I think my inner child wants to take over the world.
— Mark Foster
I'm not really worried about writer's block.
I've written so many songs that are hopeful - songs that are, like, about an old man that gives all his possessions away because he wants to help people. I wrote 'Pumped Up Kicks' just to tell a different type of story.
A timeless pop song is the hardest thing to do as a songwriter.
If I'm with people who are really positive and go with the flow, that's when the best ideas come out for me.
Travelling alone was like laundry for my thoughts.
When I started really playing music, I pretty much quit sports. I quit everything.
'Torches' flowed together with interesting intros and outros. It was all very natural.
I started out with piano when I was little. That, for songwriting, is my favorite instrument.
I'm really into the recycling of art. That one piece of art inspires another piece of art, which inspires another piece of art. I really like that idea.
I wrote 'Torches' before experiencing touring as a band. I really had no idea what they would sound like live, and that was something we had to figure out along the way.
When I'm writing songs, my favourite thing to do is to try and rabbit-trail and go places I've never gone to before. Just like exploring a new terrain or a new country or something.
I write songs based on things I see in the culture around me.
When I was 21, I was in a pretty serious band, and we almost got signed - went to New York, showcased, all that - but didn't end up getting signed, and we broke up. I went back to the drawing board; I really took a hit from that whole experience.
I've played so many gigs in front of around seven people. It's difficult to keep motivated, but it's all about growth. The love of music kept me going.
I feel like kids are getting more and more used to communicating through a glass screen than they are face-to-face, and that worries me a little.
We've grown up on the Beach Boys and the Beatles and Blur and Bowie and the Clash. Also E.L.O. and Hall and Oates. Those are all artists who write songs that are accessible but still left of center. It's intelligent pop. There's still something different and complex about it.
Going out and volunteering sounds simple, but many people don't volunteer because they don't know where to start.
The phrase 'pumped up kicks,' man, I was excited when I came up with that.
Art is observing society around you, representing it through your eyes.
Pressure has always been more of a friend than a foe for me with songwriting.
When I put Foster The People together, I just wanted to play music with friends.
I remember, in middle school, I went to four different schools. That was a rough patch. But it's also what shaped me as a person.
I remember, when I heard Jeff Buckley's 'Grace,' on first listen I just thought it was such a great song.
Every single song on 'Torches' was a little self-contained pop song, so there wasn't any fat on the songs; there wasn't a lot to cut.
I write in character a lot.
In Morocco, a Muslim country, I got to hear the call to prayer five times a day. At first it felt kind of scary, kind of dangerous, because of the propaganda towards anything Muslim in the U.S. subconsciously coming out in me. By the end of the trip, it was so beautiful, and then not hearing it when I got back to L.A. really threw me off.
Culturally, it's really funny to me that people respect the weird guy as an artist. There can be a curmudgeon in the corner with spiders building nests in his hair, and he hasn't bathed for three weeks, but for whatever reason, he's more creative than the guy sitting next to him that's showered and is talking to everybody.
I love exploring music.
'Torches' opened a lot of doors. Ultimately, it turned into an experience to be reckoned with.
I'm a really extreme person, and balance is probably the hardest thing for me to maintain.
One thing about Foster the People is that it's taking pieces of a lot of different genres of music and kind of melding them together.
I experienced bullying a lot. I was an only child, and I was kind of a small kid with a big mouth, and so I always got myself in trouble.
I feel like my calling is to show people joy: to make them feel like there's something to look forward to.
There's a lot of bands that blow up quickly, but then they die quickly. Longevity is the healthy thing; that's the pursuit.
There are career waiters in Los Angeles, and they're making over $100,000 a year.
I realized probably when I was, like, 20 years old that the hardest thing to do is to write a pop song - not, like, a candy-pop, throwaway pop song.
There were times when I was terrified to go to school because it felt like a jail sentence.
When I write a song, the music comes from my spirit, which is very playful and optimistic, but then the lyrics come from my head, which is in a different space.
I was an only child, so I was alone a lot.
Fear just crushes creativity, and if I let fear into the studio and into the songwriting, I was going to let it kill the artist inside of me.
I play guitar, bass, drums, piano, and pretty much any sort of stringed instrument - besides violin or cello.
I was always extremely independent growing up.
During 'Torches,' I was more concerned with communicating the spirit of the song than the actual lyrics.
The jingles saved my life. When I got hired to do that, I was on top. I finally was making a living doing what I loved. Before that, it was so bleak; it got so dark in L.A. I was 25, been living there for seven years trying to make it, and getting really close to getting signed with different bands and as a solo artist only to have my hopes dashed.
I didn't record 'Pumped Up Kicks' out of a sense of moral obligation.
With 'Torches,' I wanted to make a great pop record; I wanted every song to be exciting, not to have too much space, no long pieces of music without vocals. I kind of wanted to write the perfect pop album.
L.A. gives me a lot. L.A. is a city of extremes. People come here from all over the world that have these, like, giant ideas, and they put everything into it. And some people just fall flat on their face, and some people, you know, shoot like a rocket.
Through technology and social media, we're able to create an identity online that shows people the face that we want them to see and rather than who they really are.
I like to write about real-life topics, and I like to write about different walks of life.
