Twenty One Pilots' Tyler Joseph Reveals Tragic Inspiration For 'Good Day'

Twenty One Pilots just shared their pandemic-made album Scaled and Icy, and while on the surface, the songs are some of the duo's most upbeat, the message behind one in particular is actually quite dark.

During a recent interview with NME, frontman Tyler Joseph divulged the tragic inspiration for the album's opening track, "Good Day."

“It’s so upbeat, it’s so happy and it sounds so hopeful,” he explained. “But when you really dive into the lyrics, and I don’t know if people could really interpret this truly without hearing it from me, but that song is talking about…”

As the outlet noted, Joseph took a long pause before continuing. “If I were to lose my wife and my kid,” he revealed, “and Heaven forbid that happens, but at some point in the mourning process I would probably go through a phase of complete denial. I’d be saying to my other friends and family: ‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.’ When you really realise that that’s what I’m trying to exorcise in that song, you realise it’s not as happy and exciting as it may seem off the bat. I love that songs can be that.”

Joseph and his wife Jenna welcomed their first child, Rosie, last February.

Though some of the songs' messages are somber, Scaled and Icy was written as a way to escape the darkness of the past year.

“I knew the record could go one of two ways,” Joseph said. “We could directly respond to what was going on in the world, or we could lean into this idea of escaping and almost looking at everything from a different dimension. A dimension that’s more colorful, that’s got a little more positivity to it. That felt more exciting to me, to come down into this studio where I felt like the walls of the place that I was creating were impenetrable. It’s intentionally disconnected from the time in which it was created.”

Revisit "Good Day" with a new perspective above.

Photo: Mason Castillo