The pop rock band will release their second studio album ‘Some Nights’ on May 21 and Ruess told NME that West’s 2010 opus “changed everything” for him when it came to writing the album.
Asked about the inspiration behind ‘Some Nights’, Ruess said that he’d become obsessed with West’s fifth album and had enlisted five people who worked on it for Fun’s new album.
He said of this: “Kanye West’s ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’ changed everything for me. I really only listened to hip-hop when making this album, but I didn’t use it as inspiration until ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’ came out. It’s hip-hop production with real theatricality.”
Then asked if you could hear the influence, Ruess added: “You can definitely hear it. We worked with four or five people who worked with that album, so there was the elements that those people supplied and then there was the heartbeat, which was taken from Kanye’s ‘Runaway’. That’s in about half the songs on the album. It was all I was listening to, I was obsessed with it.”
Ruess also spoke about how he believed the band had moved on sonically from their debut ‘Aim And Ignite’, adding: “The first album was just us getting used to one another. I think we did too much and there was a rush to get it out. We’ve learned a lot since that record came out. We work a lot better now, each band member’s role is more defined. Everybody wanted to create an album this time, rather than a band.” –NME
