I'm ready. I I the first time we heard ourselves on the radio was actually on a plane to London. We were going to open for uh this hip-hop artist named Hoodie Allen. We were about going to do a bunch of dates in London and Manchester and uh we were watching the Serious radio screens in front of us and we were all sitting in separate seats. So as soon as our song came on, everyone was sleeping except us. We all like started like clapping and we were like motioning to each other across the plane and I actually woke up the guy next to me. I was like, "Oh my God, that's me." And he couldn't have been more upset that I did that. So, great day. I won't forget you, but I may forget your name. My lady. I know what you're thinking when the bass stops ringing. Can you tell me when your soul will start? Are you ready for tonight? Setting it on fire and we'll dance until we're dumb in the dark. Hey, I'm Ryan and I do a lot of the writing and production and play keys, ukulele and sing. Hey, what's up? I'm Adam and I play the bass and I sing. What's up? I'm Jack. I play guitar and sing lead in AJR. Come on, let's go on stage. Actually, Ryan and I were together in a college class, in a psychology class at Columbia and we were tweeting to a bunch of different celebrities, actually, he was tweeting while I was taking notes, a video of our last single, I'm Ready. Sia uh saw the tweet, which was crazy. Retweeted it, uh DM'd us, invited us to brunch. We went down to her hotel for brunch and we met Sia. Uh, the most important piece of advice anyone has given us is actually be ourselves, which is very corny sounding but it was actually true. Uh, when we first started out, we wanted to kind of conform to a lot of different sounds and people told us to do that, but when we started meeting with people who we actually stuck with, they said, "No, have your own sound, have your own look." And that's kind of been our motto ever since. So something that's very important to us is diversity and variety and I think with I'm Ready, we really tried to combine a lot of different styles within one song. Are you ready? I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready. All right, here's a tour of our stage. We have a Jack station over here, which is the sample machine. I use it to trigger like our song, I'm Ready, has the "I'm ready, I'm ready" and so I use it to trigger that and a bunch of other weird sounds that we incorporate within our music. Oh, Jack's dance moves on stage are uh absolutely ridiculous. He's so in his own element just listening to the music. It's not as much dancing as just going crazy like Mick Jagger has that kind of like just craziness.

Can we see an example, Jack?

Oh, there's no music playing, so

So we could definitely see an example. Let's go for it.

Ah. Like that. So a little taste for you.

Now, those were some great dance moves.

Over here we have Ryan's World, where uh

It's not quite set up yet, but

No, it's almost there. There's a computer here and there's a whole bunch of machinery and then my ukulele. Ukulele, we run some tracks off of here. Yeah, before we go on stage, a big kind of ritual for us is listening to music. We have this specific song uh by Macklemore called Jimmy Iovine, and it's this huge pump up song. So that's definitely our favorite thing to do before we go on. Well, we grew up listening to a lot of the music of the 50s and 60s, so Simon & Garfunkel, Beach Boys, we really fell in love with that stuff. Lessons in life. Are giving you any life lessons? None. Not to care what people think of you. Oh yeah. Growing up in a tiny apartment in New York City, all three of us shared a room for like 12 years. We had a triple bunk bed that was like a bed and then one on top of it and then one went across. So we spent so much time together, and that's how we developed our our interest in music and listening to different kinds of music but and for our music, it helped a lot. We have a lot of songs that are influenced by the city, by we have a song called Alice by the Hudson. We all really have the same vision and growing up as brothers in the same house. We don't really fight on projects. We don't really fight when working on music and deciding what's going on. It's we're very much on the same page because we grew up in the same kind of learning experience. What's up, guys? We're AJR, and thank you so much for coming to our backstage diary at Young Hollywood. Woo! Yeah!