on the album?
Chad: I don’t know that we could ever have another one of those. That song came from a lot of pain. And it was just one of those songs, for both of us, that we really needed to write. Just thinking about it makes me… that was an awful time in my life.
Ian: I think there was a period where we did feel pressure to write another one, for sure. But then we got to a place where it’s like, “Say Something” had a life of its own and we sort of have to keep it there. That song is what it is.
Chad: We need to keep being vulnerable. We need to keep being as honest as possible. When we write songs, don’t forget that it’s our therapy and “Say Something” was the most vulnerable we had been up to that point and it connected to the most amount of people, so just keep opening ourselves up.

What’s your relationship like with Christina?
Ian: We still talk to Christina every once in a while. She’s been very supportive of us and we see her at random functions and parties and I want to spend more time with her just hanging out. We hung out with her once at her house and played paintball in her backyard.
Chad: But that was sort of at the start, when we recorded with her. That was like the start of this other life that we had to live where we had to be almost the best of the best and where we were recording with one of the best vocalists in the world and it’s like how do you put yourself on the same level to collaborate genuinely?
Ian: It happened so fast. It was like one day, people knew who we were, but not a lot of people knew who we were. And then the next day, we’re recording with Christina Aguilera. We were like, “Is this for real? Is she sure? She wants to work with us? Why does she want to sing with me?” It was a big lesson in confidence.
Chad: It did feel like once that happened, or after that happened, we were able to work with anyone after that.

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