Mark Foster, from Foster The People: On Lollapalooza Chile 2025, his adventures in Santiago and writing an album about “what it is to be flawed as a human”

In 2025, Lollapalooza will, once again, take place in South America. Just a couple months after early bird tickets went on sale, Chile, Argentina and Brazil have officially announced their line-ups and Mark Foster is excited. Of course the fact his band, Foster The People, will be visiting Santiago for the fourth time in its career isn’t news to him: they were the ones saying yes and keeping the secret for months in the first place, as music stars normally do when setting off shows in advance for well-awaited festivals.

But he can finally share said excitement with the world.

“Oh, man. First of all, it’s good to talk to you. I can’t wait to come back to Chile,” surfaces as his immediate greeting through his side of the screen.

He’s proud of their latest record, Paradise State of Mind – released last August, after seven years in the making. And in an industry where artists are becoming more and more accustomed to come up with new material every couple of years, it surely might have felt like a monsoon to their fanbase. But Mark reassures it’s been worth the wait, and when being asked about what to expect from their 2025 perfomance, seems eager to share their most recent material face to face with the Chilean crowd.

“It’s taking on these new forms that the band has never really done live, which is kind of… the jazz elements of it, honestly. It’s like every night it’s different. There are moments in the show where we’re just kind of energetically vibing off of each other and it creates that feeling like… which is my favorite feeling – when I watch great actors on stage or great music. When it feels like it’s about to fall apart, but then it doesn’t, you know? Or just the tension of kind of right on the edge of something new. That’s kind of what we’re going for with this new live show. So it’s going to be a lot of energy on stage. You guys have the best fans. Which is what brings out the best in us.”

Wearing a white t-shirt, he’s all smiles as his Zoom camera displays a background that devoted fans will know best: his personal studio, the same that featured FTP in the Live from my Den series years ago. Visually, though, it’s almost as if no time has passed since then. With his back to the keys, he’s sitting in front of the same Schulze Pollmann upright piano shown in the musical special. The Motel sign has also stayed, with the lower section of its words almost unreadable – yet recognizable, above his blond head.

But time has, in fact, passed. And the same man who, more than a decade ago, wrote the universally acclaimed dark hit Pumped Up Kicks in eight hours as a warning of gun violence and honestly thought no one would ever hear it (“I was a starving artist, I didn’t have an audience. I never in a million years thought that it was going to become a global phenomenon,” he said to Billboard in 2019) looks, now, at peace with the sequence of experiences that led him here. The good, the bad.. and he certainly doesn’t disown the ugly neither.

Because it’s what has shaped him into someone who’s not afraid to show vulnerability to the world. A key element for whoever aspires to make a living out of songwriting. And yes, Foster The People might have been Foster & the People as first. But in a world where, sometimes, there’s little left to actual coincidences, the fact the band had to later readecuate its name because it was usually mispronnounced might not came out of the blue. The first shows they ever played were for charities.

And even now, Mark Foster cares about people. A lot.

Paradise State of Mind: A Foster The People’s essay on life, change and hope

It’s been said parents don’t play favorites between their own children, but when it comes to artists and their pieces of work, things might turn out a little bit different. Because the 40-year-old creative has no hesitation in letting be known that, musically speaking, he reckons Paradise State of Mind as their  “deepest, most complex, rhythmic record ever made.”

CNN Chile: It’s been such a long gap since Sacred Hearts Club, and even though this new album comes as a new era, it doesn’t lose the band’s spark. In the past, you’ve described your favorite music to make as intelligent pop and we actually keep that here. Now one turns on the radio, hears a song and is able to go like, ‘Yeah, this sounds like Foster The People.’ How’s that done, as a producer? Building this indistintic brand and keeping it as an legacy? 

Mark Foster: “Oh, wow. Thank you. I think it’s really important for artists… Uhm, I’ll just say for me. It’s really important for me to grow in life and to take in new experiences and to really approach a record from a place of authenticity. And I try to express myself honestly with where I’m at and what I’ve learned. Seven years is a long time. It’s a lot of light to let in and certainly for myself. Like, I’ve changed. I’m a totally different person in a lot of ways than I was seven years ago… because, first off, I got sober in 2018, which was a huge life changer.

It had been something that I had been in and out of since I was 19 years old and I eventually hit a point to where I needed to fully step away from kind of everything and re-examine my life. Mentally, emotionally, espiritually. And because of that, then, I fell in love, you know? And then, that started this whole other chapter of my life – which, in a lot of ways, got really simple. I wasn’t touring, I wasn’t in the public eye. I kind of pulled back from all of it and got really quiet… And then, the pandemic hit. But within that space, I started to connect with kind of a divine – you know, what I’ll call God. But everybody has a different name for what that is.

But for me, that’s like… That conversation really started to shake my perspective in a different way with art and myself, and processing things that, maybe, I had been running away from. It’s so easy to run when you’re in a band and you’re on tour. Because every single night, you’re having a party in a new city, with new people. And you can turn into Peter Pan, you know? When I meet all these old rock stars from the 70s and 80s, that they never grew. They’re still living – they still look like they’re from the 70s, they’re still partying like they’re from the 70s and I knew that that’s not what I wanted.

So, coming into this record, I feel like there are, musically, a lot of deeper things. Like the jazz incorporated into this record. There are voicings in chords, they were production kind of tricks. And musically, you know, we recorded a double quartet eight strings, multiple live horns, saxophone, flugelhorn, trumpet, bari(tone) horn, flutes. It was like a musical world to kind of step into and explore.

And then, lyrically… I just tried to be as honest as I could with where I was at. Which led to, I think, a very spiritual record. It’s very much about, I think, what it is to be flawed as a human. Like, that we’re all flawed and I tried to be honest about that and be brave in expressing things that I normally wouldn’t want to say out loud – I tried to say out loud, in hopes to connect with other people that feel the same way.

But then, also, the conversation with God. Which the funny thing about talking to something spiritual is that, a lot of times, you put it out there and you don’t hear anything back right away. And sometimes, you do. And sometimes, you don’t. Sometimes, you never do… But you’re kind of left just the fact that you can express something.

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And then you start to notice things in your life where the answer may come in a different form. You might be reading something and then a sentence will pop-out at you and you’ll be like, ‘Oh my God. Is that a synchronicity? Is that a coincidence? Or is that God speaking back to me and like..?’. To me, you know, we’re living in such a time of fear. Everything you open-up, you read the headlines… there’s a lot of clickbait and there’s a lot of fear. And music, to me, is the reminder that the world is beautiful and that there’s wonder and it’s really simple, you know? It’s really simple. Like, we want to love and we want to be loved. And we want to connect. And so that’s what I really tried to explore with Paradise State of Mind.

CNN Chile: Since you brought up this spiritual matter – these new songs feel like a psychedelic, lucid experience. Most of them are almost like seeing colors through your ears, if that makes any sense.

MF: I love that.

CNN Chile: And then there’s this deep vulnerability shown in the lyrics. The Holy Shangri-La, for example, comes to my mind, with the verse, “It’s hard to know what is real, but all of my life I tried my best not to fear. The only way to get out is if we go through it all.” That’s pure hope, and written in such a beautiful way. How do you do that? How was creative process behind it? From writing, coming up with the sounds and taking them to the studio.

MF: “Thank you! Usually, I try to approach everything like a child. I grew up studying music. I played multiple instruments. I studied the history of music and I’ve listened to a lot of different types of music. But when I’m writing music, I tried to forget about all of that and I approach it like a four year old. So if I go over to the piano to start a song, I’ll start hitting notes that may not work.

I’m not worried about hitting the right notes. I just start hitting them and what that does is it ushers in a flow state. And to where the critic is nowhere to be found and I’m just reacting. Now I’m reacting to what I’m feeling. And the Divine, or whatever… there’s an energy that will come in and just start kind of buzzing through me.

So it’s all from improve. And lyrics? Same way. So, once I get, like, a song going, I’ll turn on a microphone and I’ll just start singing. And a lot of times, words don’t come out right away. It’s just sounds. But then, a phrase will pop. It’s like meditation. The Holy Shangri-La, songs like that… That stuff kind of came out and I’m almost observing it as it’s happening, so I can’t really take credit for it, you know? I’m showing up, I’m doing it, but it’s also… I feel like I’m just passing something along. And I don’t know how it works. That’s the beauty of it. I have no idea. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

CNN Chile: Well, it could be a sad song. But then it turns out into solid hope: “We can go through it.”

MF: “I fell long and hard before I made this record. Because, as a songwriter, there’s a lot of things that I want to do. There’s a lot of songs I want to write. I almost made a punk record before this. Before that, I was working on a 50s and 60s inspired, like Motown, Beach Boys, (The) Supremes’ kind of styled record. So I like riding a lot of different things, right? But the intention – I had to think long and hard of like, ‘What do I want to say now?’ and I find, as an artist… You know, it might sound lofty, or like pretentious, or like I’m being too serious about it. But to me, it is serious that there’s a responsibility that comes with being a story teller. I feel a responsibility for what I want to say next.

And it felt like I needed hope, because the world needed hope. So that was my intention with this record. It means a lot that you’re saying that, because my simple intention with this record was to make something hopeful. And I feel like, in a space where we’re surrounded by fear, hope is the light that can cast the shadows away. That is our weapon. Our weapon is actually to choose to be hopeful, because hope is also a choice, you know?

 

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We have a choice every day of where we want to put our focus. And I know, for myself, like… Some mornings I wake up and my imagination can go to the darkest places and be full of fear, focus on all the negativity – and I have to make a choice: to stop thinking that way into reappoint my mind and my spirit in a different direction and you know, I think that’s probably why I love music so much. It’s because it’s the quickest way to pull me out of that dark space.

So there’s hope in this in this record, through pain. Because I feel like pop music, to me, when it’s pure pop, it’s really fun. But it’s also very – it’s escapist. It’s like you can you don’t have to think about anything, you can just dance and there’s something really special about that. But true hope, to me, acknowledges that there is darkness, but then, makes a choice to look in a different direction. That feels honest to me, that feels more like life. Where it’s like, ‘Okay, yeah, I see this over here. But I’m going to put my focus here, because we have to go through it.”

When Mark Foster got to explore Santiago along Luke Pritchard, from The Kooks, and Daniel Kessler, from Interpol

Mark has been in the world’s longest country four times before, also as part of Lolla in 2012 and 2015, and then Colors Night Lights in 2018. All festivals. And even though his visits haven’t exactly been part of a vacation, he’s tried to make the most out of any spare time while he’s stayed here. And he’s loved every part of it. He even got to cross paths with a local band, Newen Afrobeat (“I really liked them.”)

“You know what’s special about Lollapalooza and some of these touring festivals?” he asks. Of course it’s a rhetorical question. He knows exactly what comes next and his wide smile doesn’t hide the fact he wants to make it known. “You get to hang with other artists and you get to – you’re kind of (staying) in the same hotel, you get to have days off together.”

And those who still mourn Lolla’s line-up back in 2015 might find some comfort in finding out three of its big names in the alternative scene share memories in Chile.

“I remember being there with the band and The Kooks were there. They’ve been good friends for a long time, Luke (Pritchard) is a really good friend. We went around together and ate at different restaurants. I also remember (crossing paths in Chile with) Interpol. I was exploring with Daniel (Kessler), the guitar player of Interpol, who’s a real foodie… and he found all these restaurants. So I’d go out with him, and we would eat food together and just talk about life.”

Related article: Nick Rhodes, Duran Duran’s keyboardist, gives an exclusive interview to CNN Magazine: “Santiago de Chile is a fantastic city”

“Musicians are lone wolves.”

He recalls those times with deep affection. Finds them special. “Because musicians are lone wolves, usually. We kind of… we stick to ourselves, especially songwriters. It’s like we live in isolation a lot. So we’re in a studio or we’re with an instrument with no windows and we’re just writing. So when we get to connect, it’s special. And we got to explore Santiago together.”

Another one of his most beloved frozen-in-time Chilean mental souvenirs? He can’t really point his finger in which exact year, but guesses 2018.

“We went white water rafting. Like, the whole band and our crew. Everybody. We had a day off and we went and we went to a river. I can’t remember which river it was, but it’s like one of the favorite memories of my life. Because we were just out there, surrounded by beautiful mountains, in nature… Going down these rapids, just like – laughing together and just being outside,” he mentions, chuckling like he’s reliving everything all over again.

And who knows? In March 2025, he might actually recreate some Chilean adventures again.