The story of Twenty One Pilots

Two kids from Columbus

Twenty One Pilots is a story that begins and keeps coming back to one city, Columbus, Ohio. Tyler Joseph was born there on the first of December 1988, the oldest of four children. His mother Kelly was a maths teacher and later a high school basketball coach, and his father Chris, whose own father was Lebanese, coached and served as a principal at Worthington Christian High School. Tyler was taught at home by his mother for several years before going back to school around seventh grade. His great love back then was not music at all. It was basketball, and he played point guard for Worthington Christian, where the varsity team finished second in the Ohio Division Four state tournament in 2008.[1] [2] [3]

His mother was a demanding coach. Tyler later told Rolling Stone that when he said he wanted to be a basketball player, she had him take five hundred shots in the backyard every day, and lay-ups did not count. If he had not finished by dinner, he did not eat. He was good enough to be offered a scholarship at Otterbein University, near Columbus. Then, on a rainy afternoon as a teenager, he found an unused Christmas present in a closet. It was a keyboard. He pressed play on its demo, heard Pachelbel's Canon, and was hooked. He taught himself by picking out chords to songs on the radio, from the Beatles to Celine Dion, and he turned the scholarship down.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Josh Dun was born in Columbus on the eighteenth of June 1988. His mother Laura was a hospice social worker and his father Bill a physical therapy assistant. The Dun house was even stricter than the Josephs'. Most rock and hip hop records were banned, and so were video games. Josh hid Green Day's Dookie under his bed, and when his parents found his albums they handed him Christian alternatives like Relient K instead. For a while the only films allowed were edited versions from a company that cut out swearing, sex and violence. Josh admitted he was an angry teenager. He told Rolling Stone he yelled at his parents constantly, that he was always in detention, and that at fourteen they nearly sent him to military school.[1] [2] [3]

What calmed things down was drums. Josh had started on trumpet at school, then taught himself to drum by playing along to records on an electronic kit at the local Guitar Center, where he stuck to the electronic kits because he was self-conscious about how loud and how bad he sounded. Around the age of thirteen he drew up a contract with his parents to earn a real drum set. He promised to keep his grade point average above two point seven, keep a good attitude and keep inappropriate CDs out of the house. The kit went in the basement. Josh skipped college, worked in the drum department at Guitar Center for about three years, and in 2010 filled in as touring drummer for the rock band House of Heroes. By then he was planning to move to Nashville.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The trio in the basement

Around 2008, Tyler recorded a set of songs in his parents' basement in his senior year of high school and put six of them online as a solo release called No Phun Intended. His school friend Nick Thomas, who had played basketball alongside him, played guitar on some of them. At Ohio State University, Tyler met a drummer from Texas named Chris Salih at a party. Chris had built a recording studio in his house, and he wanted to start a band with this intense young songwriter. Just before their first show, Tyler invited Nick to play bass. In 2009 the three moved into a house together and made their first album in the basement, programming most of the drum parts because there was no money for anything better.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band's name came from a play Tyler was reading at Ohio State, Arthur Miller's All My Sons from 1947. In it, a businessman discovers that the aircraft parts his factory makes are faulty, but ships them anyway rather than lose money, and twenty one pilots die in the Second World War. Tyler took it as a lesson that the right choice usually takes more work and more time. The band still uses it as a private code. If one of them thinks they are taking the easy route, they warn the other that they are sending out the parts. Before settling on the name, they had toyed with Bicycle Thief and with Chill Coat, a pun on the surname of the band's lawyer, Jeff Chilcoat.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The self titled debut album came out on the twenty ninth of December 2009, and the trio started touring Ohio. Their marketing was about as grassroots as it gets. Tyler's mother would stand outside Ohio State handing out tickets, telling passing students to come and see her son play. They entered battle of the bands contests at local rock rooms like the Alrosa Villa and the Basement. Because they played on metal, hardcore, hip hop and electronic bills, often to people who had come for someone else, they started using costumes and stunts to grab attention. That mix of audiences also pushed Tyler to fold all of those styles into his songs, which is where the band's famously hard to label sound comes from.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2011 the original line up came apart, on friendly terms. Chris Salih left on the eighth of May, saying it was purely a financial decision. Years later he explained on a podcast that his car needed repairs, his father had suggested it was time for a full time job, and that carrying on while his parents helped with his student loans would have felt like a slap in the face to them. Nick Thomas left on the third of June to focus on his studies. Neither walked away completely. Chris remained a friend, and Tyler stood in his wedding party in 2015. Nick later moved back into the house in Columbus and spent years running the band's merchandise on tour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Regional at best

Chris Salih had one last gift for the band. Before leaving, he pointed Tyler toward his friend and Guitar Center colleague Josh Dun, who had already fallen for the band from the audience in 2010. Josh later said he loved everything about that show except that he was not up there playing. He and Tyler met a few days afterwards and stayed up all night talking about faith, doubt, music and what they wanted to do with their lives. Josh said he left thinking this was someone he wanted to be friends with for the rest of his life. So when the drum stool opened up in May 2011, Josh dropped his Nashville plans. Within weeks, Twenty One Pilots was a duo.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Their second album, Regional at Best, came out on the eighth of July 2011, launched with a free show at New Albany High School. Tyler made it almost entirely by himself in his home studio, and later called it a glorified mixtape, something to sell at the merch table to buy gas for the next gig. The title was a joke about their fame. At home they were growing fast, but at their first show outside Ohio, in June 2011, twelve people turned up. Rather than beg people to come, they played lots of small, unannounced gigs, then went all out for occasional big hometown shows. Cleveland's main paper later reported that Tyler was close to giving up music around this time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The plan worked. In November 2011 the duo sold out the Newport Music Hall, a venue of about seventeen hundred people where national touring bands struggled to fill the room. According to the New York Times, representatives of twelve record labels came to see it. An Atlantic Records executive later said that in Columbus they were the Beatles, but outside the city limits nobody knew who they were. The band turned down several offers with signing bonuses. In April 2012 they announced, on stage in Columbus, that they had signed with Fueled by Ramen, the Atlantic label that had launched Fall Out Boy and Paramore. The two of them kept acting as their own road crew long after that.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Their label debut, Vessel, arrived on the eighth of January 2013, produced in Los Angeles by Greg Wells. Five songs from Regional at Best were re-recorded for it, including Car Radio, Holding On to You and Trees, and the older album was pulled from sale. Tyler admitted he did not handle outside help well, describing himself as a young kid who did not want anyone touching his music. On the cover are the two men's paternal grandfathers. Josh's grandfather, Earl Dun, died on the first of March 2013, just two months after the album came out. Vessel entered the Billboard 200 at number fifty eight, but it kept selling for years and eventually every one of its songs was certified gold.[1] [2] [3]

They spent 2013 and 2014 on the road. They opened arena shows for Fall Out Boy alongside Panic at the Disco, then toured with Paramore. Tyler later said Pete Wentz taught them something that surprised him. They had come from local bills where you hoped every other band would flop so you could steal the night. Wentz told them to look at the crowd and go and make fans, and Tyler said he had never realised people could love more than one band. On the twenty sixth of April 2013, at a hometown show, Tyler and Josh were tattooed on stage with a matching X for their Columbus fans. In 2014 they played Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, then launched their first headlining tour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Blurryface takes over

The fourth album was written largely on tour, with a portable studio on the road, and Tyler thought of each new song as a slot in the live set. He recorded with several producers, among them Ricky Reed and Mike Elizondo, who had worked with Dr. Dre and Eminem. The album was built around a character called Blurryface, who Tyler said stood for all the things he and the people around him felt insecure about. On stage he painted his neck and hands black to become that character, to show insecurity's grip. Fans crashed the band's website trying to preorder it. Blurryface was released on the seventeenth of May 2015, two days early, and went straight to number one in America.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Stressed Out was the song that changed everything, and it did so slowly. Released in April 2015, it is a wistful, half rapped look back at childhood and the pressure of growing up. Mike Elizondo at first told Tyler he did not understand one of its key lines and suggested changing it, until Tyler explained the whole Blurryface concept. The video was shot at Josh's childhood home, with both families dressed in black. Fans tracked the house down, and Josh's parents had to cancel their landline to stop the calls. The song crawled up the Hot 100 for months, broke the top ten in January 2016 and peaked at number two, stuck behind Justin Bieber's Love Yourself.[1] [2] [3]

Stressed Out went on to spend a record twenty three weeks at the top of Billboard's Hot Rock Songs chart, and it became the first rock song to pass a billion streams on Spotify. Its success dragged the whole album up with it. Album tracks like Lane Boy, a jab at people who told the band to pick one style and stay in their lane, and the reggae tinged Ride became hits in their own right. The band's view of all this was surprisingly cautious. Tyler told Billboard in 2016 that he expected the radio success to go away, and that what mattered was using the moment to reach people who would stick around for the long haul.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In June 2016 came Heathens, written for the Suicide Squad film. Josh said they approached it like any song for their own album, and the film makers asked for no changes. It leaked online on the fifteenth of June, so it was rushed out the next day. Atlantic Records was furious. It went to a New York court to force Reddit to reveal who had posted it, saying only a handful of people, the band, their manager, label staff and radio promoters, had access. The song itself became huge. It sat at number two on the Hot 100 for four straight weeks behind The Chainsmokers' Closer, and won the band an MTV award for Best Rock Video.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That summer the band made history. On the chart dated the tenth of September 2016, Heathens was at number four and Ride at number five. Twenty One Pilots became only the third rock act in the Hot 100's history to have two songs in the top five at once, after the Beatles and Elvis Presley, and the first in forty seven years. In 2018 Blurryface became the first album ever to have every one of its songs certified at least gold, and Vessel later matched it, making them the first act to do it with two albums. The Blurryface cycle alone covered two hundred and thirty six shows, from clubs to sold out arenas including two nights at Madison Square Garden.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Underwear at the Grammys, then silence

On the twelfth of February 2017, Twenty One Pilots won the Grammy for Best Pop Duo or Group Performance for Stressed Out. When their names were called, the two of them stood up and took their trousers off, then walked to the stage in their underwear. It looked like a stunt, but Tyler explained it on the spot. Years earlier, back in Columbus, they had been watching the Grammys at his rental house in their underwear, and had promised each other that if they ever won one, they would accept it just like this. He ended the speech by saying it showed that anyone, from anywhere, can do anything. Heathens had been nominated for three more Grammys that night.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The second Blurryface tour, the Emotional Roadshow, ran from May 2016 to June 2017, one hundred and twenty three shows, with the band Mutemath opening in America. Josh played drums on a platform held up by the crowd, and Tyler climbed scaffolding and vanished into the audience. In London, a whole tube station, Wood Green, was covered in fan art over more than one hundred advertising panels. The run ended in June 2017 with Tour De Columbus, five hometown shows that climbed from the small clubs they started in, like the Basement and the Newport, all the way up to Nationwide Arena and Value City Arena. It was a victory lap through their own history.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then they disappeared. On the sixth of July 2017, the band's social media showed an eye closing over lyrics from their older songs, and Twenty One Pilots went dark for a year, with no concerts and no posts. Tyler had told Alternative Press that after Blurryface he wanted to get back to the raw honesty of their very first album. Behind the scenes, he was alone in his basement studio in Columbus making the next record, while Josh was living in Los Angeles. At the 2017 Alternative Press awards, Josh collected the prize for Most Dedicated Fanbase by himself and apologised for Tyler's absence, dropping a cryptic line about Tyler severing ties with a place called Dema.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Trench and the city of Dema

In April 2018 fans found a hidden web address in an image on the band's online store. It led to a strange website full of letters from a character called Clancy, describing his attempts to escape a walled city called Dema. On the sixth of July, exactly a year after the eye had closed, fans got an email with an eye opening. Overnight, billboards with a new logo appeared in cities around the world, and on the eleventh of July the band released two songs, Jumpsuit and Nico and the Niners, and announced the album Trench. It came out on the fifth of October 2018, the first release on the revived Elektra label, and the start of a story that would run for seven more years.[1] [2] [3]

The world of Trench is dense. Dema is ruled by nine bishops, and the chief bishop, Nico, turns out to be Blurryface himself. A band of rebels called the Banditos wear yellow, a colour the bishops cannot see. Dema's name comes from the dakhma, the Zoroastrian Tower of Silence, where the dead were left for vultures. Tyler said the idea of a faith dying out because the vultures disappeared fascinated him. Underneath it all, Trench is an album about mental health, suicide and doubt. Tyler told the New York Times that making it almost destroyed him. At times he wanted to change his identity and pretend he did not have to follow up Blurryface. His confidence kept flipping between not good enough and the best in the world.[1] [2] [3]

Some of Trench's songs step outside the story. Legend is for Tyler's grandfather Bobby, the man on the right of the Vessel cover. Tyler began writing it as dementia took hold of him, and Bobby died on the seventeenth of March 2018, before he could hear it. Tyler told NME that near the end, his grandfather kept asking to hear one of Tyler's songs. His father had none in the car, so he flicked through the radio in desperation and landed on a Twenty One Pilots song. Neon Gravestones takes on the way culture can glamorise musicians who take their own lives. Tyler said he slaved over every pronoun, and wrote it as something he would want to hear when those thoughts come.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Trench debuted at number two in America, beaten only by the soundtrack to A Star Is Born, with the band's biggest sales week yet. The Bandito Tour that followed opened with Josh alone holding a torch and Tyler rising on top of a burning car, and used body doubles so a masked Tyler could seem to vanish and reappear across the arena. It grossed around forty nine million dollars. Not everyone loved the imagery. After a show in Belfast on the second of March 2019, the unionist politician Jim Allister called the burning car and balaclavas inappropriate, given Northern Ireland's history of masked paramilitary killers. Fans pushed back, arguing the band should not change the show for one stop.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In August 2019, Twenty One Pilots headlined the Reading and Leeds festivals in England, a show they had dreamed about since watching festival clips online in the early days of their friendship. To honour British music, they covered Oasis's Don't Look Back in Anger, and Josh called it one of his favourite moments of their career. Tyler said hearing the crowd sing it made his competitive streak itch, wondering why he could not write a song that good. At home, Columbus renamed Nationwide Boulevard as Twenty One Pilots Boulevard for two arena shows. And on the last day of 2019, Josh married the actor Debby Ryan in Austin, Texas. The Bandito Tour finished that December in Chicago.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Lockdown and Scaled and Icy

The pandemic scrapped the band's plans for a final lap of arenas and festivals. Instead, Tyler wrote Level of Concern at home, the first song he had ever written on electric guitar, and sent the files to Josh. It came out on the ninth of April 2020, a hopeful song about getting through the fear together, and part of the money went to Crew Nation, a fund for touring crews left without work. Its video pretended the two were mailing a flash drive back and forth, with their wives and Tyler's baby daughter Rosie joining in. A second, fan made video ran as an endless stream for one hundred and seventy eight days, and Guinness certified it as the longest music video ever.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That year also brought a misstep. In September 2020, with fans urging Tyler to speak up for Black Lives Matter, he posted photos of himself in white platform shoes with a joke about being asked to use his platforms. It landed badly, and he apologised quickly. In December, on a Twitch stream, he apologised again at more length, saying it was wrong, that he should not have done it, and that it had hurt people. He later told NME the band was still learning that at their size they were held to a higher standard. Josh has said publicly that he supported the movement, and Tyler has called racism evil.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Scaled and Icy came out on the twenty first of May 2021. Tyler recorded it in Columbus while Josh was two thousand miles away in Los Angeles, trading files online. The title plays on scaled back and isolated, and fans quickly noticed it is also an anagram of Clancy is dead. It is the brightest record they ever made, a deliberate escape from the bleak times, though Tyler said the lyrics still ask heavy questions. The lead single, Shy Away, began as a lesson for his younger brother on how to put a song together, and his baby daughter's coos are at the start. Tyler called Josh his centre of gravity, and said Josh had decided to move back to Ohio so they could live in the same town again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Having always said livestreamed gigs could never work, the band staged a huge one for the album's release at Value City Arena in Columbus, with a hundred and fifty crew and almost a year of planning. Its web page logged three point six million sessions, and they introduced a live band for the first time. The Takeover Tour followed, spending a week in each city and working up from clubs to arenas. They played a concert inside the video game Roblox, recorded MTV Unplugged, and mashed Heathens into the Stranger Things theme. In January 2023 a tenth anniversary stream for Vessel raised over forty seven thousand dollars for Make A Wish, and ended with Tyler playing a new song drowned out by drums on purpose.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Clancy, Breach and the end of the story

In February 2024, the covers of four of their albums suddenly appeared partly covered in red tape on streaming services, and fans started receiving mysterious letters. A video called I Am Clancy recapped the whole saga. The seventh album, Clancy, followed on the twenty fourth of May 2024, a week later than planned, because Tyler insisted on a music video for every song. Josh directed his first one, for Backslide. One song, Next Semester, is about a panic attack Tyler had as a college student. Clancy debuted at number three in America with the biggest sales week for any rock album that year, and reached number one in Australia, Germany and Scotland.[1] [2] [3]

The Clancy World Tour started in Denver in August 2024 and ran to the O2 in London in May 2025. Along the way the band recorded The Line for the second season of the Netflix series Arcane, and played it with an orchestra at The Game Awards. On the twentieth of February 2025 they played Mexico City's Estadio GNP to a sold out crowd of sixty five thousand, their biggest show yet, later released as the concert film More Than We Ever Imagined. During the tour a demo of an old Blurryface song, Doubt, went viral on TikTok, so they released it. And after a show in Manchester, fans rallied to track down a drum stolen from the band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The finale was called Breach. Announced on the twenty first of May 2025 with the words hello Clancy, hello Blurryface, let's finish this, it came out on the twelfth of September and closed the story begun ten years earlier. It is full of callbacks. The closing track, Intentions, is built on Truce, the last song on Vessel, played backwards, and another song reworks a demo from the Regional at Best era. On Drum Show, Josh sings lead for the first time, a verse about wanting to change. Breach went to number one in America with two hundred thousand units, the band's best week ever, and sold seventy two thousand vinyl copies, the biggest rock vinyl week since tracking began in 1991.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Life moved on off stage too. Tyler and his wife Jenna now have three children. Josh and Debby Ryan announced in September 2025 that they were expecting, and their daughter Felix was born that December. In November 2025 the duo played the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, covering Seven Nation Army in honour of the White Stripes, another Midwestern duo. In February 2026 they officially released Drag Path, a bonus song that went viral online, and by May it had given them their fourteenth number one on the Alternative Airplay chart, tying Linkin Park for the second most ever. Tyler also started a record label, Arro, with the band's longtime manager Chris Woltman.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

As of 2026, Twenty One Pilots are still just the two of them, still on Fueled by Ramen, and still rooted in Columbus. They spent the year headlining festivals across the Americas and Europe, released the Mexico City show as a live album in August, and scheduled a hometown concert at Ohio Stadium for October, with Death Cab for Cutie in support. Their legacy is odd and real. A duo with no full time guitarist became one of the biggest rock acts of their era. The fans call themselves the Skeleton Clique, decode every clue, and often hold up signs saying the band saved their lives. And from the days when five people were in the room, Tyler has closed shows by telling the crowd that they are Twenty One Pilots, and so are you.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Twenty One Pilots

Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun. They met in 2010 and talked through a whole night about faith and ambition, and Josh joined in 2011. Tyler writes and produces, while Josh drums, flips and engineers his own drum tracks. They got each other's names tattooed on stage in Milwaukee in 2015. Tyler has called Josh his centre of gravity, and in 2016 joked that Josh was already completing him. Josh finally sang lead on Drum Show in 2025.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Tyler Joseph and Jenna Joseph. Tyler met Jenna Black through a school friend, whose sister in law she was. They got engaged on the eighth of July 2014 and married on the twenty eighth of March 2015. Smithereens on Trench is a love song for her, and The Craving on Clancy has a version named after her. They have three children, Rosie, Junie and Tommy, and Rosie can be heard on the start of Shy Away.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Josh Dun and Debby Ryan. Josh dated the former Disney Channel star Debby Ryan from 2013 to 2014, and they later got back together. In April 2016 she was arrested for drunk driving after hitting another car, apologised publicly, and later pleaded no contest to reckless driving. The couple got engaged in December 2018, married in Austin on New Year's Eve 2019, and live in Columbus. Their daughter Felix was born in December 2025.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Tyler Joseph and Chris Salih. Chris Salih met Tyler at a party at Ohio State, saw his talent and suggested starting a band, recording the first album in his own home studio. He left in May 2011 for financial reasons, but first handed his place to his Guitar Center colleague Josh Dun. The friendship survived. Tyler was an attendant at Chris's wedding in 2015, and Chris has spoken warmly about the band's early days.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tyler Joseph and Nick Thomas. Nick Thomas and Tyler met through youth basketball in Columbus, played on the same high school team and once performed The Star Spangled Banner together at a game. Nick played guitar on Tyler's solo recordings and bass in the first line up. He left in June 2011 to study, but later moved back into the band house in Columbus and worked on the band's merchandise crew for years.[1] [2] [3]

Twenty One Pilots and Mark Eshleman. Mark Eshleman of Reel Bear Media has filmed the band since 2009, designed its logo and directed videos from Car Radio and Stressed Out to Drum Show. He admits he once asked Tyler whether it was worth filming a show nobody came to. That footage became the Ode to Sleep video. He also directed the 2026 concert film More Than We Ever Imagined.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Twenty One Pilots and Paul Meany. Paul Meany, frontman of Mutemath, first worked with the band when Mutemath opened the Emotional Roadshow tour and the two acts made the TOPxMM remix EP in 2016. He then co-wrote and co-produced much of Trench, and co-produced Level of Concern, Clancy and Breach. He played keyboards and served as musical director in their live band from 2021 to 2023. Apart from Tyler and Josh, he was the only person involved in writing Trench.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tyler Joseph and Mike Elizondo. Mike Elizondo, a Dr. Dre protege who co-wrote hits for Eminem and 50 Cent, produced Stressed Out and three other Blurryface songs. He at first questioned one of the song's key lines, then came round once Tyler explained the concept. He co-produced Heathens, played bass on Scaled and Icy, and co-produced two songs on Breach, with four members of the Elizondo family credited on backing vocals.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Twenty One Pilots and Pete Wentz. Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz took the young duo under his wing when they opened Fall Out Boy's 2013 arena tour alongside Panic at the Disco. Tyler said the band arrived treating other acts as rivals to beat, and Wentz taught them to be good brothers and go make fans instead. Tyler admitted he had never realised people could be fans of more than one band.[1] [2]

Tyler Joseph and Chris Woltman. Chris Woltman has managed Twenty One Pilots through their rise and is credited as executive producer on Trench, Scaled and Icy, Clancy and Breach. He described the 2021 livestream as a mix of live theatre and a band show. In 2025 he and Tyler co-founded an independent record label called Arro.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Twenty One Pilots

• The two old men on the Vessel cover are Tyler's and Josh's grandfathers. Josh's grandfather Earl Dun died on the first of March 2013, two months after Vessel came out. Tyler's grandfather Robert, known as Bobby, died in March 2018 and is remembered in the Trench song Legend.[1] [2] [3]
• As a boy, Tyler had to sink five hundred shots a day before he was allowed dinner. His mother, a coach, made him shoot in the backyard and did not count easy lay-ups. She would knock on the kitchen window and point to the three point line.[1]
• Josh signed a written contract with his parents to be allowed a drum kit. The five point deal required him to keep his grade point average above two point seven, keep a good attitude and keep inappropriate music out of the house.[1] [2]
• Josh's parents once let only censored Hollywood films into the house. They used a Christian service that edited out swearing, sex and violence. Josh said watching films like The Terminator that way was an absolutely awful experience.[1]
• Tyler's and Josh's mothers turned out to share the same cheap hairdresser. Josh's mother mentioned her son's band at a Great Clips salon, and the stylist said she had just cut the hair of another mother whose son was in Twenty One Pilots.[1]
• A hoverboard gifted to Tyler before The Tonight Show broke his mother's wrist. Tyler took her to the emergency room himself and then banned hoverboards from all of their houses.[1]
• Josh's parents had to cancel their landline because of the Stressed Out video. The video was filmed at Josh's childhood home, fans found the listed number, and calls came in at all hours.[1] [2]
• Early on, fans picked up tickets from the band at a Chick-fil-A table in a mall food court. Before that, Tyler hand delivered tickets door to door around Columbus, and his mother sold them outside Ohio State.[1] [2]
• The band nearly called itself Chill Coat, a pun on their lawyer's surname. Their lawyer was Jeff Chilcoat. Bicycle Thief was another rejected name, dropped partly because a band already had it.[1] [2]
• Car Radio is based on a real theft from Tyler's car at college. He left his car unlocked while late for class and came back to find the radio, GPS and CDs gone. He could not afford to replace them.[1]
• The fan made video for Level of Concern ran for one hundred and seventy eight days. Guinness World Records certified it as the longest music video ever, beating Pharrell Williams's twenty four hour video for Happy.[1] [2]
• Trench sold seven thousand cassettes in America in 2018. That made it the third best selling cassette album of the year, behind two Guardians of the Galaxy soundtracks.[1]
• The Banditos' yellow has an exact colour code, and the bishops cannot see it. In the Trench story the rebels wear the shade hex FCE300, which the bishops of Dema see only as grey.[1]
• A made up phrase in the song Bandito is an anagram of all Ohio fans. It is one of many hidden messages Tyler has planted for the fans, who decode them on Reddit, often within hours.[1] [2]
• The dragon on the Scaled and Icy cover comes from an 1860s children's book. It was drawn by the illustrator Walter Crane and is in the public domain. Tyler named it Trash, inspired by a small dragon figurine in his studio.[1] [2]
• Tyler's baby daughter is audible at the start of Shy Away. Rosie cooed while he recorded a voice memo. He was annoyed at first, then kept the sound because he loved that she was part of it.[1]
• Shy Away started as a songwriting lesson for Tyler's younger brother. One of his younger brothers had asked how to write and produce a record. His youngest brother Jay and five friends later sang group vocals on three Scaled and Icy songs.[1] [2]
• Chris Martin once left Tyler a voicemail praising the band, and Tyler never deleted it. When NME asked who was the most famous contact in his phone, Tyler scrolled and landed on the Coldplay frontman.[1] [2]
• Josh discovered he could do a backflip during a soundcheck. It became a nightly fixture, often launched off Tyler's piano. Tyler joked he looked forward to Josh doing it at sixty.[1] [2] [3]
• Tyler once stopped a show to have a man thrown out for assaulting a female fan. NME listed the incident among little known facts about the band, noting he paused the concert until it was dealt with.[1]
• Both members are said to dislike bananas, so Russian fans came dressed as bananas. NME reported the in joke while covering the Bandito Tour, alongside fans dressed as the red robed bishops of Dema.[1]
• Josh descends from Edwin Dun, an American rancher who became United States minister to Japan. Edwin Dun and his Japanese wife Yama were Josh's great great great grandparents.[1]
• The closing song on Breach is the closing song on Vessel played backwards. Intentions is built on a backmasked version of Truce, linking the band's label debut to the end of its story.[1] [2]
• Tyler's daughters scream on a Breach track. The album credits list Junie and Rosie Joseph for screams on its second song.[1]
• Josh's first job was at Donatos, a Columbus pizza chain. When the New York Times interviewed the band at a Donatos in 2018, the reporter said the band was so beloved there it felt like a clandestine mission.[1]
• Columbus renamed a street Twenty One Pilots Boulevard in 2019. Nationwide Boulevard took the band's name for two hometown arena shows, and a pop up shop sold merch themed on Ned, the creature from the Chlorine video.[1] [2]
• In 2012 the band toured in a truck converted to look like a bus, and emptied its toilet tank themselves. Josh said they would pull off at night to do it, and the first time he almost threw up.[1]
• In 2016 Tyler was still driving a beat up Chevy Impala. Rolling Stone noted it as the band exploded, and Tyler said he wanted to give his money to family and charity.[1]
• Tyler helped produce much of Shania Twain's album Queen of Me. He is also a writer on its closing song, The Hardest Stone.[1]
• The band's first ever out of state show drew twelve people. It happened in June 2011, which is part of why the album that year was titled Regional at Best.[1] [2]
• Stressed Out was the first rock song to pass a billion streams on Spotify. It also held the top of Billboard's Hot Rock Songs chart for a record twenty three weeks.[1] [2]
• A Vessel anniversary livestream raised over forty seven thousand dollars for Make A Wish. It ended with Tyler playing a new song on ukulele with the drums turned up so loud nobody could hear it.[1] [2]
• Trench's single My Blood leaked because a fan's Apple HomePod played it early. The band made the song official the same day. Another single, Levitate, briefly leaked on Tidal.[1] [2]
• Josh collected the 2017 Most Dedicated Fanbase award alone, hinting at Dema. He apologised for Tyler's absence and said Tyler was severing ties with Dema, the first public mention of the Trench world.[1]

Disputed stories

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