The story of Imagine Dragons

A Mormon kid from Las Vegas

Daniel Coulter Reynolds was born in Las Vegas on the fourteenth of July 1987, the seventh of nine children, eight boys and one girl. His father Ronald was a lawyer, and the family were devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Dan grew up on his dad's records, Paul Simon, Harry Nilsson, Cat Stevens and Billy Joel, and he took ten years of piano lessons. He also learned drums so he could keep up with his older brothers' bands. From the sixth grade on he was writing songs on the family computer, singing over his own beatboxing. He called it his diary. Every heartbreak became a poem and then a song, hundreds of them through middle school and high school.[1] [2] [3]

Dan says he was the rebellious one in a very orthodox family, and his faith never came easily. As a teenager he recorded songs off Mix 94.1 in Las Vegas onto cassette mixtapes, soaking up Nineties alternative radio, Tupac, Biggie, Outkast and Nirvana. He was an Eagle Scout by 2005. Then came the first real blow. At eighteen he was accepted at Brigham Young University, like his six older brothers before him. A week before he was due to go, he told a church bishop that he had slept with his girlfriend of four years. He lost his place. He later said it was the first time he spiralled into depression, and the first time he felt something about the church's teaching was not right.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Instead of BYU, Dan went to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Then, like his brothers, he served a two year Mormon mission, in his case in Nebraska around Omaha. There he met gangs, addicts and broken families, a world far from his sheltered upbringing. Missionaries were allowed to call home only twice a year, on Mother's Day and at Christmas, and he paid his own way from money saved since childhood. He later described those two years as lonely, and said he got lost knocking on doors telling people a truth he was not sure of himself. After the mission he was allowed back into BYU in Provo, Utah, where he studied communications, marketing and music.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At BYU in 2008 Dan met a drummer called Andrew Tolman, and the two started a band. They pulled in Andrew Beck on guitar, Dave Lemke on bass and Aurora Florence on piano, and uploaded demos to MySpace that same year. They called themselves Imagine Dragons. The band won BYU's Battle of the Bands, and Dan left college to chase music full time. He had been wary of that step. A future bandmate, Wayne Sermon, had once warned him not to do music because he wanted to, but only if he had to. At BYU, Dan decided he could not do anything else. By the end of 2008, though, Beck and Florence had already left, and the band that would become famous was still some way off.[1] [2] [3]

Six hours a night on the Strip

In 2009 Andrew Tolman brought in an old high school friend from Utah, Wayne Sermon. Wayne was born in American Fork, Utah, in June 1984, raised a Mormon, and had just graduated from Boston's Berklee College of Music, where he had studied guitar performance and composition. Tolman's wife Brittany joined on keyboards and backing vocals. When Dave Lemke left, Wayne called a Berklee friend, bassist Ben McKee from Forestville, California. Ben was one semester from graduating, and he dropped out to join. The band had built a following in Provo, but they now moved to Dan's hometown of Las Vegas. Wayne remembered their very first show there, at a place called Sinister Rock Bar, after a week of eight hour rehearsals.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Las Vegas was a hard town for a band playing original songs. Venues wanted cover bands for the tourists. So Imagine Dragons became a lounge act, playing six hour sets on the Strip at places like Mandalay Bay, Caesars Palace and O'Sheas, where Wayne said the stage was about five feet square. They played half covers and half originals, slipping their own songs in and watching which ones made passers by stop. Dan joked that they dressed terribly because nobody told them what to wear. They lived together in a rented band house, ate ramen and Del Taco, and slept on friends' couches. They played weddings, birthday parties and casinos, and Dan later said their rule was simply never to say no.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band put a whiteboard on the wall of their apartment, and each member wrote down five favourite albums that everyone had to study. The list took in Arcade Fire, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Harry Nilsson, Tupac, Paul Simon and Muse. They released a self titled EP in 2009, Hell and Silence in March 2010 and It's Time in March 2011, recorded at Battle Born Studios in Las Vegas. Local papers named them best local indie band and their record the best CD of 2011. Back in 2009 their big break had come at the Bite of Las Vegas festival, when Train's singer Pat Monahan fell ill and the young band were pushed onto the headline slot in front of a crowd of many thousands.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Then came an email from Alex da Kid, the London producer behind Eminem and Rihanna's Love the Way You Lie and B.o.B's Airplanes. Dan said it simply read that he dug their music and wanted to write. Alex had just launched his own label, Kidinakorner, as an imprint of Interscope. He gave the band's rhythmic songs the huge bass and drums they could not get on their own. Even before that, Dan's brother Mac Reynolds, a lawyer at a Los Angeles entertainment firm, had quit his job to become their manager. Another brother, Robert, already managed the Killers. In the summer of 2011 the Tolmans left, and in November 2011 Imagine Dragons signed with Interscope.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The last piece fell into place in August 2011. Daniel Platzman, a drummer from Atlanta, had studied film scoring at Berklee and played in jazz orchestras there alongside Wayne and Ben. He had started on violin at the age of four, and his heroes ran from Phil Collins to Bill Bruford. He joined just after graduating. A keyboard player, Theresa Flaminio, came in at the same time but left around the time of the label deal, leaving a four piece. Dan married Aja Volkman, singer of the Los Angeles band Nico Vega, in March 2011. They had met the year before when Dan's band shared a bill with hers in Las Vegas, and they briefly recorded together as a duo called Egyptian.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Night Visions and the record breaking Radioactive

With Alex da Kid, the band recorded at Westlake Studios in West Hollywood. Their first major label release was an EP, Continued Silence, on Valentine's Day 2012, and it reached number forty in America. The lead single was It's Time, a song Dan wrote after dropping out of college at a low point in his life. It had been on YouTube since 2010, and Andrew and Brittany Tolman still play on it. After the television show Glee covered it in the autumn of 2012, It's Time climbed to number fifteen on the Billboard Hot 100. When the band first heard themselves on the radio, driving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, they raced to stay in range of the station.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The debut album Night Visions came out on the fourth of September 2012. Parts of it were finished at Studio X inside the Palms casino in Las Vegas. It entered the Billboard 200 at number two, the highest debut for a rock album in six years, and in Britain it was kept from the top only by Justin Timberlake. Critics were mixed, but the public were not. Night Visions was the fourth best selling album in America in 2013 and stayed in the top ten across three calendar years. Dan's daughter Arrow was born in August 2012, just as the album arrived. He later estimated he spent two weeks at home in the whole of the following year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The song that changed everything was Radioactive, the opening track of Night Visions. It mixed electronic rock with a dubstep throb, and Dan said it was about an awakening, waking up one day and seeing life in a new way. The video starred Alexandra Daddario and Lou Diamond Phillips in an underground puppet fighting ring. Radioactive entered the Hot 100 at number ninety six in September 2012 and simply refused to leave. Heavy use in adverts and trailers carried it slowly upward, and in mid 2013 it set a record for the slowest climb ever into the top five. It peaked at number three. It spent twenty three weeks at number one on the rock chart.[1] [2]

Radioactive stayed on the Hot 100 for eighty seven weeks, a record that stood until the Weeknd's Blinding Lights passed it in August 2021. It became the best selling rock song in American digital history and was eventually certified Diamond. At the Grammys on the twenty sixth of January 2014 the band won Best Rock Performance and were nominated for Record of the Year. Beforehand Dan told Rolling Stone they had no chance. On the night they performed Radioactive mashed up with Kendrick Lamar's m.A.A.d City, pounding giant drums in clouds of red smoke while Taylor Swift danced in the front row. A remix with a new Kendrick verse was released the next day.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The third single, Demons, went to number six and stayed on the chart for sixty one weeks. Its video, filmed at a Las Vegas show in February 2013, ends with a dedication to Tyler Robinson. Tyler was a Utah teenager with a rare cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma. At a show at the Velour club in Provo, the band dedicated It's Time to him, and his brother lifted him onto his shoulders while Dan reached out and sang with him. Tyler died in March 2013, aged seventeen. With his family the band set up the Tyler Robinson Foundation to help families facing childhood cancer. Its 2018 gala alone raised over two million dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Smoke and Mirrors and the cost of success

By late 2013 the band had played well over three hundred shows in eighteen months. Dan was working out on a cross trainer the moment he came off stage, and he told London's Evening Standard he had been diagnosed with stress related high blood pressure and woke up with his jaw locked. He was also injecting himself every fortnight for ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory disease of the spine and joints that had flared around the time the band began. He said that for the first time he understood why so many musicians turn to drugs. At that point the band still presented themselves as clean living, and Dan said they avoided swearing in their songs.[1] [2] [3]

Between albums the band wrote Warriors for the 2014 League of Legends World Championship. League was their favourite game at the time, and Warriors was the first song made for the tournament, starting a yearly tradition. They also gave Battle Cry to Transformers: Age of Extinction. Meanwhile they piled up about fifty demos on the road and recorded the second album in their own home studio in Las Vegas. Daniel Platzman used the freedom to experiment with timpani, trash can drums and a huge nine piece kit, and he said Phil Collins was the album's patron saint. Dan promised a more stripped back, rock driven record than Night Visions.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They promoted it with treasure hunts. Fans in Las Vegas found hidden puzzle pieces of the cover art, and numbers on the finished cover were coordinates to prizes buried in the Nevada desert, including a signed guitar and a pass to every show on the tour. During the Grammys in February 2015 they played Shots live on Fremont Street in the first ever live commercial, for Target. Smoke and Mirrors came out on the seventeenth of February 2015 and went straight to number one in America, Canada and Britain. In the UK it was the last album to reach number one on sales alone, because streaming joined the chart the following week. Reviews were again mixed.[1] [2] [3]

The Smoke and Mirrors tour ran from spring 2015 into February 2016. On stage in Leeds in 2015, Dan told the crowd publicly that he had ankylosing spondylitis. In 2016 he went further, saying he had been heavily depressed for the previous two years and saw a therapist, and that many of the Night Visions songs had come out of depression. He had also lived with ulcerative colitis since he was twenty one. After the November 2015 Paris attacks the band released a cover of I Love You All the Time by Eagles of Death Metal to support the victims. Then, after six years without a break, they forced themselves to stop for a year.[1] [2] [3]

The year off was not silent. The band gave songs to the films Me Before You and Suicide Squad, and recorded Levitate for Passengers. In 2016 Dan started his own label, Night Street Records, as an imprint of Interscope. His first signing was the rapper K.Flay. Years later, in 2021, he signed a young singer called Benson Boone, whose Beautiful Things became the biggest selling single in the world in 2024. Dan had already brokered a record deal for the band X Ambassadors back in 2013, after discovering them unsigned. On the thirteenth of September 2016 a photo of Wayne in the studio signalled that work on the third album had begun.[1] [2] [3]

Believer, Thunder and a public reckoning

For Evolve the band worked for the first time with the Swedish duo Mattman and Robin and the songwriter Justin Tranter. Dan said they helped put the band back on track. Believer came quickly, written around the 2016 presidential election, and Dan said it was about turning pain into strength, from anxiety and depression to his spinal disease. It came out on the first of February 2017, and days later it soundtracked a Nintendo Switch advert during the Super Bowl. In the video Dan boxes the action star Dolph Lundgren, who accidentally caught him with a right hand and nearly knocked him out. Believer reached number four and spent twenty nine weeks on top of the rock chart.[1] [2] [3]

Thunder followed in April 2017, with a black and white video shot around the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and it also reached number four. Whatever It Takes came next. Evolve arrived on the twenty third of June 2017 and reached number two, and critics were harsh, with the Guardian calling it lifeless. But the songs were everywhere. Believer had been placed in more than thirty adverts and trailers by the end of 2017, Thunder in nineteen, for brands like Jeep and Microsoft. In February 2018 the band asked the Conservative Political Action Conference to stop using Whatever It Takes. That spring they became the first act ever to hold the top four places on Billboard's alternative digital song sales chart.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Dan was also facing his own church. He had watched gay friends hide their lives while growing up, and a friend from his mission, Tyler Glenn of Neon Trees, had come out publicly. Dan learned that suicide was the leading cause of death among Utah teenagers and decided to act. In August 2017 he staged the first LoveLoud festival in Orem, Utah, close to BYU, raising money for the Trevor Project, GLAAD and other groups. A documentary about his journey, Believer, premiered at Sundance in January 2018 and aired on HBO that June, with music by Hans Zimmer. It won a GLAAD Media Award. His strictly Mormon family were not happy, though his parents came to the premiere.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In April 2018, after seven years of marriage and with twin daughters born in March 2017, Dan announced that he and Aja Volkman were divorcing. Months later he revealed they had never gone through with it. That news came with Bad Liar in November 2018, a song the couple wrote together in the middle of the split. It later emerged that its cover picture, a work by the digital artist Beeple, had already been used on a single by a Norwegian band called Maraton. The second LoveLoud, in July 2018 at a Salt Lake City stadium, drew about thirty five thousand people, and Utah's governor declared it LoveLoud Day. In interviews Dan said his advocacy brought death threats, one serious enough to involve the FBI.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The fourth album, Origins, arrived on the ninth of November 2018, just months after the Evolve tour ended. Dan called it a sister album to Evolve. Natural became their fifth number one on the rock chart, and Zero played over the end credits of Disney's Ralph Breaks the Internet. Origins reached number two, but the backlash was growing. After their halftime show at the college football championship in January 2019, Spin ran a piece asking whether they were the worst band ever. Slipknot's Corey Taylor said they had replaced Nickelback as rock's most hated band. Dan answered on Instagram that years of such attacks had added to his depression. In December 2019, with a newborn son, he stepped away to be a father.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Mercury, grief and sobriety

The band returned in March 2021 with the double single Follow You and Cutthroat, and signed Rick Rubin as executive producer. Dan said Rubin pushed him to stop hiding behind metaphor, reminding him that his fans had grown up with him and wanted honesty. The album was named Mercury after the word mercurial, a nod to Dan's mental health and to the band's refusal to settle on one genre. They knew early on that it would be two records. Act One dealt with death and the shock that follows it. Act Two was about what comes after grief. Monday, a playful love song to Aja, grew up at Wayne's house before coming to life at Rubin's Shangri La studio.[1] [2] [3]

The darkness on Mercury was real. Wrecked was written after the death from cancer of Dan's sister in law, Alisha Durtschi Reynolds. Dan was at her bedside with his brother when she died, and he said it was the first time he had seen death that close. No longer a man of fervent faith, he said, he could only hope she heard the song somewhere. He also said he had watched friends die of drug addiction, and he spoke openly about his own journey into sobriety. By 2021 he was describing himself as non Mormon, the only one of his huge family to leave the church, and he said he would not raise his children religious.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Mercury Act One came out on the third of September 2021 and reached number nine. Then came a song that went round the world. For Netflix's Arcane, an animated series based on League of Legends, the band recorded Enemy with the Atlanta rapper JID. It was released on the twenty eighth of October 2021 as the show's opening theme. JID said his opening lines began as a song he started with Mac Miller, who told him they belonged on this one. Enemy reached number five in America, their highest placing since Thunder, and spent nine weeks at the top of the alternative chart. The band re released their early EPs on streaming services that same month.[1] [2] [3]

The Mercury tour began in Miami in February 2022. When Russia invaded Ukraine that month, the band cancelled dates in both countries, and that summer they became ambassadors for Ukraine's United24 fundraising platform, helping raise over six million dollars for ambulances. Bones, the lead single from Act Two, arrived in March, and the complete double album Mercury Acts One and Two followed on the first of July 2022. In September they filmed a full stadium show at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, later released on Hulu. On the sixteenth of September 2022 Dan announced that he and Aja had separated again. In October the South American leg was postponed a day before it began because of Dan's health.[1] [2] [3]

In March 2023 Daniel Platzman announced he would miss the South American leg to focus on his health. The band's original drummer, Andrew Tolman, who had already been working with them as a drum tech, took his place for the rest of the year. That April Aja Volkman filed for divorce in Los Angeles, and it was finalised in March 2024. In May 2023 the band released a video for Crushed, filmed in Ukraine, telling the true story of a fourteen year old boy called Sasha who survived the occupation of his village. In August 2023 they played Tel Aviv despite calls to boycott Israel. That year a show in Baku, Azerbaijan, also drew sharp criticism from System of a Down's Serj Tankian.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Loom and life as a trio

For the sixth album the band arrived at the studio with around one hundred and fifty demos written on the Mercury tour. Their producers Mattman and Robin suggested throwing them all away and starting from scratch. Over six months they wrote about thirty new songs, the least they had ever made for an album, and for the first time one production team handled every track. Dan said the two quiet Swedes were hard to read at first, but that they never changed his lyrics. The album was named Loom after a video game that Dan says introduced him to music at the age of six, and he liked that the word hints both at something looming and at weaving.[1] [2] [3]

Loom was released on the twenty eighth of June 2024 with just nine songs, their shortest album. Dan said it was built from years of journal entries written through his divorce, a move away from Las Vegas, and a new relationship with the actress Minka Kelly. She can be heard clapping on Nice to Meet You, and the cheers on that track are the real sound of the band celebrating the moment the album was finished. Loom got their best reviews yet but peaked only at number twenty two, their first album to miss the top ten. Asked about Platzman, Dan told Rolling Stone he could not discuss it and that he does not play on the record.[1] [2] [3]

On the twenty first of August 2024 Daniel Platzman confirmed he was leaving Imagine Dragons after more than a decade, saying he wanted to focus on film scoring and composing, the subject he had studied at Berklee. Imagine Dragons were now officially a trio of Dan, Wayne and Ben. Andrew Tolman, who had left before the band became famous, was back behind the kit on the Loom World Tour, which began in the summer of 2024. Dan pointed out that Andrew lives next door to Wayne and that they have been best friends since before the band existed. The tour ended its American run with a four night residency at the Hollywood Bowl in October 2024.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Hollywood Bowl shows, played with a film orchestra, became a concert film shown in cinemas in March 2025. A month earlier, for the tenth anniversary of Smoke and Mirrors, the band released Reflections, fourteen unreleased demos from that era. Looking back on the band's first whirlwind, Dan told Rolling Stone that the pace of success had broken him, but that years of practising six hours a day and playing empty rooms had kept their egos in check. His health, he said, was manageable, with his colitis in long remission and his spinal disease controlled by diet, daily exercise and occasional injections. As of 2026 the band remains Dan Reynolds, Wayne Sermon and Ben McKee.[1] [2] [3]

Loved, hated and streamed by billions

Few bands of their era divided opinion so sharply. On Metacritic, their first four albums scored between the forties and sixties, and Loom was the first to earn a favourable score. Critics attacked the repetitive hooks, the reverb and the genre hopping. Matty Healy of the 1975 dismissed Radioactive as nothingness in 2017, and Mark Foster of Foster the People joked that his band gave its rejected songs to Imagine Dragons, later apologising. Dan has always answered that the band is simply genre less. He told Rolling Stone that Imagine Dragons are pure Vegas, dramatic and in your face, and that he would rather people love or hate them than feel indifferent.[1] [2] [3]

The numbers are hard to argue with. Imagine Dragons were the most streamed group on Spotify in 2018, and they were the first rock act to have four songs pass a billion streams each, Radioactive, Demons, Believer and Thunder. According to Billboard, Believer, Thunder and Radioactive were the three best performing rock songs of the 2010s. Billboard also named them its breakthrough band of 2013 and its biggest band of 2017. They have won a Grammy, three American Music Awards and nine Billboard Music Awards. Supporters credit them with keeping big guitar bands in the charts during a decade when rock almost disappeared from mainstream radio.[1] [2]

Part of the story is family. Dan's brother Mac has managed the band since before they were signed, and he once said his job was to keep them united and on course. Dan and Wayne have both left the church they were raised in, yet Dan says he remains close to his parents and his forty plus Mormon nieces and nephews. Through LoveLoud, the Tyler Robinson Foundation and their work for Ukraine, the band has tied its music to causes. Dan puts their staying power down to honesty. He says every song is still just a journal entry set to a melody, and that parents who saw them years ago now bring their children to the shows.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Imagine Dragons

Dan Reynolds and Aja Volkman. They met in 2010 when Dan's band played on the same Las Vegas bill as Aja's group Nico Vega, and married in March 2011. They had four children. They announced a divorce in 2018, reconciled and co-wrote Bad Liar, then separated for good in 2022. Aja filed in April 2023 and the divorce was finalised in March 2024. Dan still calls her his best friend.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dan Reynolds and Minka Kelly. Dan has been in a relationship with the actress Minka Kelly since 2022. They were introduced by a friend and talked by phone while she worked in Britain, swapping his new songs and her book. She claps on Nice to Meet You from Loom, a song Dan says is about her friends doubting a rock star boyfriend. He taught her piano pieces for the series Ransom Canyon.[1] [2]

Dan Reynolds and Wayne Sermon. The singer and the guitarist are the band's creative core. Wayne once warned Dan only to make music if he had to, advice Dan says shaped his choice. Both were raised Mormon and both have since left the church. Wayne, known as Wing after a manager's name call was misheard in a loud room, lives with chronic insomnia and often records in the middle of the night.[1] [2] [3]

Imagine Dragons and Alex da Kid. The London producer Alexander Grant, once a footballer with Bristol City, signed them to his Interscope imprint Kidinakorner in 2011 and co-produced Radioactive and Demons. Dan said Alex gave them the huge bass and cannon like drums they could not achieve alone. He executive produced Evolve, and their albums still come out on Kidinakorner.[1] [2] [3]

Dan Reynolds and Mac Reynolds. Dan's older brother Mac was a lawyer at a Los Angeles entertainment firm when he took on the unsigned band, then quit law to manage them. He described his job as keeping the band united. Another brother, Robert, managed the Killers. In 2022 Mac teased Bones by sending fans a thirteen second audio file on Discord.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Imagine Dragons and Tyler Robinson. Tyler was a Utah teenager with a rare cancer who adopted It's Time as his personal fight song. At the Velour in Provo the band dedicated it to him as his brother held him up and Dan sang with him. After Tyler died in March 2013 at seventeen, the band and his family created the Tyler Robinson Foundation.[1] [2] [3]

Imagine Dragons and Kendrick Lamar. The two Interscope acts shared one of the most talked about Grammy moments of 2014, fusing Radioactive with m.A.A.d City amid giant drums and red smoke. A remix with a new Kendrick verse followed the next day, and they performed it together on Saturday Night Live on the first of February 2014.[1] [2] [3]

Imagine Dragons and Rick Rubin. The famed producer executive produced both halves of Mercury. Dan credits him with pushing him to drop metaphor and write about uncomfortable truths, and says Rubin told him fans had grown up with him and expected honesty. Dan says he still talks to Rubin almost every day, even though Loom was made without him.[1] [2] [3]

Imagine Dragons and Mattman and Robin. The Swedish producers Mattias Larsson and Robin Fredriksson first worked with the band on Believer and went on to Natural, Enemy and Bones. For Loom they took on the whole album alone, persuading the band to scrap their demos. Dan says they rarely speak, never touch his lyrics, and became almost members of the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Daniel Platzman and Andrew Tolman. Andrew co-founded the band and drummed on its early EPs and on It's Time, then left in 2011 and was replaced by Daniel. Twelve years later the roles reversed. When Daniel stepped away in 2023 to focus on his health, Andrew, who had been helping as a drum tech, took over and became the touring drummer.[1] [2] [3]

Dan Reynolds and Tyler Glenn. Tyler Glenn of Neon Trees served a Mormon mission alongside Dan. When Tyler came out publicly as gay, Dan says it made him ask what he was doing with his own platform. The two brainstormed together, and the result was the LoveLoud festival. Tyler appears in the documentary Believer and performed at LoveLoud in 2018.[1] [2] [3]

Imagine Dragons and Serj Tankian. System of a Down's singer, whose family roots are Armenian, attacked the band in 2023 for playing Baku, saying it would whitewash Azerbaijan's human rights abuses, and later said he had zero respect for them. Dan told Rolling Stone he had no regrets and would not deprive fans because of the acts of their leaders.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Imagine Dragons

• Dan Reynolds says his musical awakening came at six from Loom, a computer game, and the band later named its sixth album after it. Dan cites the game Loom as his introduction to music, and the 2024 album took its name, which he also liked for its hint of something looming.[1] [2]
• Imagine Dragons' early Las Vegas gigs included six hour lounge sets at O'Sheas casino on a stage Wayne Sermon said was about five feet square. The band spent years playing half covers, half originals on the Strip. Wayne told Las Vegas Weekly the tiny O'Sheas stage was unbelievable, and their first ever Vegas show was at Sinister Rock Bar.[1] [2]
• Dan's brother Robert Reynolds managed the Killers, while another brother, Mac, manages Imagine Dragons. Mac quit his job at a Los Angeles law firm to manage the band. Dan told the Evening Standard that having brothers in charge meant someone would always tell him when he sucked.[1] [2]
• Wayne Sermon's nickname Wing came from a manager introducing him at a loud early show. The manager called out Wayne, but the room was so noisy that the crowd heard Wing. The name stuck and appears in interviews and even in drum magazines.[1] [2]
• The band once found a church band covering Radioactive next door to a Florida club, snuck in and taught them how to play it. Wayne Sermon told the story to the Killers guitarist Dave Keuning in a 2013 Las Vegas Weekly conversation, describing it as a weird experience with covers.[1]
• Imagine Dragons played It's Time on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to an empty studio during Hurricane Sandy. On the twenty ninth of October 2012 the storm kept the audience away, so only Fallon's cast and crew watched the performance.[1] [2]
• At the first Game Awards in 2014, the band played It's Time with Nintendo composer Koji Kondo on piano. The acoustic performance closed the ceremony on the fifth of December 2014 and was woven into a medley of music from The Legend of Zelda.[1]
• The video for On Top of the World parodies the conspiracy theory that Stanley Kubrick faked the Moon landing. The band play a Beatles style group posing as astronauts. It was filmed in Provo with local cameos, including the actor Jon Heder, and Aja Volkman plays Dan's wife.[1]
• Radioactive set a record for the slowest climb ever into the Billboard top five. It debuted at number ninety six in September 2012 and only reached number four in mid 2013, beating a record set just three weeks earlier by Florida Georgia Line.[1]
• Radioactive still holds the record for most consecutive weeks on the Hot 100, eighty five. The Weeknd's Blinding Lights beat its total of eighty seven weeks in 2021, but no song has matched its unbroken run.[1] [2]
• Taylor Swift brought Dan Reynolds on stage in Detroit in 2015 to sing Radioactive, which she called one of her favourite songs. It was a surprise guest spot on the 1989 World Tour at Ford Field on the thirtieth of May 2015. Swift called the moment a rage fest on Instagram.[1]
• Before the 2014 Grammys, Dan told Rolling Stone that voters would not even know what Imagine Dragons looked like. He was sure they would lose, pointing to Blurred Lines and Lorde. They went on to win Best Rock Performance for Radioactive.[1]
• Smoke and Mirrors was the last album to reach number one in Britain on pure sales. Streaming was added to the UK albums chart the following week, so the band's February 2015 chart topper marked the end of an era.[1] [2]
• For Smoke and Mirrors, the band hid prizes in the Nevada desert, and the album cover gave the coordinates. The finds included a signed guitar, drumsticks and a pass to every show of the world tour. Fans also assembled the cover from hidden puzzle pieces.[1]
• Imagine Dragons' Shots was the first ever live commercial broadcast during the Grammys. Target paid for the performance on Fremont Street in Las Vegas in February 2015, directed by Jonas Akerlund. Billboard estimated the airtime at eight million dollars.[1]
• Warriors was the first song ever written for the League of Legends World Championship. It launched a yearly tradition in 2014. The band wrote it because League was their favourite game, and it was also the official theme of the 2015 Women's World Cup.[1]
• Dolph Lundgren had never appeared in a music video before Believer, and he nearly knocked Dan Reynolds out. Dan took boxing lessons for a month. He said Lundgren caught him with a straight right to the jaw by accident. It became the most watched rock video of the 2010s in America.[1]
• The Evolve artwork was made by the digital artist Beeple. Beeple's art also caused a mix up. The Bad Liar cover used an image of his that a Norwegian band, Maraton, had already put on a single months earlier.[1] [2]
• In 2018 Imagine Dragons became co-owners of an esports team, Rogue. It was one more link to gaming for a band that had written songs for League of Legends and later Starfield.[1]
• Dan Reynolds won a bronze medal at a Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournament at UCLA in July 2023. He competed in the white belt division of a Jiu-Jitsu World League event and, as of 2024, holds a blue belt.[1]
• As a Mormon missionary, Dan could phone home only twice a year, on Mother's Day and at Christmas. He told Rolling Stone he funded the two years himself with about ten thousand dollars saved from childhood jobs, and would not urge doubtful teens to go.[1]
• Ben McKee pledged in 2021 to give away a thousand dollars a day for a whole year. Causes included UndocuFund for Latino families, a food bank, a bird rescue centre and a mentoring group for LGBTQ youth.[1]
• Daniel Platzman composed the score for a season of Africa Investigates on Al Jazeera English. He studied film scoring at Berklee, won its Michael Rendish award, and later said he left the band to focus on film composing.[1] [2]
• Dan Reynolds received the Songwriters Hall of Fame's Hal David Starlight Award in 2014. He received it just two years after Night Visions came out, and three years later he was given the Trevor Project's Trevor Hero Award.[1]
• Dan Reynolds discovered X Ambassadors unsigned and brokered their record deal. In 2013 he helped sign them to Kidinakorner and Interscope and co-wrote songs on their debut album VHS, which went platinum.[1]
• Dan's label Night Street Records signed Benson Boone, whose Beautiful Things became 2024's biggest selling single worldwide. Dan founded Night Street as an Interscope imprint in 2016. His first signing was the rapper K.Flay.[1]
• Andrew Tolman returned to Imagine Dragons as a drum tech before taking over as touring drummer. Tolman left in 2011. Dan says he had been helping behind the scenes before stepping in for Daniel Platzman in 2023, and lives next door to Wayne.[1] [2]
• Monday is the first Imagine Dragons song since Night Visions with a writing credit for original drummer Andrew Tolman. The playful 2021 song, written for Aja Volkman, took shape at Wayne Sermon's house and Rick Rubin's Shangri La studio.[1] [2]
• Enemy's JID verse began as a song he started with Mac Miller. JID said Mac Miller told him the lines would fit better on another track. They ended up opening his verse on the Arcane theme.[1]
• The Utah Jazz regularly play Whatever It Takes before home games. The song was also the theme for a WWE pay per view and appeared in Madden NFL 18. The band asked CPAC to stop using it in 2018.[1]
• Utah's governor declared the twenty eighth of July 2018 LoveLoud Day. The announcement came during the second LoveLoud festival in Salt Lake City, which drew about thirty five thousand people and raised about a million dollars.[1]
• In their early days the band opened for Weezer, one of Dan's favourite childhood bands. Dan mentioned it to KSL around the time they signed to Interscope. Years later he said Weezer's Blue Album was the model for the tight, no filler sound of Loom.[1] [2]
• Minka Kelly's handclaps are on Nice to Meet You, and the cheering is the real studio celebration of finishing Loom. A room microphone had been left on when the band cheered the album's completion, and they kept the recording.[1]
• Dan kept the first mumbled take for the song Kid without re-singing it. He improvised the opening words over a drum loop, the band laughed at how it sounded, and they kept the exact take.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.