Sometimes the road to a hit single starts with a drink to calm the nerves. A year ago Nate Ruess, the frontman of the pop-rock trio Fun., was anxious about meeting Jeff Bhasker, the producer and hit maker behind artists including Kanye West and Beyoncé, so he arrived early at the bar in the Bowery Hotel on the Lower East Side “and had a little to drink just to make sure I was loosened up.”
Some Nights Lyrics: Some nights, I stay up cashing in my bad luck / Some nights, I call it a draw / Some nights, I wish that my lips could build a castle / Some nights, I wish they'd just fall off.
Mr. Bhasker, who had just finished a long day in the studio with Beyoncé, had already canceled two meetings with Mr. Ruess. He said he had decided to give Mr. Ruess, a 30-year-old songwriter from Phoenix, just 10 minutes.
But the two started talking about music, and Mr. Bhasker became intrigued by Mr. Ruess’s desire to merge hip-hop beats and electronic effects with his theatrical pop-rock, reminiscent of 1970s bands like Queen and Electric Light Orchestra. Mr. Bhasker invited Mr. Ruess to his room to hear some Beyoncé tracks he had been working on. Slightly tipsy and feeling inspired, Mr. Ruess belted out the chorus for “We Are Young,” an unfinished song that had been rattling around his head.
“I was kind of blown away,” Mr. Bhasker recalled. “He sings me the song, and I immediately booked a studio for the next day.”
The song they recorded that week eventually became a breakout hit that topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart this week and has sold more than 1.2 million digital copies. It anchors Fun.’s second album, “Some Nights,” which made its debut last week at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart and remains at No. 12 this week, having sold 95,000 copies.
Continue reading the main storyThose numbers represent a remarkable success for this New York-based indie group; its first album, “Aim and Ignite” (Nettwerk, 2009), has sold only 75,000 copies and has never climbed above No. 71 on the album chart. The spike in popularity is even more rare for an alternative rock outfit: It has been more than a decade since a rock band had a song enter the pop chart in the top spot. (Nickelback did it in December 2001 with “How You Remind Me.”) Billboard put Fun. (yes, it’s spelled with a period) on its cover this week.
The song has also been gaining airplay on independent stations in recent weeks. “It doesn’t sound like anything else on the radio — it’s fresh,” said Bruce Warren, the assistant station manager for WXPN (88.5 FM) in Philadelphia. “At the same time, though, it has almost immediate familiarity. Obviously the harmonies bring to mind a band like Queen, so there’s a touch point for older listeners.”
The success of “We Are Young,” which features Janelle Monáe as a guest vocalist, owes something to a couple of marketing coups for its record label, Fueled by Ramen. Last year the producers of Fox’s “Glee” decided to cover the song, even though it had not yet been released, and the show generally avoids songs by new bands before they become famous, Tracey Raftery, a “Glee” spokeswoman, said. Then Chevrolet used it in a commercial shown during the Super Bowl, and the single soared, selling 301,000 copies last week alone.
Mr. Ruess has a knack for writing grandiose pop tunes with complex structures, soaring hooks and pensive verses. During a creative dry spell in late 2010, he began to pester the head of his label, John Janick, about working with Mr. Bhasker. He had become fascinated with Mr. Bhasker’s experimental hip-hop tracks on Drake’s “Thank Me Later” and Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.”
“I started falling in love with the Drake album and the Kanye album, and I thought, that’s really theatrical, and it’s hip-hop music, and I make really theatrical music,” Mr. Ruess said. “Why can’t I add a hip-hop element?” He said his idea was “to take that ’70s songwriting style but modernize it a little bit more.”
Musically, Mr. Bhasker pushed Mr. Ruess and his band mates — the guitarist Jack Antonoff and the keyboardist Andrew Dost — to use a more lush sonic palette with heavier rhythmic underpinnings than they had on their previous album, which was produced by Steven McDonald.
Mr. Bhasker layered Mr. Ruess’s crystalline tenor upon itself like “a Freddie Mercury choir,” in Mr. Bhasker’s words, and sometimes altered the singer’s voice with Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction device, to give it a robotic sound. Several tracks feature the ominously low synthesizer parts Mr. Bhasker is known for.
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Unlike the group’s previous album, this one has drum tracks that are completely synthetic, but rich, propulsive and booming, with very few cymbals, echoing Peter Gabriel’s work. Mr. Bhasker mixed in odd strains of exotic instruments on some tracks, like Irish drums and whistles on the lilting “Carry On.”
Mr. Ruess’s lyrics give the album a troubling and introspective edge. “We Are Young” starts out with a confused, fumbling apology in a bar — a young man trying to atone to someone for a mysterious past offense — before breaking into an anthemic chorus about being young. Another song, “It Gets Better,” relates an unromantic scene in which a girl loses her virginity.
The title track expresses the existential angst of a young man a long way from home and includes lines like:
My heart is breaking for my sister and the con that she called love
and when I look into my nephew’s eyes
Man, you wouldn’t believe the most amazing things that can come from
Some terrible nights
“He can tackle these really dark subjects and put this pop melody to it,” Mr. Bhasker said.
Mr. Ruess said he moved to New York and formed the trio in 2008 after the breakup of his Phoenix-based band, the Format. He recruited Mr. Antonoff, who had been a guitarist with Steel Train, and, Mr. Dost, who played keyboards for Anathallo. They had all had a modicum of success in the indie-pop world but never broke into the ranks of the big-earning acts. Fun. is a second-chance band, Mr. Ruess said, and the members never expected it to be a commercial success.
Mr. Ruess, who lists Fleetwood Mac and Van Morrison among his favorites, said he did not want to revive the ’70s pop-rock sound so much as reinvent it.
“I remember George Harrison once said E.L.O. is what the Beatles would have sounded like if they had kept going,” he said, referring to Electric Light Orchestra. “I think that ’70s classic music — if it had continued to go — that this is what it would sound like.”
Correction: March 13, 2012 An article on Saturday about the band Fun. included several errors.
Its first album, “Aim and Ignite,” was produced by Steven McDonald, not by the band. A lyric from the song “Some Nights” includes the phrase “some terrible nights,” not “some terrible lies.” The call letters of a radio station in Philadelphia where Bruce Warren, who commented on the song, is the assistant station manager are WXPN, not WPXN. And because of an editing error, the article misidentified the station’s frequency. It is 88.5 FM, not 104.9.