Reynolds, Dan

lead singer of Imagine Dragons

Dan Reynolds: Imagine Dragons

Lex Fridman Podcast · May 30, 2022

• Dan Reynolds
• Imagine Dragons
• songwriting process
• Rick Rubin collaboration
• authenticity in music
• Mormon faith crisis
• ayahuasca experience
• depression and therapy
• fame and identity
• LGBTQ advocacy and Proposition 8
• meaning and uncertainty

Core ideas

Reynolds describes his songwriting process as inseparable from a broader creative impulse he also finds in programming (he's been learning C# while developing a video game with a Kyiv-based team): both are driven by the satisfaction of building something from nothing and reaching genuine completion. He says lyrics, melody, and music arrive to him simultaneously as a "soundscape" reflecting his emotional state in the moment, rather than through deliberate structural planning, comparing the process to writing an unplanned journal entry. He estimates he writes over 100 songs a year but releases only about 20 every three years, and insists he finishes every song idea even if never released, since incompleteness isn't part of his process.

Discussing authenticity in music, Reynolds argues audiences have a powerful, near-universal "bullshit detector" that senses whether a performer genuinely means what they're singing, regardless of who wrote the lyrics — citing Elton John and Harry Nilsson as examples of performers who inhabit others' words with real emotional conviction. He describes working with producer Rick Rubin on line-by-line lyric revisions, recounting a specific disagreement over a lyric in the song "Number One" ("I'm still my number one") that Rubin felt read as cringeworthy self-help sentiment; Reynolds ultimately couldn't find a version he believed in enough to change it, while crediting Rubin's broader coaching — the idea that a listener's trust collapses the moment a lyric feels performed rather than believed — as central to his songwriting philosophy. He walks through the origin of "Believer," explaining that "pain" as its central image reflects his view that his most meaningful creative work has come out of his deepest suffering, including losing loved ones and going through a personal crisis of religious faith.

Raised in a devout Mormon family in Las Vegas (a city he describes as founded by "the Mormons and the mob," which he says shaped his view of embracing contradiction and duality), Reynolds describes a painful adult break from his childhood faith, and states that ayahuasca use — which he undertook cautiously after witnessing its effect on his wife — became the most significant experience of his adult spiritual life, describing an experience that felt like direct, non-verbal communication with something he alternately describes as "highest sense of self," "mother earth," or a wise presence, which he says helped him process guilt and anger toward his parents and community without needing to resolve the truth or falsity of Mormon doctrine specifically. He is careful throughout to frame all of this as his own subjective, uncertain account, not a truth claim, stating repeatedly that he doesn't know what is ultimately true about God, an afterlife, or which (if any) religious tradition is correct — including when his own child directly asked him whether they'll see each other after death, to which he says he answered honestly that he doesn't know, rather than offering false comfort.

On mental health, Reynolds discusses living with clinical (including seasonal) depression since adolescence, recounting a moment during a genuinely life-threatening small-plane engine failure in which he felt relief rather than fear at the prospect of dying — which he attributes to how depressed and burdened he felt with life at that time, contrasted with his current outlook. He credits therapy (after false starts with a Mormon-affiliated therapist and a Scientology-affiliated therapist tied to his then-girlfriend, now wife) and cutting out alcohol as central to his recovery, and describes overcoming an internalized stigma — rooted in his high-achieving family of non-therapy-going siblings — that seeking help signaled weakness, framing mental health support as something he now actively promotes to destigmatize, especially for young people.

Discussing fame, Reynolds describes a specific pitfall: that public perception flattens a person into a single "role" that friends, family, and strangers alike expect them to perform, and that this pressure to conform to an external image — which he compares to actors who lose themselves inside long-running characters — can be more psychologically corrosive than losing fame itself, since chasing approval or renewed relevance becomes a self-perpetuating trap unrelated to any stable sense of self-worth. He recounts advice from Charlie Sheen ("your life is about to get really weird") as prescient, and credits keeping his brothers as his manager and lawyer as a partial safeguard against losing perspective.

On LGBTQ advocacy, Reynolds describes his support as shaped by close friendships within the arts community from adolescence onward, the suicide of a gay Mormon peer near the Las Vegas temple, and his wife's estrangement from LGBTQ friends who declined to attend their wedding due to his Mormon affiliation during the Proposition 8 era — framing his public advocacy as a response to feeling that silence, given his visible association with a faith he saw as institutionally opposed to gay rights, was itself a form of endorsement. Reflecting on religion generally, he states plainly that religion has caused real harm and suffering historically, while also crediting Mormon culture's emphasis on eternal family bonds with providing real comfort and cohesion in his own upbringing, framing this as an unresolved tension rather than a settled judgment either way.

He closes on meaning, stating his current purpose is to "bring light and love to the world" and maintain personal integrity, while explicitly resisting certainty in either direction — comparing confident atheists and confident believers as equally puzzling to him — and describing himself as an active "seeker" drawn to people, including Rick Rubin and Lex Fridman, who share that same open, humble uncertainty rather than dogmatic conviction.

Excerpts