The story and the album, and now the movie, when you watch it all together, it has a prelude, and then it has a beginning and a middle and a finale but it doesn’t really end. Why does Attention Attention still resonate with you now?īS: Even when I was explaining the album in the earlier days, I told people that this doesn’t have an ending. We just wanted an interesting way of expressing humanity, and I think we accomplished that.ĪS: So much happens in a few years and while these songs aren’t too old, the film does give them this visual rebirth in a way. It’s a very fast story because it’s about a lot of different people but it’s people coming together. Your legacy is going to be about the fact that you refuse to give up. Your legacy isn’t going to be about your failures. I don’t think that people need to be afraid of their failures.

Whatever you really want to be, whatever you want for yourself, and whatever you want for your existence, that’s what you should go after. I always tell don’t have a “Plan B” in life. Just because you didn’t get it the first time doesn’t mean you don’t need to try again, and again, and again. But if you never make the leap into things that you think maybe you’re not capable of doing, even if you fail, that doesn’t lay out your life at that point in time. It’s a roller coaster, psychologically, but mentally, physically, and spiritually, it’s about a lot of different people.ĪS: What is the deeper message around the 14 tracks of Attention Attention, and ultimately the film?īS: The consensus of the album is we don’t want people to be afraid of failure in life, because failure is what allows you to know what to do next. So it was a story of all of these different people that find each other in the finale of everything in the film, but you watch all these individual lives go through a lot. It’s what makes you an individual, and who you are.

Inside of Attention, Attention, it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, whether you’re younger or older, and the color of your skin-that’s irrelevant. We needed to do the whole thing.īS: I think that everybody had an idea from when they saw the videos as the singles were being released because people were starting to see the same actors in different videos, and this story that was kind of deconstructed at the time. We developed this story and we didn’t want to release just a couple of the single videos. When we were finishing the record in the studio, we knew that we were going to show everything visually. We shot the nine remaining songs in 11 days.

We did “Devil” and then “The Human Radio,” and as we were looking at the next single “Get Up,” and work simultaneously on “Monsters,” we said, “let’s do it all.” We positioned ourselves with a two-week window during the tour, because we were touring constantly for Attention Attention, and carved out time in LA with this remarkable cast and this incredible crew, and Bill. And he also worked with a lot of different artists, one particular being Beyoncé for the album Lemonade. Immediately, you can tell that he was a visionary. When we met Bill Yukich for the first single “Devil,” one of the things that stuck out about him was the fact that his was really thorough, and the way that he showed us images and his treatment, it was very detailed. A lot of times when you get the first treatment at the beginning of a record cycle, and you’re starting with your first single off that album, you get inundated with a lot of different treatments from a lot of different directors. When we knew that the album was a story, it became a story album. It became that during the writing, and then ultimately during the recording.

American Songwriter: What led to the release of Attention Attention film now and how did Bill Yukich help you visualize each track?īrent Smith: In the early days of the writing process, we didn’t necessarily set out to develop a concept record.

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