{"id":3622,"date":"2021-05-30T17:00:33","date_gmt":"2021-05-30T22:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/read.streamapse.com\/?p=3622"},"modified":"2026-04-13T16:59:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T21:59:25","slug":"twenty-one-pilots-i-wanted-to-provide-people-with-that-opportunity-to-escape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=3622","title":{"rendered":"Twenty One Pilots – I Wanted To Provide People With That Opportunity To Escape"},"content":{"rendered":"

The title of twenty one pilots\u2019 sixth LP is a play on \u201cscaled back and isolated,\u201d words that summed up frontman Tyler Joseph\u2019s world as he wrote and recorded in his Ohio basement during lockdown. \u201cIt just felt very confined,\u201d he tells Apple Music. \u201cI had this little dragon figurine that I kept on my desk during the entirety of the writing process, and I just knew that when you focus on even the tiniest little detail in your room\u2014or wherever you’re confined\u2014that thing can come to life and fly around your room. That dragon on the cover really represents what can be accomplished with that sort of imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

And as has been the case for everyone, the challenges of pandemic living had a noticeable impact on Joseph\u2019s work\u2014but maybe not quite how you\u2019d expect. \u201cI was actively trying to push against that natural inclination to come in darker,\u201d he says. \u201cThe idea of adding to the pressure of what’s going on in our world, it didn’t feel right.\u201d Instead, Scaled and Icy finds Joseph pushing his genre-defying alt-pop into brighter, more hopeful territory. \u201cIt felt like I needed to go the opposite direction,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted to escape a little bit more and provide people with that opportunity to escape too.\u201d Here, Joseph takes us inside some of the album\u2019s key tracks.<\/p>\n

\"\"
#StreamScaledAndIcy<\/strong><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cGood Day\u201d
\n\u201cI designed it to feel like something was coming to life. If you really listen to the song, it’s so upbeat and shiny on the surface, and then lyrically I’m talking about trying to cope with the idea of if I were to ever lose my family and friends. I would probably go through a period in the mourning process where my reaction to anyone asking me how I’m doing would be like, \u2018I’m fine. Everything’s great, I don’t even know why you’re asking me.\u2019 Making them feel stupid, like, \u2018Why would you even ask me that?\u2019 That’s what this song is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cChoker\u201d
\n\u201cI come from a basketball background, and choking is: You\u2019re standing at the free-throw line and you need to make one of those two, and if you miss them both, you choked. I think for me, with certain friendships and relationships, there were moments that I could have risen to the occasion and I didn’t, and that’s something that I’ll have to live with. I think that everyone has those moments where they feel like they choked. The song is trying to work that through and trying to figure out if that\u2019s someone that I was born to be. Can I shape this? Is this something I can turn around?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShy Away\u201d
\n\u201cMy brother said, \u2018Hey, I just want you to show me, from the beginning, how you start a record. How do you start writing a song?\u2019 So I had him over at the studio. A lot of times when I sit down to start, I’ll tap into my phone and I\u2019ll have a bunch of voice memos of ideas that have hit me randomly. Sometimes it\u2019s just a single word, sometimes it’s a melody. I started to build up the track from there, and it turned out that it was talking about wanting him to pursue his dream of chasing music. Most of my songs are very inward, but this is one of the few that I feel like the message is outward, coming from me. The only thing harder than figuring out what your purpose and identity is, is watching someone that you love trying to figure out theirs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSaturday\u201d
\n\u201cWhen you strip away what day of the week it is, you lose your rhythm. You lose your sense of what is up and what is down. And that’s a lesson that [drummer] Josh [Dun] and I learned pretty quickly on tour, because a Friday night and a Monday night could feel the exact same, whether or not we had a show. When the pandemic happened, everything’s shut down, everyone was starting to learn that same lesson, where the days of the week lose their meaning, and it was messing with people’s reference of time. You feel like you’re swirling and your feet aren’t planted. The song is really, I’m talking to my wife, hoping that she sticks with me, even though I’m working through this, even though I’m kind of tumbling into nothingness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo Chances\u201d
\n\u201cI recruited my brother and a few of his friends to come over and record gang vocals. You have this microphone in the middle of the room and I have everyone in headphones and I’m kind of directing them in what to say and what to yell. That was the first time I’d ever really produced a room full of people. I was thinking of athletics and college sports specifically, where there’s overwhelmingly this hometown crowd, and how intimidating that can be and powerful that is in the face of opposition. I definitely was writing from that\u2014I felt the energy of a gymnasium or a stadium and was wanting to capture that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRedecorate\u201d
\n\u201cI had a friend of mine whose son passed away and they would keep his room the same way that he had left it. I remember thinking how crazy powerful a story that is, and how it makes me wonder, like, \u2018What will people do with my stuff?\u2019 It can actually bring you back down to earth, make sure that you don’t make any horrible decisions. I’m realizing now how difficult it is to talk about, but this song is really important to me. I love the messaging of it, and I hope that our fans hear what it is I’m trying to say in it. Because it is a bit delicate, but it’s one of my favorite tracks and it’s pretty powerful if you let it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The title of twenty one pilots\u2019 sixth LP is a play on \u201cscaled back and isolated,\u201d words that summed up frontman Tyler Joseph\u2019s world as he wrote and recorded in his Ohio basement during lockdown. \u201cIt just felt very confined,\u201d he tells Apple Music. \u201cI had this little dragon figurine that I kept on my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3623,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[533,534,206,535,536,537,538],"class_list":["post-3622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","tag-escape","tag-opportunity","tag-people","tag-pilots","tag-provide","tag-twenty","tag-wanted"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3622"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6569,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622\/revisions\/6569"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}