When fun. hits the road for its Most Night Summer Tour on July 6 in Toronto, it will be “equal parts victory lap and a bridge to the next record” according to guitarist Jack Antonoff. But, he adds, that follow-up to 2012’s Grammy Award-winning “Some Nights” will come in due time.
“There’s, like, hints of a game plan,” Antonoff tells Billboard. “The way we work is pretty spontaneous and pretty quick. ‘Some Nights’ was written and recorded in a two-month time period, and I think that’s one of the elements that made it successful as an album. It should be a documentation of a band in a moment, not a giant, three-year process. So the next album will be the same thing. I assume some time at the beginning of next year we’d like to be in the studio, but that all depends on when the feeling hits and when we have a concept that’s worthy. Until we have the parameters of what the album really is it’s hard to hone in on them and work specifically on it, and we’re not there yet.”
Antonoff adds that the success of “Some Nights” will certainly weigh on the trio when it does hit the studio. Does that mean more confidence or more neurosis? “I think it’ll be a combination, and my hope and my assumption is the combination will sort of bring us back to zero,” he says. “We learned a lot of great lessons with ‘Some Nights’ — the most important is that we made the album we wanted to make and we weren’t really thinking about anything else besides that, and it just happened to have singles and be really successful. I can only imagine how hard this process would be if we compromised and changed anything to have a successful album. So the lesson we learned is we should do what we want, and if that has a chance of being successful it’s great.”
For now, however, fun. is looking forward to hitting the road with a show Antonoff says has “upgraded and tweaked” some of the production from the group’s spring tour. “We changed a lot of stuff,” reveals Antonoff, who outside of fun. has done some writing with Sara Bareilles (including her new single “Brave”) and tour openers Tegan and Sara.” “These are the biggest venues we’ve done by far. During the past two years of ‘Some Nights,’ so much has changed and grown, and we’ve been playing catch-up almost. The band was always bigger than where we were playing. When we were in the clubs they were selling out and we should’ve been in theaters, then when we were in theaters we should’ve been in bigger rooms. I feel like this is the first tour ever where we’re right where we should be, and we’re ready to be there.”
fun. currently has shows booked until early October, with July and August festival dates in Japan, South Korea, Belgium and the U.K. The group is currently working a fourth single from “Some Nights,” “Why Am I the One,” and Antonoff says it will be the last, though the group “might continue to make videos for stuff.”