Alex and Drew of The Chainsmokers landed back home after a week that careened from a college football crowd at Ole Miss to a rain-soaked festival in Ohio, with barely enough runway between stops to change shirts. For any artist, a week like that is manageable. For a duo that decided to rebuild their entire live set from scratch and debut it at Lost Lands, a festival they do not usually play, it was something closer to controlled chaos at altitude.
From a cheering stadium to a basement that smelled like pee
The week opened in Oxford, Mississippi, where the pair dropped into an Ole Miss event that had the energy of a football stadium pregame. The logistics were characteristically blunt: off a plane, into a car, straight into a basement with no one in it. Nobody was entirely sure who had booked that routing. A debate broke out almost immediately about whether Lane Kiffin or Nick Saban was the more famous figure in college football, with one of them insisting Kiffin was ‘way more famous than Nick Saban’ and the other treating that claim as roughly equivalent to a flat-earth position. The crowd, when they finally reached it, did not care about the debate. Ole Miss made exactly the kind of noise that was requested of them.
Before leaving for Ohio, the team also rolled seven cameras for what appears to have been a retrospective look back at a decade of work. Watching old footage of themselves talking, Alex described the feeling in a single word: ‘nostalgic.’ Drew added ‘unsettling,’ then offered the hope that they both sound at least a little smarter when they talk these days.
A never-played set and a very nervous drive to Ohio
The Lost Lands appearance was the week’s real pressure point. The duo had reworked the set entirely for the occasion, a format they rarely get to use anywhere else. By their own admission, they had never actually performed this version before walking out in front of that crowd. Drew put the anxiety in perspective: he was ‘more nervous than Tomorrowland.’ That is not a small benchmark.
Before the show, a fan named Megan had sent in something she described as ‘kind of a call for help,’ explaining that this would be her sixth year at Lost Lands and that she was the loneliest she had ever been. The response was a surprise appearance that sent her from confused to screaming in roughly three seconds.
The set itself, performed in conditions that had already pushed the festival crowd into cars and shelter areas because of the weather, landed. The crowd’s reaction to songs they clearly knew and loved left at least one member of the crew visibly relieved. ‘I was nervous about that when we started,’ one of them admitted afterward, and the other chased the relief with a direct appeal: ‘just hope the internet is kind to us now.’
A decade of footage, still processing
Somewhere between Oxford and Ohio, a voice from outside the duo surfaced with a memory: a drive back to New York City after a show at Tuxedo Junction in Danbury, Connecticut, years ago. The detail landed with the weight of something half-forgotten. ‘That was me,’ came the reply. ‘That’s crazy.’
By the time they were back home, Drew’s voice was still warming up at 9:00 a.m. and he called it embarrassing. He had been wanting to do something for six months and was finally excited about it. He did not specify what it was.
The muddy Ohio ground outside the Lost Lands stage, still wet from the weather that had sheltered an entire festival crowd in their cars just hours before the set, sat quiet.
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