![]() ![]() “The entire album-and the following album, too-is apologies. I'm in the Staples Center going, ‘Okay, give me three weeks and five guys.’” It took me a while to not look at a room and think about how much time it would take me to paint it. ![]() I was a house painter before, and I had my own business-I was pretty ambitious in every way-but I was making far more money painting than being out on the road. I remember sitting in the back of the van-we weren't even in buses then-and just crying. “We had been touring so much, and I was just sad a lot. ![]() Van Halen's my favorite band.’ And I was like, ‘I don't even know what you're talking about.’ But they thought I was singing ‘Van Halen is overrated’ instead of ‘And that heaven is overrated.’ So that was a highlight in my career.” “When the song came out, the internet was pretty fresh, and so I got a lot of hate mail for the first time, saying, ‘Fuck you. I've kind of written my future, I guess.” I would fantasize about wouldn't it be amazing if either, A, I wasn’t married, or, B, if I was happily married? ‘She’s on Fire’ was like, ‘This is the person that would be amazing to be with.’ And my reward, after all of these things, is that I finally did meet that girl, and she's my wife and has been for 13 years. I was married early and I had children early, and so when we were out on tour, I was a very sober parent in a very loveless marriage. It took me that record and another to get through that before I started to move forward.” Here, Monahan takes us inside some key songs on the album. I was in a terrible relationship and very stressed out-not what I’d been hoping to live my life as. But I think of that album as healing for me. “There was no chance for the other songs. “‘Drops of Jupiter’ was so big that it just consumed the entire album,” he says. They’d paid tribute to Jeff Buckley (“Mississippi”) and The Beatles (“Something More,” the album’s original title track), while Monahan explored fantasies (“She’s on Fire”) and fears (“Hopeless”) that stemmed from his failing marriage and an uncertain future. But “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)” was also an outlier, a moment of inspiration that both defined and eclipsed everything else they had recorded up until that point. It was a four-minute ballad that felt worlds away from the insurgent rock of The White Stripes and The Strokes at the time, one whose blockbuster scale and natural warmth turned Train into Grammy-winning global stars. Inspired by a dream Monahan had that night, in which his mother came home with impressions of an afterlife amongst the stars and planets, “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)” would-with the added lift of skyscraping string arrangements from Elton John and David Bowie collaborator Paul Buckmaster-meet those expectations. I said, ‘Before I do that, can you listen to this demo?’ He did, and he said, ‘This is the song of the year, man.’” I demoed it the next day, was called to a meeting at Columbia that was basically Donnie Ienner telling me that I needed to start working with professional songwriters. But then, it happened: “I fell asleep one night,” he says, “and I woke up and wrote ‘Drops of Jupiter’ in 15 minutes. Months passed and Monahan-still grieving the loss of his mother a year earlier-was struggling to come up with anything that might expand upon the relatively modest success of 1999’s “Meet Virginia,” his San Francisco pop-rock outfit’s first breakthrough. It's like bringing a girl or a guy home to your parents and having them just be like, ‘Dude, no. “The fact is, we’d written a record that didn't have a big first single,” frontman Pat Monahan tells Apple Music. ![]() When Train delivered their second LP to then Columbia Records president Don Ienner in 2000, they thought the album was finished-it wasn’t. ![]()
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