Band came in from the cold
Imagine Dragons happy to play an indoor gig
Imagine Dragons were happy to perform indoors ahead of Super Bowl LII, unlike their recent outdoor gig for New Year’s Eve. The Grammy-winning rock band headlined the EA Sports Bowl on Thursday in Minneapolis, running through hits including Thunder, Believer and Radioactive.
Lead singer Dan Reynolds said singing outdoors in the cold is “really brutal ’cause it gets tight on your vocal cords, but indoor it’s not so bad.”
“The New Year’s thing we did in New Orleans, that was insanely cold,” said guitarist Daniel Wayne Sermon, referring to their performance on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest 2018.
“We were dying. That’s the coldest I’ve ever been. We heard this one was indoors and we were pretty jazzed. I’m not going to lie,” he said.
It wouldn’t have been nearly as cold when the band played the Grey Cup halftime show at Vancouver’s BC Place in 2014.
For the EA Sports Bowl, Imagine Dragons performed for feverish fans at Nomadic Live at the Armory, where rapper Machine Gun Kelly and electronic music producer Mura Masa also performed.
The band members said they’re not cheering for a particular team when the New England Patriots take on the Philadelphia Eagles at the U.S. Bank Stadium on Sunday. Reynolds also said “none of us are particularly athletic people.”
“I went to college in Boston so I guess I should be a Pats fan. Sorry about that,” said Sermon, who played hockey in high school.
“You got probably the two least competitive guys in the band here,” said Reynolds.
Though he couldn’t pick a team, Reynolds said he recently watched a documentary about Tom Brady that helped him appreciate the athlete. “It was intriguing. You kind of see the dynamic of being a father and also having a family and juggling that with his competitive drive, and the age, and the taxing on the body. I thought that was very incredible. Just seeing that was inspiring,” he said.
The band, which formed in Las Vegas, said returning to Minneapolis is great because the city “has been a big part of our band’s story.”
“I feel like there’s certain cities in the U.S. that really feel we like a sense of home and this is one of those cities,” Reynolds said.