Blogocentric Formulations

Imagine Dragons

Written in reponse to "Note: 48-HOUR CHALLENGE : Media Prompt Deadl..."

                             

Imagine Dragons feels like the latest popular band that people love to hate, in good(?) company with the likes of Coldplay, Maroon 5, and Nickelback. They are all incredibly popular bands and yet evoke a huge backlash for some reason. Personally, I think all of these bands are okay; there are some songs I really like and others that I'm not too wild about. And of course some that have been so overplayed that I used to like them and don't anymore. When a band has as many hits over as short a period of time as these guys do, I suppose it's inevitable that a certain subset of the population will either tire of them or resent the amount of attention they're getting.

Case in point, USA Today featured an article just yesterday by Maeve McDermott entitled, "I hated Imagine Dragons -- until their new album changed my mind," which starts with this amazing opening paragraph:

It happened slowly, Imagine Dragons’ transition from “the annoying band in all the movie trailers” to “the slightly-less-annoying band whose song I won’t change on the radio” to “the band whose album I may listen to, voluntarily.”

I think I'm somewhere between "annoying band from movie trailers" and "song I won't change on the radio" depending on which song we're talking about. "Believer" isn't anywhere near the top of my favorite songs by Imagine Dragons and definitely falls into that "annoying song that's overplayed" category. My current favorites are "Friction" (featured in the Mission: Impossible Fallout trailer), "Demons," "It's Time," and "Levitate" (the last one was featured in Passengers a couple years back). What Imagine Dragons is great for, however, is inspiring cover versions by really talented artists. Where their stuff tends to be a little manufactured, there have been some excellent adaptations of their songs.

Here's Lindsey Stirling and Pentatonix doing "Radioactive":

And here's Lulu Antariksa doing "It's Time":

And here's "Demons" by Kina Grannis and Tyler Ward:

While I may not be Imagine Dragons' biggest fan and have no intention of doing anything other than purchasing the occasional song on iTunes (or just listening to it on Amazon Music), I do appreciate how much they inspire all of these other artists to take their popular songs and do variants of them that really feature some amazing voices and musical talents. And seeing as how Imagine Dragons seems to manage to put out a new album every couple of years, there are probably going to be a fair number of new covers for the foreseeable future.