Courtesy of 3 Ocean LiveIf you are a struggling musician thinking about calling it quits, you might want to give it a second thought.

“I was a delivery boy at one point,” said Mark Pontius, drummer of the successful indie pop band Foster the People. “Struggling to be a musician is tough sometimes, and you just want to give up. But you must stick to it.”

Sharing similar experiences are bandmates Mark Foster and Cubbie Fink, who between them have shared a list of odd jobs that ranged from folding clothes and telemarketing to painting houses.

They were friends for years before they formed a band in 2009. For many years, things were slow for them. They admitted to having played a crowd of 10, some of whom were their friends who they bribed to come see their performance.  

But today, Foster the People is a wildly successful indie band, whose breakthrough single “Pumped Up Kicks” sold 3.61 million copies in 2011, making it the sixth biggest selling digital song last year.

And no, they are not a YouTube sensation. Instead, they resorted to the classic way of achieving musical stardom — playing in cafes and music festivals, recording a demo and sending it to the radio.  

Since getting onto the radio, their infectious, psychedelic “Pumped Up Kicks” has gathered a cult following that consists of everyone from Hollywood starlets and gym goers to taxi drivers across the globe.

It is no wonder that the band’s maiden Asian tour, which started in Jakarta on Wednesday, was a huge success. The tickets for their subsequent concerts in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Osaka and Tokyo, too, sold out in advance.  

“This is our first show in 2012. It’s so crazy that we’re going to play in Indonesia. But I remember about six months ago that there’s this big influx of Tweets regarding our music coming from this country — it’s insane!” said the group’s frontman Mark Foster of the group’s Jakarta concert.

They owe their whirlwind success to the groovy and rhythmic feel of “Pumped Up Kicks”, which apparently was created by Foster in five hours. In an interview with USA Today last year, Foster, who moved to LA from Cleveland in 2002, pointed out that despite the quick process, the song “wasn’t an accident”.

But a catchy tune isn’t the only thing the song is famous for. Its controversial lyrics, which tell a disturbing story about a school shooting, proved to be a double-edged sword.

While the indie crowd may understand the cynical social criticism behind the lyrics, the mainstream market — with its tendency to consume popular products as they are — may find it a bit too much to swallow.

“I was trying to get inside the head of an isolated, psychotic kid,” said Foster as quoted by Rolling Stone in June of last year. 

But during a recent interview with The Jakarta Post, Foster commented: “Certain songs just kind of write their own lyrics. And when I created “Pumped Up Kicks”, it was pretty much freestyle — I didn’t write the lyrics — it was just flowing. The first verse of the song is from the third person’s point of view, while the second verse of the song is from the first person’s point of view.”

He found a six-shooter gun. In his dad’s closet, with the box of fun things, I don’t even know what. But he’s coming for you, yeah! He’s coming for you!

I’ve waited for a long time. Yeah the sleight of my hand is now a quick-pull trigger

The passages above, along with the sing-along chorus “You better run, better run, outrun my gun … faster than my bullet”, are perhaps the most notorious of the lyrics. Foster realized that much of the
controversy revolved around the use of the word “gun”, but he insisted that the word was a metaphor to “stand up for yourself”.

“I experienced bullying a lot when growing up. I was the only child in the family, and I had a small frame with a rather big mouth – which makes me an easy target,” Foster said when asked about his childhood.

“I have always been a little bit tortured. But at the same time, I’m a person who likes to dive into things, which makes it easier for me to look at things differently,” he said of his creativity.

Youth violence is indeed a topic close to Foster the People. While Foster had a bitter experience as a victim of bullying, bassist Cubbie Fink witnessed the trauma the Columbine shooting caused his cousin, who was in the library of the school when the incident happened.

“She was actually in the library when everything went down, so I actually flew out to be with her the day after it happened and experienced the trauma surrounding it and saw how affected she was by it. She is as close as a sister, so obviously it affected me deeply. So to be able to have a song to create a platform to talk about this stuff has been good for us,” he said during an interview with CNN.

Foster dismissed the idea that “Pumped Up Kicks” is a song that condones violence and revenge from bullying victims. He maintained that the song’s envelope-pushing lyrics and cross-genre tune should be seen as a work of art independent of social stigma. If there’s any moral message to it, then it is one that asks everyone to put an end to bullying culture.  

Foster was noticeably edgy when asked to elaborate on the lyrics. During a press conference, he answered the question jokingly, saying that the song is actually about “A young child and his grandfather who’s going on a fishing trip.”

Then, during an exclusive roundtable interview, the 27-year-old sat for much of the interview touching his nose and planting his elbows on his knees.

When asked if he considered the band successful, he paused and replied: “I don’t think I can answer your question now. Maybe after two or three albums, then I’ll be able to answer that.”

But when asked if he reckoned he was born with a blueprint to become a musician, Foster offered a megawatt smile and said: “I never thought that I was born to be a musician. But I certainly knew that I was born to be a leader.”

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