Foster The People

Mark Foster didn’t show up at The Church, his old friend and collaborator Paul Epworth’s studio in North London, expecting to dive full force into a new Foster the People album. He arrived without any expectations at all, just excited to be traveling internationally for the first time in a couple years, and eager to reconnect with Epworth after almost a decade. He didn’t realize at the time that Paradise State of Mind was about to be born, its title track written and recorded hours after he set foot in the door. It was spring of 2022, and Foster had accompanied his partner on a work trip to the U.K. He knew he’d be there a couple months, and he was happy to have no real plans. It had been five years since Sacred Hearts Club, the band’s previous album, and so many intense things had happened in the world at large, and in Foster’s world in particular, that he hadn’t really felt ready to jump back into the fray of public life. Musical ideas had visited him, but none of them felt inviting. “I thought long and hard about what I wanted to make,” he says. “I almost made a punk record, and just went straight at everything. But I kept pausing because the energy didn’t feel quite right, and it wasn’t making me feel any better. I started thinking, ‘How can I make a record that is healing for me, and maybe for people who listen to it, too?’” The trip to the U.K. brought a fresh perspective, and a chance to look at that creative puzzle in the company of trusted collaborators. And The Church itself felt like a welcoming nest – this beautiful, historic structure that had been converted from a proper house of worship to a more metaphorical one in 1980 by Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, and which had previously hosted recordings by Bob Dylan and Radiohead and Adele. Foster entered the studio with nothing and started building from the ground up, that very first day. He grabbed a bass and started to lay down a groove, Epworth jumped on the drums, and singer-songwriter Jack Peñate, who had also stopped by that day, joined them on guitar, adding some of his signature strumming to “Paradise State of Mind.” And suddenly, there it was: a new beginning. “It was such a cathartic relief when that song came together,” Foster says. “That one day cracked open a lot. I can hear it in the vocal when I listen to it now – the isolation I had been feeling, and how much I needed to break out of my own head.” The lyrics flowed out of him: “Just need to stop trying to work out why something feels good and let it all in.” That’s exactly what he did, over the course of the next eighteen months and a couple trips back and forth between The Church and the legendary East West Studios in Los Angeles, where he recorded and produced Paradise State of Mind. The core musical ideas for Paradise State of Mind had actually been percolating in Foster for a few years. Listening purely for pleasure, he had been gravitating towards albums from the late Seventies and early Eighties, and the genre-bending innovation of artists like Nile Rogers and Chic, Prince, Talking Heads, the Tom Tom Club, and producers such as Parliament-Funkadelic’s Bernie Worrell and disco pioneer Giorgio Moroder. “It was such a beautiful moment in time, when these different styles – disco, funk, punk, gospel, jazz – were all cross-referencing each other,” says Foster. “I wanted to dive into that and figure out what they were doing – the gospel and jazz phrasings mixed with Motown-inspired vocals, funk mixed with the emergence of the synthesizer, early drum machines mixed with live percussion, the orchestration pulling from swing, big band and classical. It was such a perfect vehicle for creating something joyous that had layers of musical depth and subtext. I was also thinking about how that era has social parallels to the time that we're in now, with the giant recession in the Seventies, the political turmoil post-Vietnam, and other major tensions. But then you see these expressions of joy happening through music, and I started thinking about joy as an act of defiance.” After that first day at The Church, Foster set up shop there for the next two months, building tracks on his own with engineer Riley MacIntyre, in the smaller studio, and then bringing them to Epworth for feedback before returning to his creative cave. Epworth had produced songs for Foster the People’s 2011 debut album Torches and their 2014 follow-up, Supermodel, making him the ideal sounding board for Paradise State of Mind, where Foster fully stepped into the producer role himself for the first time. As he regained trust in his instincts, Foster connected with an incredible wellspring of music and his best, boldest writing yet – from the jubilant, dancefloor bound title track to the cosmically catchy lead single “Lost In Space” to the retro-futuristic R&B of “Let Go,” to the dark disco drama of “Glitchzig,” which comes on like a cross between Outkast, Kraftwerk and the Bee Gees. In order to get the sound he imagined for Paradise State of Mind – one with the warmth and authenticity of music made by humans – Foster knew he wanted to stick to analog recording for as much of it as possible, and to include live orchestration throughout the album. Following the first interlude at The Church, he came back to LA and continued working on the album at East West Studios for two months. To Foster’s delight, he secured Studio Three, the room where the Beach Boys had recorded their brilliant Pet Sounds LP. “The Beach Boys have been my favorite band since I was a kid,” says Foster, “and I'd never worked in that room before. Looking at the original floors, you can see all the scratches of where the Wrecking Crew dragged their gear. You could just picture Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine doing their thing. So, it was really special to be there.” After another trip back to London to work with Epworth, Foster returned to East West again, this time setting up shop in “the big room,” Studio One, where Frank Sinatra recorded some of his major hits. There, he tracked a double quartet of live strings, which can be heard on more than half of the album. As detail-oriented as he was, Foster was also mindful not to obsess over the trees at the expense of the forest. “I didn’t want to overcook anything,” he says. “One of the best things about that dance and funk music from the late Seventies is there’s a rawness and swing to it. It was played well, but it wasn’t overly edited.” He applied the same rawness and honesty to the songs’ lyrics. “I think the trickiest part about this record was trying to be authentic about what had been going on with me, without writing something super dark and without glossing over it, either,” he says. “Because, to me, it was really important that hope remain at the core of this whole thing. People need hope. I need hope. And when I think about what hope is – it’s having the courage to walk towards something that you think can be better, while fully acknowledging the darkness and reality around you.” He continues, “That was the goal, walking into this album, which was actually really tricky – to make something that rang true to what was on my mind, but that had this much groove and that would be fun to dance to. You know, to me, they're like Trojan Horses, the message is hiding in the melody.” Foster explains that when he came off the road following Sacred Hearts Club, he realized he needed to take a step back and get healthy, and part of that was getting sober. “I had to really let things get rearranged, and put some old things down, in order for this to be sustainable,” he says. “I got everything I thought I wanted, and then I realized that that wasn't it, and that the simpler things that I didn't know I needed were right in front of me, and didn't cost a thing. I think stripping away all of the things I was chasing made me open enough to be able to receive some of the deeper things that were more spiritual, that are kind of effervescent and intangible, and really gentle, like the wind. You have to be quiet enough to be able to hear it. I need that connection, more than anything, to be able to walk through the rest of the noise. I feel like now, coming back out into the world, I'm open to whatever this experience is, in a new way.”