Young the Giant has finally found their home. After more than 15 years together, the rock band ended their long-lasting, existential search for their place in the world with the release of their sixth LP, Victory Garden, in May.
“We’re all sons of immigrants. We all are relatively new, to this country and it’s this kind of existential search to find belonging and to find home,” frontman Sameer Gadhia told Lisa Konicki during an appearance on American Songwriter’s Off the Record podcast. “I feel like with this new record, Victory Garden, I think we’ve kind of established and found our home. Home is just where we are all the time. It can be within you.”
In terms of sound, it’s no surprise that, with inspirations from Radiohead to Beck, Young the Giant has always valued reinvention.
“We’ve always looked up to artists who have managed to evolve and change,” Gadhia said. “It’s been an amazing privilege that we’ve been able to do that throughout the course of our career.”
The band discovered Victory Garden over the course of four writing retreats, where “the songs just showed up,” guitarist Jacob Tilley said. Young the Giant found that to be the case during the very first writing retreat, where “the floodgates really opened” up.
Young the Giant on Victory Garden Stand Outs
It was during that Idyllwild getaway that the band wrote “Bitter Fruit” and “Ships Passing,” two tracks that appear on the 11-song LP.
The former track is one that showcases “this pure experience of life,” according to Gadhia.
“Life is not sweet, right? Life has its punches, and it’s an acquired taste to live life well,” he said. “I think as adults, we lose sight and touch of those things that inspire us and thrill us… Those verses really kind of come from that adult lens of numbness, and the choruses are like these extreme, violent confessions of just wanting to feel something or feel anything again.”
At another session, “Different Kind of Love” came to be.
“That song, in particular, really moved the concept of this radical empathy for oneself,” Gadhia said. “… I think that we’ve all felt being alienated, feeling alone, feeling separated from the world that you’re a part of. [You have] to try and hold on, knowing that those things pass, that they move and change. You can feel those feelings come through you, but don’t let go of that hope that it could be something else.”
According to guitarist Eric Cannata, it’s the song that “encapsulated the overall message and the overall feeling [of the album] in the best way.”
“There are certain songs that have a certain type of feeling to them, and that particular song really connected with the band,” he said on the podcast. “It felt like a really good representation of the album as a whole.”
Young the Giant on the Making of Victory Garden
Cannata went on to note that, in listening to the LP, he and his bandmates—which also includes bassist Payam Doostzadeh and drummer Francois Comtois—displayed “the most collective energy we’ve had in a long time.”
That shows up in the theme of the album too, as victory gardens are a wartime government initiative where people were encouraged to grow food for their communities. What resulted, Cannata said, was “was a very communal thing where people were helping their neighbors.”
“I think us coming together and reconnecting as brothers, and really feeling like we needed empathy for ourselves, each other, our families, and the loved ones in our lives, really inspired a record of that kind of communal idea of having empathy,” he said. “It was an incredible joy to make the record.”
When fans listen to the album, Cannata said he hopes they focus on “finding that empathy, and finding peace within yourself to be able to be there for others and be there for yourself.”
“It was us having to move through those emotions and feel that cathartic feeling at the end of going through them that we came out the other side in a way that feels like we can come out and perform these songs and feel not healed at all, but feel like we moved through some emotions,” he said. “I think that’s what people are resonating with and hearing.”
Young the Giant on Their “High Octane” Tour
Resonating they are. Young the Giant is currently touring in support of the album, and Cannata said he’s been feeling “the best response I’ve ever felt energetically” on the road.
“I feel there’s a real connective tissue,” he said. “People are singing along. We’re playing a good bulk of the record, and I feel like the best response I’ve ever seen for a Young the Giant record.”
Tilley agreed, and credited the excellent response, in part, to the focus he and his bandmates put on “leveling up and just taking our musicianship and our fans to new places.”
“We worked really diligently on providing a really good foundation to tell this record story, but while serving our fans the whole catalog essentially,” he said of the band’s “high octane” show, during which people have typically been putting their phones away.
“I think it’s a testament to where the show is at that people are very present and with us. Young the Giant shows have always been amazing, but I really have felt this resonance in the audience I’ve never felt before,” Tilley added. “I know it’s because we’re putting in a lot of hard work on this one.”
The post ‘Off The Record’ Episode 16: Young the Garden on How They Finally Found Their Home on Latest LP, ‘Victory Garden’ appeared first on American Songwriter.