Imagine Dragons on the ‘Surreal’ Experience of Having Their Music Beamed Back From the Moon

It’s fair to say the three members of Imagine Dragons are over the moon about their new concert film Imagine Dragons: Live From the Hollywood Bowl (with the LA Film Orchestra), showing in theaters March 26 and 29. The fact that it comes in the wake of the band’s music actually being on the moon makes it even better.

On March 5, Imagine Dragon’s “Children of the Sky” — which the Las Vegas-formed group co-wrote with Inon Zur and others in 2023 for the video game Starfield — was embedded in Athena, a ship the space startup Lonestar Data Holdings sent to Earth’s moon. And while music had previously arrived there on other voyages, it marked the first time a song was transmitted back to Earth — albeit a day later because the Athena craft landed on its side, and short of its target, so some adjustments had to be made.

Imagine Dragons’ guitarist Wayne Sermon is still stoked that “Children of the Sky” skied its way back to its home planet. “I was here, and I was following the mission live on YouTube,” Sermon tells Billboard via Zoom from Los Angeles, where he now resides. “I’m very much into space exploration, I’m into anything NASA’s doing. I’m very fascinated with that kind of stuff…It was one of the easiest yeses we had. Things looked a little dicey there for a minute…but (Athena) was able to still do a couple of things and one of them happened to be beaming our song.

“We were happy just to be part of it. It’s a crazy thing. Put it up on the list of things that are just surreal, having your music beamed from the moon. It’s like alright, sure, that sounds reasonable, OK.”

Sermon says he hasn’t had a chance to flex any bragging rights over the achievement, however. “I haven’t used it once, man. Unbelievable,” he says. “It hasn’t come up in conversation, casually. Once it does I have an ace in the hole at a dinner party — ‘So, how about the moon…?’”

Sermon says the filmed Hollywood Bowl experience was also otherworldly. Filmed Oct. 27, 2024, at the last of four shows Imagine Dragons performed at the venue (and the final date of the North American leg of its Loom World Tour), the concert found the band — also including frontman Dan Reynolds and bassist Ben McKee — playing with a full orchestra conducted by Zur, whose video game scoring work the group has long admired.

“We saw these Hollywood Bowl shows coming down the pipeline while we were on tour,” Sermon recalls. “We just felt like something needed to happen there. We’d sold out four shows, which was kind of crazy to us, and it seemed to be special, so we thought, ‘Why don’t we do something with an orchestra, a one-night-only thing.’” The group recruited Zur to create orchestrations and then watched it grow from a handful of numbers to the entire 22-song concert.

“We’d keep getting emails from (Zur), ‘OK, send me another one,’ and the next day we’d have an arrangement and ‘Send me another one,’” Sermon says. “This kept happening until he’d arranged every single moment of the show. From start to finish it was a complete collaboration, which I think is pretty rare in a show like that.”

Among the concert moments that most stand out is “Radioactive,” for which Zur created a duel between violin and cello players in the orchestra. “Children of the Sky” was another highlight, according to Sermon. “That was a song conceived in the studio, and we weren’t present for when (Zur) came up with the orchestration for it,” Sermon says. “We wrote our part, he wrote his part and we got ’em together remotely. We never actually played that song together in the same room with an orchestra before. So for that song to come to life at (the Hollywood Bowl) felt like a full-circle moment. (Zur) wrote a really incredible intro to it where he could stretch out and show some of his chops. It was great to do that song and have it represented and documented forever.”

The film, however, was not part of the initial discussion and only decided upon “probably a couple of weeks before the show,” according to Sermon. “It was just going to be this thing that happened, that you just had to be there for. In this day and age, where everything is documented and overshared, it was maybe something that just lived for a night and was gone, and maybe there’s something beautiful about that. But the more we thought about it, so many people who would like to see it couldn’t. With Inon being involved and hearing his arrangements…we felt it would be a real shame for people not to hear it. Luckily our management scrambled to find some extra cameras and we threw it together and willed it into existence so people could see it.”

Live From the Hollywood Bowl was directed by Vincent Adam Paul and will be screened in CJ 4DPLEX, ScreenX, 4DX and Ultra 4DX as well as standard formats. Theater and ticket information is available via ImagineDragonsMovie.com.

Sermon plans on catching one of the big-screen showings himself but anticipates the film will eventually go to streaming as well. “The whole point of filming it was so people can see it,” he says. “Seeing it in theaters, especially in 4DX formats, is gonna be mind-blowing for people, but eventually it will be streamed.”

Imagine Dragons will resume the Loom World Tour on April 4 in China and then begin a European run on May 27 in Italy. The trek is set to wrap up July 25-26 in London, while he, Reynolds and McKee are “just starting to write our new album now. We are exploring a lot of different options, including parting things back a lot — just trying new things and seeing what sticks. We don’t really know what we’re doing for next things until we just do it.”

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