Hello, beautiful human.

I'm Zach. That is Dan.

Today we welcome to the studio for the first time ever.

Say hello to Paul and Jake from Lainey.

Yo, what's up everybody?

Hello, happy to be here.

This is a, it's been a, I met you, I feel like, on New Year's Eve for the first time. I was gonna bring it up. I think you gave me COVID. What? I gave you COVID? No, I'm joking. No, but I did get COVID after that. I mean, dude, we're at a house party. Were we all getting COVID after that? I probably did. No. It wasn't a year's either. No, I did. I remember just being very depressed because I was in a really bad place at the time because we had found out literally two days later that we were returning to FM radio. Which, by the way, like, seems to be a blessing. Congrats. Thank you. Yeah, good job. It worked out. Yeah. The whole landscape's changed. It kind of changed like perfectly, like perfect timing for you.

Literally parallel to that whole thing.

And then, yeah, right, that was a weird, 2022 is a weird year.

Yeah, we just, we'd been in the house a long time.

It felt like it was time to get out.

We went on a whole tour.

There was like four people on tour in 2021 and it was us

Harry styles and two other people I don't know but we we managed to get through

that whole tour not getting COVID and then I go to this one party and the next like

three weeks I couldn't taste anything really yeah I. I wonder if I got COVID after that. I don't know. I was just thinking like, man, I know I've met Zach, and I'm pretty sure the last time I've seen him, was at that part? I got COVID. Here's the deal. If I had COVID, I would have known it. So I'm so sorry.

But I was also testing. This is a terrible way to start. Oh my God.

I'm joking. You didn't get me COVID. Let's go back to 2020. Let's go back to 2020 for an hour. I actually want to go to a moment in time in 2024.

Because there is a near-death experience that actually births the album that we're talking about today, which is your six studio album.

It's called Soft.

Can you take me back to this Vespa accident? Yeah. Like, I guess since we're here, like, we can go into... Sometimes we make, like, a long story shorter, but, you know, we haven't done too many of these podcasts, bro. Oh, you can make a long story. Go all the way for saying. Oh, yeah. Like, it was June 6th, a pretty defining day, so I'm going to remember it for the rest of my life. I think it was like a Wednesday night. And just super normal. We had been in the studio earlier that day working on some stuff. We were home in between different legs of the tour, so we had finished North America, and we had just played some shows in South America and we were getting ready to go to Australia and New Zealand. So we were home for a couple weeks and just went to the gym on a Wednesday night, probably like eight. I was leaving the gym like 8.30 p.m. or something. And I just have a Vespa that I love and like, you know, it's easy to park and just whip

around if you're going like a couple miles from the house.

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