Now bona fide rock stars with a No. 1 album in Blurryface, several triumphant festival appearances in 2016, and five Grammy nominations (including Record of the Year), twenty one pilots have to think a lot about their public image.

“Tyler [Joseph] and I are always thinking about social media and when to be able to hit the pause button and hide in the shadows a little bit, if that’s what’s important to do,” the band’s Josh Dun tells Yahoo Music. “I can think back to a band like Led Zeppelin, who are a bunch of rock gods. Nobody ever knew what those guys were doing at any given time, but there was a draw and allure to that because there was this mysterious element. Now you can go online, search any celebrity you want, and you know where they were this morning for yoga.”





They have to think about how to strike that balance as the band adjusts to fame and the attention that comes with it. Right on cue, halfway through the interview as Dun talks about the changes he sees in fan reactions and the number of people who recognize him, he gets stopped by screaming fans. A full minute before the fans work up the nerve to speak to him, they can be heard screaming, “Oh my God!” Despite being in the middle of the interview, Dun is completely polite to both parties as he stops to take a picture with the fans.

The relationship between twenty one pilots and their fans is special. “We’ve cared about people from the very beginning,” he says. “Anybody who comes to a show or buys a copy of our album or poster, they’re investing themselves in what it is we’re doing, and that’s a special thing.”

It’s not just lip service, as evidenced both by his graciousness to the fans in Portland and in his conversation with both myself and Monica Molinaro, a journalist who joins in the conversation. Dun speaks with both of us about how to keep life interesting on the road, the importance of family, and why he’d like to be social media friends with Chris Martin, among other artists.





YAHOO MUSIC: I know you got to shoot around with the Dallas Mavericks in Dallas, so do you have different activities for different cities?

JOSH DUN: If there’s an opportunity to do something cool, then we’ll try and go check it out. So when we were in Dallas we went to the Mavericks gym and they let us play for a little while. A couple of the dudes were there, it was fun. Each day can be monotonous in a way, but then you can make it totally different from the previous day, too.

On this recent tour, what has been the best activity?

I actually had a blast playing basketball with the Mavericks, but this will make me sound like an old man: As I was playing I rolled both my ankles really bad, it makes me sound super-uncoordinated and non-athletic, but I just kept landing on dude’s feet. [laughs]

What does it mean as someone who grew up playing basketball in middle school to get to have these kinds of experiences?

It was just a real cool and unique experience. I love interacting with people. To me, I don’t care about what you do or kind of who you are, but at the same time we’ve gotten to rub shoulders with some pretty cool people. I guess I would’ve never really thought that we’d be getting to shoot around and playing a little bit in a professional basketball team’s gymnasium. It’s been a fun journey and you never know who you’re going to run into.

Have you noticed that more and more people recognize you and Tyler just being out and about?

Yeah, I’ve noticed it a lot more this tour. I think with any band the goal is to go and play a venue and then the next time in that city get to a bigger room. It’s been really cool. The more people that come to shows, the more people know who you are and what we’re doing and who we are as people, which is flattering and it’s cool. So whenever somebody stops or recognizes one of us, it’s really just a thing of, “Hey, thanks for liking what we do and thanks for listening to our music, it means a lot to us.” There are some people I’ve met who will get annoyed or turned off by people talking to them, wanting to have a conversation with them or get a photo. I don’t understand that mentality too much. There are times where obviously you’re in the middle of trying to go somewhere, you have to be somewhere and you can’t stop and have a life chat with somebody, but it’s still cool.