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Molek FMfun.: Never Too Old
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What does fun. do for fun? Besides setting things on fire.
(Laughs) We like to eat a lot. We eat and then work out a lot to kind of counterbalance the amount of what we eat. We all enjoy each other’s company, we got a great group of people who are constantly on the road with us. You have to when you’re away from your loved ones and family for a long time – you have to be surrounded by people you like. I find it to be super strange because when I get annoyed with everybody, like I hate them, I would still want to be around them no matter what regardless.
You came from a punk background. How did you transition to making more accessible pop music now?
It’s about getting older. When I was coming from making punk music as a kid, I just discovered a scene and discovered a whole bunch of people. I never felt like I belong to anything and suddenly I belonged to that scene. But it wasn’t necessarily about the music for me. It’s just about finding likeminded people. As I got a little older, I started going back to my dad’s record collections and when you think about it, Elton John, Queen, Cat Stevens or The Beatles, they are all so great and they also had great commercial success. So, it’s unfortunate that nowadays you can’t associate artistic success with commercial success. It’s very weird but I guess we must have done that, we must have been responsible for continuously buying music that we’ll eventually look back and say “What were we thinking?” I don’t think you’d think about that with the classics and so hopefully we don’t end up falling into the bin of “What were we thinking?” as far as music is concerned.
With all the commercial success and critical acclaim, do you feel more pressured from expectations with your next effort?
Being a competitive person, of course! But I think the artistic person in me, as soon as we finish touring this year, I’ll take a month off and maybe certain things will sink in then, I dunno. But I’ll head straight back to making another album and hopefully I’ll remove myself from a lot of this stuff. It’s so strange, you know, I’m sitting here and only a year removed from having no one heard of us. So it’s hard not to be conscious of the weird life that this has become and I’m sure that I’ll write about it and find ways to disguise it as a love song. But mainly, I got enough baggage back at home to fill up an album that I can’t ignore about it.
So when you’re working on Some Nights, did you ever think for a minute that it was going to change your life?
I didn’t. I guess something felt a little special about [the album]. And that is the testament to our record label and a testament to our producer, Jeff Bhasker. You always had friends and family who were like “This is going to be the one, this is going to be the album,” but this is the first time our record label and producer have ever said words of encouragement. You know, when I was in The Format, I thought we had 2 or 3 songs that were catchier than any of the ones on Some Nights from a radio standpoint, and [success] didn’t happen. A lot of people really worked on our behalf, and for us, we just acted and progressed naturally as artistes and as friends.
We’ve always wondered… what’s the story behind the stylised name?
Well the punctuation is more interesting than the name because that was the matter of us just sitting around the table until someone said something and we’re like “Yeah, Fun. That’s a cool name.” But we came up the name “Fun” with no punctuation, and then after we announced it, we got a message from a Finnish death metal band saying that “Our name is Fun too, will you guys do something to change up your name?” So we thought, alright, it’d probably be good if we added a period to the end because it kind of understates the word. If there were an exclamation mark, people would think that we’re like wild and crazy… we’re not (laughs).
What about the lowercase initial?
Well sometimes it’s lowercase and sometimes it’s uppercase, there’s no rivalry between the two. I’m not a big fan of song titles and band names. I mean the first band I was in was called The Format and this one is called Fun. so there’s really not much thought to it. I like to leave [the creativity] for the album and the lyrics.
That’s one mystery solved for us.
JUICE had fun singing along to ‘We Are Young’ at Future Music Festival Asia ’13.
