Foster the People and the inner child

With this, the Foster The People vocalist presents as an unsuspecting indomitable force, one who's scaled charts and made himself a mainstay of every elder millennial's mind.

Yet, within Foster wages an internal battle, one which began with his band's 2011 debut album, Torches – and its heavily synchronised single "Pumped Up Kicks" – and thrust Foster into his wildest dreams. On one side is his innermost naivety – wanting to throw out his childlike whims and most basic constructions to satisfy a simple fact; what sounds good to me? The other has emerged from the tossed-and-turned education and criticism that he's experienced internally and externally across a lifelong love affair with music.

This counterpoint to his childish state stemmed from the success that took him by surprise over a decade ago. "All of a sudden this new entity came in the room when I was in the studio writing our second record," he tells me. Describing it as a pressure or codependency with his fans and critics and "not wanting to let people down," he acknowledges his output bent to whims that weren't his, which he found produced an impasse after the release of his third album, 2017's Sacred Hearts Club.

There's a restless energy in Foster, one that tracks throughout his journey so far. Sat engaged yet relaxed, clad in a white t-shirt draped with thick gold chains and unkempt hair, his answers and conversation unfurl before both of us. He's a staple of many playlists with his arsenal of studiously-crafted pop jams – which often deal with darker subject matter, including his signature singles dallying with school shootings – but they don't just fall out of the aether into his lap. The child and the critic have to work together it turns out. And it was coming up with his fourth album Paradise State of Mind, that he discovered this, as well as a whole battalion of internal conflicts arising.

The Mark Foster before me today is more rooted in reality. The last few years for him have included sobriety, marriage, and a newfound love for his craft. This all stems from a period in purgatory where, as he puts it, "I had to see how it felt without having it there," he says of music and the industry surrounding it. "And to see who I was as just Mark, the guy in the grocery store and what that felt like, being anonymous."

Taking up woodwork, gardening, and all manner of everyday, hands-on [mediums] this return to the real world, for lack of a better term, was a needed dose for Foster. "I felt like that period was almost a season of darkness where Ingot melted in a crucible, internally, doing a lot of deep work to get to the core of why I drank in the first place, and why I was so uncomfortable in my own skin. And in that space, what started to emerge was this more pure version of myself, knowing that I can make music and it doesn't matter if people like it or not. It was falling back in love with music and falling back in love with the process and not the result."

To do this required a change of scenery; after migrating to the UK for two months with his wife (actor Julia Garner) Foster was at a bit of a loose end. Covid hit just after their marriage in December 2019, ("We basically spent, a year and a half kind of indoors in our house, and for somebody that's been on tour for the last eight years or whatever it was the longest I've been home.") and so his sojourn to our shores came on the back of a period of extreme writer's block. For someone as creatively in-tune as Foster, this was debilitating.

It was reconnecting with his instruments and with collaborator Paul Epworth at his studio – The Church in North London – that was key: "I bought a guitar and my bass and went over to The Church. That day, to me, marks a significant moment in my life."

Working again with Epworth was also significant as the preceding years had found Foster removing himself from contact with the outside world: "I hadn't connected with a lot of artists because I had been so isolated, I had gone dark online, I kind of pulled back from culture." During his time at The Church, Epworth also introduced Foster to Jack Peñate, and together they wound up writing the title track for Foster's fourth record.

Now he reflects upon the fallow period preceding Paradise State of Mind's mountain with wider, kinder eyes, but for a while, this time of writer's block begged for more from Foster: "The years of writer's block before that, the critic was just right on my fucking shoulder," he explains. "So that's what was stopping me. A lot of this was trying to push that out of the room. To be in a safe space to just express and just throw paint and then kind of figure out and then start to shape it later.

"And so for this, I think, partly being away from touring and music for six years, and I'm doing this deep work within myself, in conjunction with that, gave me a couple of inches of space away from that feeling to be able to try to just be brave enough to be to explore those things, to let the little kid inside come out and play. I think a lot of it has to do with identity too. There was a moment over the pandemic where I almost just hung it up."

Foster is, if anything, a studious creative. Born in California, but raised in Ohio, after studying classical piano at an early age he joined the Cleveland Orchestra's children's choir. Being the 90s, the next logical step was, of course, discovering Nirvana. Following the path of distortion through hardcore, grunge, and the likes of Rage Against The Machine, TOOL, Converge and Delineator goading him forward, he joined a hardcore band in high school.

After moving himself from his Ohio homestead to Los Angeles, Foster set about achieving his dream. For eight years he toiled away with feet in various doors – including jingle writing – but it wasn't until he inhaled, took a moment, and let whatever creativity was hidden deep inside shine that he would make his debut album.

"I can remember the feeling that I had when I was writing Torches," he tells me. "I was alone in a tiny little studio and I was just exploring, I was just having fun. I had been in LA for about eight years at that point, working all sorts of random jobs, grinding, barely paying rent. And I was like, basically 26 because I moved to LA when I was 18. And in a lot of ways, I kind of felt like my time had passed, and that it wasn't going to happen for me."

Reflecting upon his life-altering debut now, Foster explains, "There was no pressure. I was just writing because I was having fun, I love the process, you know, and it wasn't about the result."

It's a similar frame of mind he was aiming for with Paradise State of Mind. This early period for Foster was, for all intents and purposes, his awakening – something he needed a second dose of. "I think within that there were a lot of beautiful moments that came out of that, in that record [Torches]…I wasn't chasing anything, it wasn't trendy...When I listen to my early songs they sound like young songs. They're like, Oh, this is what a 26-year-old would make."

In its own way, Paradise State of Mind began with a dive into the past. A reference Foster makes multiple times in our chat is to his "case study" on the mid-to-late 70s and early 80s, "Specifically, the crossover of like disco, funk, synth, funk, pre and post drum machine," he clarifies, with the likes of Nile Rogers and Chic, Tom Tom Club, and Giorgio Moroder taking a place on Foster's mantle. It's an artefact from his early-00s move to LA, which was at a time when the nostalgia was rife: "It was like the resurgence of the 80s, so I was exposed to like Depeche Mode and Joy Division and the Clash and Tears for Fears and, Oingo Boingo."

A passionate student of music, Foster acknowledges that, "the older that I've gotten, for me to stay interested in music that I'm making, I have to be growing and be slightly out of my comfort zone." Each album Foster The People has delivered into the world has sought to follow this theorem. While Torches radiates a youthful naivety, its underrate followup, 2014's conceptual Supermodel, entered a gloomier scope of pop-dom, before leading into the more ever-so-slightly experimental, psychedelic-leaning sounds of 2017's Sacred Hearts Club. "As I've grown musically, I have to dive a lot deeper now to make something that excites me and that's part of why this record was a mountain because musically, there was a lot of things that I really didn't understand that I had to learn."

The process of feeling comfortable being back in the limelight was in itself a world outside of Foster's comfort zone and he had to believe what he was being offered by his inner child was, actually worth it. "There are different kinds of moments throughout that where I just trusted myself and allowed myself to kind of just and a lot of this stuff might sound really lame, you know?" he tells me, taking a pause. "That's my struggle because I feel like some artists are really good about that. They really don't care, and they're really confident. I've had impostor syndrome since I was a kid."

The biggest statement for this period is his production work for Foster the People. Having been an active participant in every element of the band since its inception, taking the reins for the first time was his base camp. "Two weeks into that process, this terrifying thought hit me, which was Oh, fuck, this is why David Bowie always worked with Tony Visconti," he says. "Bowie, to me is one of the greatest producers ever…he was very capable in the studio, but he pretty much always had somebody. That sounding board helps keep moving, moving things forward.

"Songwriting is very myopic so it's knowing when to bring the critic in or not. So, the child would be playing, the innocence would be playing, and that's non judgmental. But a producer's job is to be critical, and to be able to use their taste to say, Okay, this is working or this isn't because they're not as close to it because they're not the songwriter and so they can objectively look at the process," he says.

"When I'm operating from the purest part of myself, it's so funny, because when I was a little kid, all I wanted to do is be an adult because I felt like nobody ever listened to me and then as an adult, now I'm trying to return to how I was when I was a little kid…not a teenager!"

For Foster, this looks like abandoning all of his prior education and instead listening to that inner child – "anything cerebral," as he puts it. "Most of the notes are sour and sound terrible but I don't judge it," he says. "I'm just I'm trying to usher in a flow state."

A musical meditation, be it "banging on things" or approaching melodic instruments with a rhythmic mind, it is in this state that it all starts to become clear, and the pay-off appears. "To me, that's way more interesting than what I could actually conceptualise if I was trying to think about exactly what I wanted to play. And so it's very childlike, and it's very fast. It's non judgmental. The critic comes in later, when I'm doing it properly."

For someone so intrinsically curious, when he steps up to the creative plate, is it terrifying or freeing? "Both equally. It's terrible, it's terrifying," he laughs, "And it's also the most invigorating thing because that's the puzzle. And then when there's a breakthrough, it's the most rewarding, because it took a lot of rabbit trails and explorations to get to that breakthrough.

"There's certain songs on this record that we started that we hit a wall and never cracked, and they'll probably never see the light of day. There's many, many failures in the process. You're hearing the results of the songs that ended up surviving, but I probably had 70 to 100 sketches of songs before finishing these 11 tracks."

As with all artistic minds, Foster's hopes for Paradise State of Mind reach beyond his own space. He also wants this record to be a moment of radiant quietude in a blisteringly divided world. "What we're experiencing in the world and how fear has become commoditised and used for clicks, and advertising and division," he says. "Every time we're all on social media, we're all addicted to our phones, we're all addicted to information, we're getting tumbled by it, it's not really how humans were wired. And we're experiencing the adolescence really of social media and I don't think we know what to do with it."

Not hiding from reality, but instead acutely aware, Foster's opting for hope, rather than ignorance.. He doesn't believe in ignoring the glaring elephants in the room (the far-right, political strife, war, etc). "To me hope only feels real, when I know that that person is completely aware of the darkness," he says. "Otherwise, it just feels like escapism, or I can't trust it. And so when I know that it's coming from somebody that knows, but is deciding to be optimistic in spite of the circumstances it makes me want to want to keep going as a person and that's my intention with this record, and when we go out on tour, it's to connect with people, and to make something that in its nature is hopeful."

Indeed, Paradise State of Mind is as much a hopeful figurative representation of Foster's current mental standing. Keeping himself at arm's length from his listeners is integral to maintaining the hard work Foster has conducted. "Separating myself from that has also given me a little bit of freedom to express something musically and know that it doesn't define my worth as a human being, whether people like it or not," he clarifies.

This leaves the future wide open: "I think every record is going to be a new exploration in something that we've never done before, and that's what's fun," he says. "I don't think that I'll ever make a record like this again. I don't want to. That's what this was." He rattles off a list of genres he'd like to give his due attention to including rock, dance, and acoustic. "I love all kinds of music but what's fun for me is the puzzle of it, and to step into a world and create something new."