On the Road With Owl City

Last year, Owl City mastermind Adam Young scored the sleeper hit of the year with his debut album Ocean Eyes, which spawned the massive radio hit "Fireflies" and helped him earn fans in superstars like Taylor Swift. (Go on the road with Young and learn more about his songwriting process in the exclusive video above). Before the RS Breaking artist records more Owl City music, he's going back to the archives to release An Airplane Carried Me to Bed from his pre-Owl City project dubbed Sky Sailing. The disc will be released digitally on July 13th. The 23-year-old bedroom-pop wonder crafted most of these tunes while going to Minnesota community college and logging time in a Coca-Cola factory. "Luckily, music was my fallback," says Young. "I would spend the whole day day-dreaming. I would go home where I had this crappy old computer and all this gear and I would sit down and let everything come out."

While Young recorded most of these tunes in his parent's basement three years ago, he went back to re-record several parts this past spring. "There might be a guitar part recorded three years ago but the tambourine track was recorded a few weeks ago," he says. Fans of Owl City won't find Sky Sailing to be too much of a departure: Young's whimsical children's book imagery remains intact, although he does substitute electronic laptop textures for more acoustic guitar.

This summer, Young will hit the road opening for Maroon 5 and his personal hero John Mayer before starting work on a new Owl City disc, which he hopes to finish in the fall and release by December. And while Young says it's too early to say how the new music will sound, he does admit being inspired by Scottish electronic act Boards of Canada and the Canadian instrumental band Relient K, who Young has collaborated with in the past. Says Young, "I find wordless music to be incredibly inspiring."

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Song Stories

“(We're Not) The Jet Set”

George Jones and Tammy Wynette | 1973

George Jones and Tammy Wynette were still married when they recorded the tongue-in-cheek "(We're Not) The Jet Set." The lyrics, written by Nashville songwriter Bobby Braddock, who also penned Wynette's "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" and Jones' "He Stopped Loving Her Today," make fun of the good life by declaring, "We're not the Jet Set/We're the old Chevrolet set." Braddock recalled that while writing the song, he needed the name of a city that evened out the rhyme he had with "Riviera" and "Missourah." “I got out a Rand McNally atlas," he said. "In the first part are the maps. The last part is an alphabetical listing of cities. I wanted a rustic, small-time sound. I went to the listing for Missouri. And I found 'Festus.' I loved the sound of it."

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