The High Expectation of Music

Owl City’s Adam Young hopes to strike gold again with ‘Fireflies’ followup

“Fireflies” wasn’t just a hit song for Adam Young, the singer/songwriter who records under the group name Owl City. It was a phenomenon, going No. 1 in 24 countries and topping three major charts in the United States alone.

To this day, Young, who has just released a new Owl City CD, “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” remains a bit mystified about why “Fireflies” struck such a chord. To him, it wasn’t even a standout song as he was recording his major label debut CD, “Ocean Eyes.”

“It really kind of does continue to escape me, more or less,” Young said, when asked if he understands the appeal of the song now. “Looking back, that song was really just one of the songs on the record, and it never really stood out to me or to any of the record label folks or anything like that. It was just a song that kind of wrote itself in a way, and it was just kind of one of a crowd of those songs on the record. Thus, when it started to gain momentum and really started to connect with people, it was that much more surprising, to me most of all.”

Of course, Young has heard what fans have had to say about “Fireflies,” and that has helped him gain some insight into the popularity of the song, even if he doesn’t boast about the song or his success.

“I think more than anything, a lot of folks say that they feel kind of connected to a certain sense of innocence with the song,” Young said. “I think there’s a kind of pure innocence to it, and I think that sort of fueled the fire and really made people feel uplifted or inspired or kind of just optimistic about things.”

Analysis aside, one thing can’t be debated. The success of “Fireflies” and the “Ocean Eyes” CD as a whole threw Young into the public eye in a big way and created pressures he couldn’t have anticipated.

It all happened fast for Young, who started Owl City in 2007 as a bedroom recording project in the basement of his parents’ home in the small Minnesota town of Owatonna – while still working a day job loading delivery trucks at a Coca-Cola warehouse.

He began uploading songs early on to internet sites such as Myspace, and they caught on. He racked up 5 million page views and 150,000 song downloads, at one point selling about 2,000 downloaded tracks a week.

That caught the attention of Universal Republic Records, which signed Young and helped shepherd the very green musician through his transition to being a touring major label artist.

Now comes the new challenge of following up his hit album.

In doing the self-released EP, “Of June” (2007) and full-length CD “Maybe I’m Dreaming” (2008) that preceded his move to Universal Republic – as well as “Ocean Eyes” – Young had enjoyed the luxury of creating music pretty much in a bubble. So how did he deal with the reality that he was now a hit-making artist facing genuine expectations from the public? Young pretended none of the whirlwind had happened.

“A lot of folks are saying ‘Can you do it again,’ more or less,” Young said. “And so ultimately I tried to really shut those thoughts out and really imagine myself as if I was writing the first record I’d ever done and really just kind of blocking out the first three records I’d released and sitting down and saying what do I want to say with this new album, as if the others didn’t exist? I wanted to make sure that I was writing from the heart, more or less.”

The music Young created for “All Things Bright and Beautiful” will sound familiar to fans of “Ocean Eyes.”

The melodies to songs like “The Real World,” “Honey and the Bee” and “Hospital Flowers” are still as sweet as pop gets. But overall, Young creates a bigger and more dynamic sound this time out. “Deer in the Headlights” is a track that features an ear-grabbing buzzing synth line and a heavier rhythm track, while “Angels,” packs a punch by shifting from understated verses into a full-bodied section driven by fairly beefy beats.

Now Young and his touring band are hitting the road, while he waits to see if “All Things Bright and Beautiful” comes even close to matching the million-selling success of “Ocean Eyes.” Young is feeling good about how the new songs are translating to live band performances.

“The way this music is put together, by nature, has so much to do with, obviously on the record, a lot of different tracks,” Young said. “So a lot of it has to do with divvying out different string parts or different guitar parts or different synth parts, or getting our drummer to re-create some of these sampled drum loops or what have you. It’s kind of a puzzle I have to put together. But as it stands right now, things are looking pretty good.”