Nate Ruess always dreamed about deafening, distorted guitars. So, in early 2023, he went out and bought a Gibson SG and began writing capital-R rock songs.
Never mind that he’d largely opted out of the music business seven years before. Occasionally, he’d do a songwriting session when Pink or Keith Urban asked him for a hook. But he was more likely to hit the golf course or blow off steam by playing NBA2K than penning catchy melodies.
“My kids were off at school,” Ruess told The Washington Post. “I got to go down to the basement and make a bunch of noise without anybody judging me. It’s the same way that I learned how to sing.”
You may remember Ruess’s name. He was briefly inescapable as the front man for the pop rock band fun., whose 2012 album “Some Nights” blended hip-hop production and arena rock on the millennial anthem “We Are Young” and its inescapable title track.
For a heady two years, fun. was everywhere: performing on “Saturday Night Live,” winning Grammys, appearing with Queen at the iHeartRadio Music Festival. But two albums in, Ruess was overwhelmed and opted to finish “Grand Romantic” — a record that chronicled his romance with his wife, Charlotte Ronson — without his bandmates.
Then he zagged again. Ruess wanted to focus on his kids. He wanted a return to normalcy. No more awards ceremonies. No more fans approaching him on the street. “If you don’t release any music or do anything, it only takes a few years” to regain your anonymity, Ruess says. “And it’s great.”
The members of fun. don’t keep in touch anymore, and Ruess isn’t working on any solo material. But as of last fall, he’s out of retirement.
On Sept. 27, he walked onstage at the Arizona State Fair with the Format, the modestly successful indie pop duo he founded with his childhood friend Sam Means in 2002. When the pair, who parted ways in 2008, launched into the fan favorite “Tie the Rope,” the audience roared along as if no time had passed.
The performance itself wasn’t the only surprise. For the encore, Ruess, Means and their touring band jumped into a Cars-esque power-pop tune called “Holy Roller” that doubles as the lead single for the first Format album in 20 years. “Boycott Heaven” is a burst of energy that reflects Ruess’s newfound knowledge of power chords.
“You’re easy to forget,” Ruess says. “The only people that in the last five or six years would stop me were Format fans.”
The Format met on Dec. 20, 1996, at a Weezer show. Ruess was a superfan; Means ran a fan page. They began shooting hoops together in the Phoenix suburbs and eventually played together in Nevergonnascore, an emo band. By 2002, Ruess and Means had tired of punk scorchers and wanted to make pop music. The Format was born.
“A lot of pop can be insulting because it’s trying for hooks with no soul,” says Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins, whose label Western Tread Recordings rereleased the band’s first EP. “The Format was balancing great hooks with a lot of soul.”
The group clearly had hit potential. Ruess excelled at rock belting, while Means, primarily on keys and guitar, knew how to sonically zhoosh things up. With a sledgehammer ’80s drum machine and R.E.M.-worthy jangling guitars, the pair’s first single — “The First Single (You Know Me)” — landed them a deal with Elektra Records. But after their Beatles-go-emo debut, “Interventions and Lullabies,” received minimal promotion, Ruess and Means asked to be released from their record contract.
In 2006, they self-released “Dog Problems,” which was packed with breakup tunes inspired by XTC and Harry Nilsson. Ruess’s vocal theatrics were more varied, as was the record, with twee love songs placed next to Jellyfish-like power pop. “Dog Problems” was a undeniable step forward — but Means and Ruess were getting tired.
“It started to just feel like a job with tasks and emails and things like that,” Means says.
The Format went on hiatus in 2008, allowing Means to get back to normal life: He had a daughter and settled in Phoenix. With his wife Anita, Means opened Hello Merch, which has since produced merchandise for musicians including Elvis Costello, Kraftwerk and Sleater-Kinney. Means kept making music with the short-lived folk group Destry, then under his own name.
Ruess couldn’t imagine doing anything other than music. And he needed to find a way to eke out a living. But he couldn’t play any instruments and knew no music theory, so he called two of his former tour mates — Jack Antonoff, then of indie rockers Steel Train, and Anathallo’s Andrew Dost — and proposed starting a band. By August, fun. had released “Benson Hedges,” a rollicking song that split the difference between Electric Light Orchestra and Elton John.
“There were so many Format fans that got me through that time and got [fun.] up and running,” Ruess says. “It was bleak in my life. I had to figure everything out.”
When fun.’s first album, “Aim and Ignite,” arrived in 2009, it was not a hard sell for Format fans — Means is credited as a co-writer on the entire album. But soon after the debut came out, Ruess became obsessed with Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” and started imagining what fun.’s next record might sound like.
Jeff Bhasker had just finished working with West and was doing a few production sessions with Beyoncé. But he kept hearing about this indie rock singer who wanted to meet him. Ruess and Bhasker eventually met at the Bowery Hotel in New York City, where the former sang a few lines from a song he was working on with the working title “We Are Young.”
“I was kind of blown away,” Bhasker told the New York Times in 2012. “He sings me the song, and I immediately booked a studio for the next day.”
At Bhasker’s house and in the studio, fun. worked on Akai MPCs and MIDI keyboards, merging maximalist rap production with stadium rock hooks. It didn’t take long for their sound to catch on. Shortly after it was covered in an episode of “Glee,” “We Are Young” rocketed up the Billboard Hot 100, finally reaching No. 1 after it was included in a Chevrolet ad during the Super Bowl.
The jump from the indie world to the mainstream was jarring. Soon enough, fun. was playing larger stages than the Format ever had. John Janick, president of Interscope Geffen A&M Records, suggested that Ruess start writing for other artists. On a brief tour break, Ruess flew into Los Angeles to work with Bruno Mars.
“I just remember renting a car and turning on the radio station and it was ‘We Are Young’ and I was like, ‘I do not want to hear this right now,’” Ruess says. “I changed the radio station and about two minutes later, it was ‘We Are Young.’ It happened with like three different radio stations.”
Ruess wasn’t the only busy member of fun. In hotel rooms during the tour, Antonoff had started the heartland rock-tinged project Bleachers and was about to begin working with Taylor Swift en route to becoming a pop super-producer. He was also starting to have some doubts about the longevity of the material on “Some Nights.”
“There was something very accidental about fun., which is also what stressed me out about it,” Antonoff told the Los Angeles Times in 2024. “It wasn’t my band.”
If fun. was growing disillusioned with success, Ruess found some solace in crafting new songs with Bhasker about his blossoming relationship with Ronson. Eventually, he decided that he wanted complete creative control and concluded that meant releasing solo material. But even before “Grand Romantic” arrived in 2015 to mixed reviews, Ruess wanted out.
“I remember saying, ‘I’m just going to do one more album because I have an obligation to do one album,’” Ruess says. “I can’t just come off of this crazy success and just go away for good. I felt an obligation from everybody around me.”
In the years since Ruess stepped back from the business, he and Means toyed with the idea of a Format reunion but struggled with the specifics: Ruess was done with writing music, while Means hoped for another Format album. In 2020, the pair planned some reunion dates and even played an acoustic set at a screening of their concert film “Live at the Mayan” in Phoenix. But shortly after they announced the shows, covid arrived and torpedoed their plans.
In the thick of the lockdown, Ruess went out running ahead of a Zoom songwriting session with a buzzy pop artist. When he got back, he canceled the session so he could keep toying with a melody he had stuck in his head. When he picked up a guitar a few years later, he fleshed out the chords to “Holy Roller” and envisioned a simple guitar-bass-drums arrangement, due in part to a lasting obsession with the Clash.
“Joe Strummer and Mick Jones are a better songwriting duo than Paul McCartney and John Lennon,” Ruess says. “Everybody would say it’s revisionist history, but I’m sticking to that bold claim.”
Even though the songs were piling up, Ruess wasn’t sure if he wanted to release any of them. He called up his old partner Means for a gut check, and they spent a few days hanging out in Santa Barbara, listening to his demos, adding a bridge when a song needed it. “I didn’t know what it was, but I was just happy to be there,” Means says.
At first, Means thought he was helping out on a Nate Ruess solo record. But they eventually decided it was a Format album, and Ruess called in prolific alt-rock producer Brendan O’Brien.
It was going to be a rock album, full stop. No pianos. Roaring electric guitars. In the same vein as the albums O’Brien produced for Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen. O’Brien wasn’t entirely convinced, but he loved the demos. “I actually told him you cannot help but write pop songs,” O’Brien says. “This is what you do. You understand that, right?”
He was right. “Boycott Heaven” doesn’t stray far from the playful Format sound, complete with flickering guitar melodies and lush harmonies that put Ruess’s voice front and center.
But Ruess’s lyrics have matured. On “Right Where I Belong,” he celebrates his marriage over fingerpicked guitars. “We don’t say much ’cause what’s left to prove?” he sings, “If I’m ever getting old, then I’m getting old with you, too.” It’s a little startling coming from the “We Are Young” guy.
That isn’t to say the record finds Ruess cheery about the state of the world. He snarls about the music industry on the freewheeling “Human Nature” and the bubbling opener “No Gold at the Top,” and he sings about the end of a relationship on “No You Don’t,” which finds him wailing as if he hasn’t been happily married for years. On “Leave it Alone (Till the Morning),” he contrasts the comfortable lifestyle of his kids with the suffering of Palestinian children.
Despite his outrage, “Boycott Heaven” is ultimately life-affirming and hints at more music to come from the Format, especially the closing piano ballad — initially intended as a hook for Ruess’s friend and collaborator Young Thug — on which Ruess sings about coming “back to life.”
After all, “You can’t just sing about f—ing being bitter about the world around you for everything,” Ruess says.
This fall, across five shows in Phoenix, New York and Los Angeles, Ruess performed the Format songbook like he’d fallen back in love with it. They’ve had to change some of the keys, since Ruess isn’t 20 anymore, but the duo’s sunny pop rock has aged well. The pair even tossed some “Boycott Heaven” songs into the mix, including the angsty title track, which turns the question of religious belief into an alt-rock exercise in letting go.
Bounding around the stage, Ruess acted as if he were singing to a stadium crowd, pointing his microphone toward the audience so they could finish his lines. You’d never guess that he once found performances daunting, or that he relied on liquid courage during his (not so) fun. days.
“With these shows in the fall, that feeling of ‘Oh, everything’s okay’ came on, like, two songs earlier, so if anything, I guess I’m improving,” Ruess says. “I’m finally on the right prescription medications, and I think that those have helped a lot, too.”
After announcing the album in October, the Format did a few additional acoustic dates in small venues across the country, and the audience sang along to “Holy Roller” as if they’d known it for 20 years. It’s hard to imagine they won’t do the same when the Format takes “Boycott Heaven” on the road this spring. Ruess seemed like he’d been waiting to sing these songs — old and new — for a while.
“I would have been just as happy never having written a song again,” Ruess says. “And now I’m very, very happy with the fact that I did this.”
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