There's variables at every single gig. I look forward to those every night. We have a lot of things that happen in our show, a lot of people from the outside watching the show might think it's one schtick after the next. We promised ourselves we have to be there mentally. We have to be aware. We are forced to be aware.
— Tyler Joseph
Sometimes you go to a show, and you see someone and think they're not there right now. They're performing, but it's muscle memory. There is no memorising some of the ways we put on a show.
I always wrote with some kind of angle of ignorance. I didn't know what was right or wrong.
We're not the first people to climb up something or do a backflip during a set, but we want to do something that gets people's attention.
Radio is a hungry monster that eats very fast.
Even if it's a horrible venue - a bar that barely has a PA and no lighting - we're still there trying to get somebody to not forget us.
Self-awareness is a character trait that's horrible to have if you're a performer. I think that a lot of these performers that we see get up on stage and play music, there's a sense of them truly not caring how they're coming across. They are just themselves. I look up to a lot of people who are like that.
I guess when I first started writing music, I really had no idea if anyone was ever going to hear what I was writing and almost no intention of people hearing it. So, it was kind of this journal. It was pretty unfiltered.
By the time you do what somebody else is doing, everybody has moved on to something else.
It's hard not to be affected by the live audience.
I've forgotten what it feels like to be in one place for more than a day... But we signed up for this. This is our dream. We sat down and said this is what we want to do, play music and touring.
Our moms accuse us of selling out all the time, so we're still trying to cope with that. They claim to be true fans, like they've been there from the beginning, and they think that we've kind of, like, changed as humans.
For a long time, we just played here - Columbus is a perfect place to work your way up and maybe build a fan base.
There's been many times when a producer will say, 'I don't think you want to say that.' We were told we shouldn't be so brutally honest about songwriting or radio or the industry.
When Josh and I are recording a record, we're very mindful of how the music will manifest itself live. That's where we have to live every day. When we tour for the next record, I imagine there will be a new story to tell, and we'll introduce new characters.
We come from a sensory-overload culture, and so we wonder if one guy on drums and one guy dancing around is enough. Adding guys was something we always were curious about. We decided for this run specifically to stay a two-piece. In the future, we definitely could add members.
You hear about our conservative background and know that we're Christian guys, but we're not timid at all. I will take anyone on when it comes to outworking them or putting on a better show or standing up for people who are being put down.
A lot of bands have an unfortunate past; we've dodged a lot of bullets when it comes to that.
We know in order to get where we want to be and do what we want to be doing, sometimes we have to do what we don't feel like doing. It takes hard work, and the band name is a constant reminder of that.
From the beginning, my songwriting was from writing in a journal; it was completely unfiltered. I don't know if I really meant to show everyone this side of me, but when I saw how people resonated to the things I was saying, some of the questions I was asking, I realized I was not alone.
If you really see how many live shows are going on... you can start to do things that are out of the ordinary.
Here in Ohio, the hardcore scene is a big thing, so some of our good friends are in hardcore bands. So we've had to figure out how the heck we get these people to respect us.
The lyrics are a lot about those big questions: why are we here, how did we get here, what's the point, and what's next. When those questions come up with fans, I would absolutely share with them what has helped me and where I stand on what it is that I believe.
One think that you notice about anyone that gets up on stage is that they don't really have a lot of self-awareness. It's kind of a trait that performers don't have because you just kinda just have to let go and do whatever you want to do on stage.
If I were to give advice to someone that just started a band and how to get someone's attention, you've gotta have a central hub. For us, it was Columbus, Ohio.
I had to make 500 shots every day, and when my mom wasn't looking, I'd get up closer to the basket and do lay-ups and count them, and she'd be at the back window at the kitchen and knock. Then I'd have to go back and shoot from longer.
Our palette is wide and eclectic. That's why we crank out a lot of different styles. To some people, it makes us seem disjointed or scattered. But when we play live, it makes sense to us.
It doesn't matter what we post about ourselves on social networks or how many times we play live TV, even. It's all about those people, those fans who are telling other people about us.
Insecurity, for me, feels like the sensation of suffocating.
We had so many friends who did the band thing, and one of their first moves was to go on tour, and they'd just blow all their money.
I remember the first time I ever showed my parents a song that I had written. The content may have been a little darker than they were used to, or really introspective in a way that may have been uncomfortable. I thought they'd retaliate with some kind of judgment or concern about whether I was feeling all right, but they were proud of it.
A lot of things you do to cover up insecurities can be just as harmful to you as anything else.
There's so many people who have never heard of us, but I think what we've learned is you can't underestimate the power of a core fan base and people who believe what you're doing. I think they're the ultimate marketers. They're the ones promoting us.
Some people would look at a backing track as something that would confine you, but it really frees us up. It's nice not to be strapped down to a certain spot when you're trying to put on a show.
We've been lucky. Even as a young, local-level band, we were able to rise out of the local scene without having any debt, without having signed the wrong deal with the wrong manager or the wrong booker or a small label.
We're constantly faced with decisions. A lot of times, the right ones take more work; it takes longer to see benefit: they're the long route.
You have to give them something where they walk away and say, 'I want more of that.' To create something like that, you have to take them on a journey. So the live show is very important to us; we've been working on that a lot.
Live shows have been going on for so long, can you really do something that's never been done before?
We've done that whole spectrum of different varieties of shows, and we've figured out the best way of capturing the audience and taking them to a place where they will have an experience that they will never forget, whether they don't like it, or they actually resonate with what we're trying to do.
For us, we make a song, and if we like it, it goes on a record.
I think one of the toughest things is that balancing act of trying to maintain relationships while being on the road.
We're past the self-doubt. We just have fun with it and just try to make the best music that we can make.
Blurryface is this character that I came up with that represents a certain level of insecurity.
Writing songs is kind of like a wrestling match to me. You have to pin it down and make it do what you want it to do.
Even though there's only two guys in the band, when both of us are on the same page about something, you can't really change our minds.
We just want to outdo ourselves every time we come back somewhere.
You kind of have to celebrate the moment that you get to create something that you love that falls into the parameters of a 3-minute-and-20-second song, to try to be creative inside of those parameters.
There are times when we look back and think, 'Do you remember when we had to lug a piano downstairs to a basement of some venue to play for five people?' We do a lot of reminiscing. It helps us keep our heads on straight.
I don't love the way I look. Nobody does, and if they do, I don't want to be that person's friend. But we all know what we're insecure about. The question I had as I was writing was, 'How are these things affecting the way I live? How am I compensating because I don't like this about myself? What do I do to cover it up?'
It's a funny thing. I'll be in my home town of Columbus at a restaurant or something, and the waiter maybe asks, 'What do you do?' and I say, 'Oh, I'm in a band... Twenty One Pilots,' and he'll say, 'Cool, I'll check it out. I never heard of them.' And then I say, 'In September we're playing the Schottenstein Center,' and it's like, 'What?!'
