You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, your way.

Imagine Dragons are a Grammy award-winning band from Las Vegas. They've sold over 20 million albums so far, and they were the most streamed band on Spotify in 2018.

In March of this year, they released the song Follow You. Singer Dan Reynolds started the song at home, and then later the band took the song to the studio Shangri-La to record parts of it with legendary producer Rick Rubin.

In this episode, Dan breaks down the song, which tells a deeply personal story of his relationship to his wife.

My name is Dan Reynolds, and I sing for the band Imagine Dragons.

There were a lot of things that kind of led to this, and we had gone through therapy and different things, but we decided, you know what? After seven years of being married, this isn't going to work. We're going to get a divorce.

And that was a really difficult decision, super heart breaking. We had actually been together for over a decade at that point.

We had three kids, and Imagine Dragons blew up after we got married, and so I traveled a lot, which was really difficult.

I also went through a big faith crisis I was raised in Mormonism, and it never really settled in correctly for me.

I was just dealing with different things that made a marriage difficult. It made me a difficult partner to be with.

So we got separated, and after seven months of zero communication, I came home to sit in an attorney's office and sign the final papers.

And when I was driving to sign the papers, Asia sent me a very lengthy text message, expressing seven months of pain that she had been through, and really expressing seven years of marriage.

But doing it in the most heartfelt way, it was, I love you, I accept you, and we're going to be great co-parents together for these children, separated, kind of like this text of freedom and love and forgiveness.

And I read it, and I was like, reminded about how important this woman was to me. It made me rethink a lot of things about myself, about our relationship, about our family.

So we sat down at the table to sign these papers, and we kind of looked at each other across the table, and I think we were both crying.

And I said something like, hey, why are we doing this? Let's get out of here.

So we got up from the table, and we went to eat, and just felt the deepest sense of love and loyalty, and it felt like the first time we had met, which was magical for both of us.

Then we cited, well, why don't we just start dating again, even though we were still married. So we just started dating.

Since the age of 12, I've written almost a song a day, and I was like, this is incredible. Me and Asia are dating again. We may get back together. This is the second chance.

I have to write about this today, and I went through a bunch of tracks that Joel Little had sent me, who is an incredible producer that we've worked with in the past.

And I listened to a couple of them, and one of them was a basic beat with a sense.

It's like a really beautiful haunting organ, and it felt nostalgic to me immediately. It made me feel like some sense of worship, and when I hear that, something about the worship made me think of love.

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