Production
Who's debut album is "Aim and Ignite"?
We Are Young
After the poor commercial performance of their debut album, "Aim and Ignite", Fun decided to put Jeff Bhasker as producer for their second studio effort. The band's frontman, Nate Ruess, met with Bhasker at his hotel in New York City in February 2011. Ruess was anxious about meeting Bhasker, so he arrived early at the bar in the Bowery Hotel on the Lower East Side "and had a little to drink just to make sure I was loosened up." According to Bhasker, he wasn't really wanting to meet the band, as he "was working with Beyoncé, and also with Alicia, Kanye and Jay-Z, and doing this had been a big goal in my life. I had no intention of being distracted. "Bhasker had just finished a long day in the studio with Beyoncé, and had decided to give Ruess 10 minutes. He had previously already canceled two meetings with him. The two began talking about music, and Ruess' desire to merge hip-hop beats and electronic effects with pop rock intrigued Bhasker, who invited Ruess up to his hotel room to show him some Beyoncé tracks he had been working on. "Slightly tipsy and feeling inspired," Ruess belted out the chorus for "We Are Young," which at that time was an unfinished composition. Bhasker was taken aback and automatically "freaked out," demanding he see the band for studio time "in the next few days." The next day, Bhasker and Ruess booked a New York studio and cut a version of "We Are Young" not far from the final version of the track. On the first day of recording at Jungle City, Bhasker programmed the drums on his Akai MPC3000 machine, a moog bass and "maybe using my little Juno 106, and we added vocals and piano. We worked for many more days on it afterwards, but the core of the final version of the song was recorded on that first day.” After the Jungle City sessions, more vocal, guitar and piano tracks were recorded at Electric Ladyland Studios, and from there sessions continued at Enormous Studios in Los Angeles, The Village Recorder to track the children's choir, and Abbey Road Studios to record the orchestral arrangements. The band invited Janelle Monáe to provide guest vocals on "We Are Young" through her friendship with Bhasker. After being played the song, Monáe was enthused about the song and recorded her vocals in Bristol, England. Bhasker further mixed the song in a 44.1 kHz/24-bit Pro Tools HD session at the course of almost two weeks, and the stereo mix was mastered using a L2 limiter and an API 550 EQ. When Bhasker multitracked Ruess' vocals for the chorus, he noticed that it "had a Queen/Freddie Mercury vibe to it." Guitarist Jack Antonoff called "We Are Young" the "bull's-eye center" of the sound the band was striving for while producing "Some Nights." The song displays the influences brought by Jeff Bhasker and hip-hop music. Antonoff agreed with the notion that the song was their de facto anthem: "It's pretty rare, because any other projects that we've done, I don't think any of us have ever had that song that was like, 'This is our band,'" Antonoff said. "We're proud to say, 'Listen to this one song, and then come listen to the rest. Here it is.'"