[Verse 1]
Falling too fast to prepare for this
Tripping in the world could be dangerous
Everybody circling is vulturous
Negative, nepotist
Everybody waiting for the fall of man
Everybody praying for the end of times
Everybody hoping they could be the one
But I was born to run, I was born for this

[Pre-Chorus]
Whip, whip
Run me like a racehorse
Pull me like a ripcord
Break me down and build me up
I wanna be the slip, slip
Word upon your lip, lip
Letter that you rip, rip
Break me down and build me up

[Chorus]
Whatever it takes
'Cause I love the adrenaline in my veins
Whatever it takes
'Cause I love how it feels when I break the chains
Whatever it takes
Now, take me to the top
I'm ready for whatever it takes
'Cause I love the adrenaline in my veins
I do what it takes
[Verse 2]
Always had a fear of being typical
Looking at my body feeling miserable
I’m always hanging on to the visual
I wanna be invisible
Looking at my years like a martyrdom
Everybody needs to be a part of 'em
I’ll never be enough from the prodigal son
I was born to run, I was born for this

[Pre-Chorus]
Whip, whip
Run me like a racehorse
Pull me like a ripcord
Break me down and build me up
I wanna be the slip, slip
Word upon your lip, lip
Letter that you rip, rip
Break me down and build me up

[Chorus]
Whatever it takes
'Cause I love the adrenaline in my veins
I do whatever it takes
'Cause I love how it feels when I break the chains
Whatever it takes
Now take me to the top
I'm ready for whatever it takes
'Cause I love the adrenaline in my veins
I do what it takes
[Bridge]
I’m hypocritical, egotistical
Don't wanna be the parenthetical, hypothetical
Working hard on something that I'm proud of, out of the box
An epoxy to the world, the vision we've lost
I'm an apostrophe
A symbol to remind you that there's more to see
A product of the system, a catastrophe
Yet a masterpiece, yet I'm half-diseased
And when I am deceased
At least I'll go down to the grave and die happily
And leave my body and my soul to be a part of thee
I do what it takes

[Chorus]
Whatever it takes
'Cause I love the adrenaline in my veins
Whatever it takes
'Cause I love how it feels when I break the chains
Whatever it takes
Now take me to the top
I'm ready for whatever it takes
'Cause I love the adrenaline in my veins
I do what it takes

[Spoken: Dan Reynolds, Wayne Sermon]
This whole time I felt like my pants were riding up on me but then I remembered that I did this
Goodness sakes
We’re gonna play another song for you, this one’s off our new record
Uh, short story for you
The first song I ever wrote, I was eleven years old
I still remember it to this day, and uh
I didn’t have- my first instrument was piano, I played piano from six to sixteen
For ten years as classical, just like Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, things like that
And I think that’s where I learned melody from, was a lot of classical instrument- instrumentation and melodic writing
And when I was eleven years old, I didn’t like my voice
My brothers called me Cookie Monster from like Sesame Street
Is that a thing in France, Sesame Street?
You kinda know Cookie Monster, like [eating noises], you saw the cookies? Yeah
Is that true Mac? Did you do it? Mac, was that you?
No, you were the good brother, huh?
Right, this is my brother Mac, he’s also our manager of our whole career
And he’s a wonderful manager
I don’t know if it was Mac
I think it probably was, to be honest
Anyway, well after I got past all that trauma, the Cookie Monster trauma
I turned- I was in a very uh-
I started to feel depression for the first time in my life when I was in middle school
So I was around eleven years old, and I just felt very foggy
I wouldn’t even say sad, I felt numb- I was very numb
And I found myself feeling incredibly alive when I would make music
So I’d write these songs for no one to hear
And for a long time nobody did hear it, I just kept it to myself
And I felt this sense of release that I’m sure so many people feel when you draw a picture
When you create a piece of art
When you code some beautiful piece of code
When you write a book
When any, y’know, any creative process
It filled me in a way that I needed
And then I just started to do it all the time
So eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen
Hundreds, hundreds, thousands of songs
Literally thousands of songs
Obsessively, compulsively, almost every day
And the band can attest to this ‘cause still, to this day, I’ll still-
Every album it’s like two hundred songs
It’s actually a problem I think
I think I need to still seek help for that (Wonderful problem)
Oh yeah, It’s a great problem for a band (Thank you for this problem)
Anyway, long story short
Because there’s so many songs, there’s some themes that I just happen to come back to all the time
‘Cause it’s all autobiographical
And one of those themes is a feeling of not being good enough
And I don’t know where that comes from, maybe it’s just the human experience
Maybe everyone feels it
But I certainly feel it quite a bit and I’ll write these songs about self-empowerment
Really just for myself
In that moment, on that day, to get myself out of bed
To get out of my victimhood
To get up and go out
And then I know the day will be better
And it’s not always better, but at least I tried
Anyway in this, long story short, this is one of those songs
So it’s interesting, cause I’ll meet people all the time who’ll be like
“Man, I listened to that song and there was- you had so much confidence in that song and this bravado”
And I’m always like “awesome”, but really in my heart I’m like
“Man I wrote that on a really shitty day when I was feeling not any of those things”
And I was writing it to try to get out of that
But it’s been incredible to see that y’know, people get what they need from music
And that’s the beauty of it
Anyway
This song is called Eyes Closed