Brother trio AJR are following up their breakthrough single "BANG!" with another hit, "Way Less Sad," from their new album OK ORCHESTRA. According to the group, they've literally been working on the song for nine years, until they finally came up with a concept they thought would work.
According to AJR's Jack Met, the band finally came up with what they describe as an "ironic party song," but then realized it'd work much better if they had it speak to our particular moment in history.
"Yeah, that was kind of the final step, making it…about, like, the world that we're in right now," Ryan Met tells ABC Audio. "Whether it be politics or who the president is, or whatever."
"We had this song that we knew was a relatable concept," he continues. "But then it was like, 'OK, how do we AJR-ify it and contextualize it in a place where people feel like, 'Oh, my God, this is my song right now!'?"
"That's where some of the lines, like, 'I wake up and I'm not so mad at Twitter now,' came from," Ryan explains. "You could take it in many different ways, whether it's about politics or about what[ever]. But that's how we kind of turned it into 'OK, only, AJR could put out this song.'"
In the song, AJR sings, "I wake up and I'm not so mad at Twitter now/Livin' sucks but it's sucking just a little now/And I don't wanna cry no more/So I set my bar real low."
By the way, the song may have been nine years in the making, but it's built around a horn sample from a song that's even older: "My Little Town," a hit in 1975 for Simon & Garfunkel.
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