Twenty One Pilots: Inside the Biggest New Band of the Past Year
They play the album track “Heavydirtysoul”: Like most songs on their newest album, Blurryface, it delves deep into Joseph’s insecurities. “There’s an infestation in my mind’s imagination,” he speed-raps. Fallon is sitting in darkness at his desk, but he’s banging his head along to the beat; Questlove is also impressed, tweeting later in the day, “Whoa … I wasn’t ready!!!”
Joseph and Dun emerge from behind a red curtain into the Tonight Show hallway as Joseph’s slim blond wife of nine months, Jenna, and members of their management team and road crew burst into applause. “Well,” Joseph says, breathing heavily, “that was four minutes of hard work.”
The name Twenty One Pilots is also a philosophy for Joseph and Dun: It came from an Arthur Miller play, All My Sons, that Joseph was reading at Ohio State, about a war contractor who knowingly sends off faulty airplane parts to Europe during World War II, afraid that he’d lose money if he fessed up to the mistake; the decision results in the death of 21 airplane pilots. It resonated with Joseph, who declined a basketball scholarship from Otterbein University to focus on music. “I could relate to the fact that making the right decision in life sometimes takes more work,” says Joseph. “It takes more time, and it can feel like you’re going backward.”
To this day, Joseph and Dun will warn each other that they are “sending out the parts” if they feel they’re taking the easy route. As the duo grew more popular, they turned down record deals with signing bonuses, acted as their own roadies long after they were selling out large venues, and refused to trade in their van for a touring bus. More recently, they’ve declined significant sponsorship offers for their 2016 tour.
Joseph and Dun were both raised in conservative, religious households. Joseph’s father was the principal of a Christian high school that Tyler attended; before that, he was home-schooled by his mother. “I told her I wanted to be a basketball player, and she made me take 500 shots every single day in the backyard,” he says. “If I got closer to the basket and made lay-ups, she didn’t count them. She’d knock on the back window near the kitchen and point to the three-point line. I had to be done before dinner, and if I wasn’t, I wasn’t allowed to eat.”
Things were even stricter at the Dun household. Video games and most rock or hip-hop albums were banned. “I’d hide albums like Green Day’s Dookie under my bed,” Dun says. “Sometimes they’d find them and get real mad. They’d find a Christian alternative, like Relient K, and make me listen to that.” For a while, the only movies allowed in the house came from CleanFlicks, a Christian company that took Hollywood movies and edited out all the profanity, sexuality and violence. For a young Dun, it made watching movies like The Terminator quite confusing. “Some scenes they’d remove entirely,” he says. “Watching those movies was an absolutely awful experience.”