Mark Foster's 'Life-Changing' Experience

Both connected and disconnected from 2011 debut Torches, the 2014 follow-up record from Foster The People, Supermodel, is everything you'd expect from an act that can balance sadness and joyous better than most. Great pop music – the stuff that staunchly holds integrity in a superficial world – has long been delivered by an educated voice, and chief songwriter Mark Foster has managed to speak from both sides of the fence once more, while leading an evolution both instrumentally and thematically.

“I feel like it's the first album we've made as a band; Torches to me was just a collection of songs,” says Foster. “There's something about having a short period of time to express yourself, and almost create a time stamp of what was going on with thoughts and creatively and philosophically, and that's what it felt like making this record – it was the first time I'd ever written a body of work in a period of less than a year. In terms of the continuity on the record and the concepts, it really captures the essence of what I was going through as a person and where we were as a band.”

Although their music suggests a party band at work, Foster The People take their position on the global stage completely seriously. The catchiness of their tunes can be traced back to Foster's inherent songwriting ability, which saw him working as a commercial jingle writer prior to the band breaking through. However, like the full-length that preceded it, there is nothing novel about Supermodel, a record that again gives the listener so much more to consume than the standard candy-coated cookie-cutter pop currently rotting the charts.

"Going to a remote village in Tanzania and watching people pull buckets of water out of a mud hole filled with parasites, just to try and get a clean glass of water."

Looking backwards to how he moved forwards, Foster is quick to admit that the response to Torches was above and beyond his wildest expectations. The record was a goal that he'd been chasing since moving to California from Cleveland, Ohio as an 18-year-old dreamer, and he was as shocked as anyone when singles such as Pumped Up Kicks and Helena Beat gained massive traction on every continent, allowing Foster The People – Foster the multi-instrumentalist, Jacob 'Cubbie' Fink (bass) and Mark Pontius (drums) – to ditch their day jobs and crisscross the world.

“After that [success] I travelled to some pretty remote places to be alone and really tried to process my thoughts,” he recalls. “I tried to reflect on the two worlds, the world I was just in, playing in a band at the Grammys, in front of a bunch of A-list celebrities, and then going to a remote village in Tanzania and watching people pull buckets of water out of a mud hole filled with parasites, just to try and get a clean glass of water.”

Those polar opposite situations dictated the content of this new record, triggering a lot of questions in Foster's mind. “It also redesigned things that maybe I'd assigned a certain amount of value to before that I don't assign any value to now. For me it was a reappropriation of my priorities. It was life-changing for me; it shifted my focus a bit.”

But although the frontman and multi-instrumentalist has mentioned in the press that he was at times angry when writing Supermodel, he doesn't necessarily think it embodies that mood. “If there's anger throughout the record...” he trails off. “I think [it's] a beautiful record, I don't think it's inherently an angry record, maybe melancholy at times – but there are moments of anger, and they probably come from really just a frustration at injustice.”

Supermodel started at pace in 2012 when Foster and acclaimed British musician, songwriter, producer (and Oscar winner!) Paul Epworth came together once more in Essaouira on the Moroccan coast. Epworth made his name during the mid-'00s working with UK angular rock acts like Bloc Party, The Futureheads and Maxïmo Park, however, in recent years the 39-year-old has become something of a pop golden boy, helping artists like Adele, John Legend, Florence & The Machine and Coldplay craft many of their biggest hits.

Having previously worked together on Torches, co-writing a number of tracks including the infectious Call It What You Want, Foster and Epworth immediately found cohesion once more, and when they came together in solitude on the African continent the two men were quick to feed off each other's ideas again, barely standing still for seven straight days, a stretch that formed the aesthetic and tone of Supermodels. “It was a pretty special week; I don't think I've ever had that type of creative output in consecutive days ever before,” smiles Foster. “For whatever reason things were just flowing.”

And although it's the guitar work that perhaps makes the biggest instrumental statement on Supermodels, with tracks like Ask Yourself and A Beginner's Guide To Destroying The Moon benefitting greatly from the additional muscle and solo flair provided, Foster admits that he's always been drawn to Epworth because he's a drummer first and foremost.

“That's the instrument that I'm the weakest on, and he's a really creative drummer, the way he approaches percussion and drums is really creative, and that's how I start most of my songs, over a beat; but then he plays a little bit of everything else as well. But we just had fun [in Morocco] – there was no judgement. And Paul's a walking encyclopaedia when it comes to music, the history of music, so he'll kind of guide things in a way that comes from a wealth of musical history, which is great because it's the opposite of how I work. I'm very visceral in my expression, I kinda purge when I play music; I work very fast and jump from instrument to instrument. I kind of Jackson Pollock songs, and will stand back and look at the canvas and decide whether it's good or not later, but in the moment I'm like a whirlwind and he's a little bit more calculated.”

"I kinda purge when I play music."

As fruitful as that Moroccan sojourn was though, after that initial burst of life Foster was still without any finished songs when he arrived back home in Los Angeles to regroup with his bandmates. He knew, however, that he had to continue following those creative rabbit trails, and fast, which led to the trio cutting tracks locally in Malibu and Hollywood before eventually finishing off the album at Epworth's Wolf Tone Studios in London.

Tapping into the excitement and spontaneity that comes from a room full of instruments and a head crammed with ideas, Foster says that a lot of the album was written in that adventurous spirit. And although he admits to feeling the pressure of time and expectation – “that now we were a known band and people were going to be listening” – he learned how to navigate those vibes to find a result more positive.

“There were points when it helped me and points when it was more of an ominous thing in the room,” he explains. “I spent a lot of my time and energy on this record just doing my best to keep the pressure outside of the creative process, to be able to write from an authentic place.

“One thing that I learned about writing – if I'm writing for myself, I'm writing out of a place of loving what I'm doing, then the song will be authentic, and it doesn't matter what they sound like or what style they're in, they'll resonate with me. And I've always used my instinct as a microcosm for the rest of the world, so if I'm dancing around the room or if I've got tears in my eyes, I know somebody else is going to feel that too. If I was to go into a studio and try and write another Torches, I think you'd be able to smell the unauthenticity from a mile away, and you'd use the CD as a coaster or a Frisbee.”