The 2010s File Feature
Whatever It Takes
Imagine Dragons and the Making of "Whatever It Takes" "Whatever It Takes" arrived in 2017 as one of the standout tracks from Imagine Dragons' third studio al…
01 The Story
Imagine Dragons and the Making of "Whatever It Takes"
"Whatever It Takes" arrived in 2017 as one of the standout tracks from Imagine Dragons' third studio album Evolve, a record that marked a deliberate and commercially successful effort by the Las Vegas band to streamline their sound without sacrificing the emotional intensity that had built their audience. Released on June 23, 2017, through KIDinaKORNER and Interscope Records, the album produced multiple chart-topping singles, and "Whatever It Takes" was among the most representative of the album's particular combination of confident arena-rock energy and self-reflective lyrical content.
The song was written by Dan Reynolds, Wayne Sermon, Ben McKee, Daniel Platzman, and Alexander Grant (producer Alex Da Kid) alongside Jayson DeZuzio. Alex Da Kid, who produced the track, had been one of the most commercially successful producers in rock-inflected pop since his work with Imagine Dragons on their breakthrough album Night Visions and with other major acts. His production approach favors powerful, driving rhythms and a compressed, explosive sonic palette that translates exceptionally well to stadium contexts, a quality that had helped build Imagine Dragons into one of the most successful live acts of their generation.
Dan Reynolds wrote the lyrical content of "Whatever It Takes" from a position of hard-won personal experience. Reynolds had spoken publicly about his struggles with depression and with the physical and psychological demands of maintaining an active touring schedule at the level Imagine Dragons was performing. The song's themes of relentless determination and willingness to pay whatever personal price is necessary for success reflect these experiences directly, giving the track an autobiographical weight that distinguishes it from more generically motivational anthems in the rock mainstream.
"Whatever It Takes" achieved significant chart success both domestically and internationally. The song peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, an impressive result for a rock-leaning track in an era when the genre had largely receded from the upper echelons of that chart. Its performance on the Hot Rock Songs and Alternative Songs charts was even stronger, with the song spending extended periods at or near the top of those genre-specific rankings. In the United Kingdom and across Europe, where Imagine Dragons had developed a particularly strong following, the song also performed well, reinforcing their status as one of the genuinely global acts in contemporary rock.
The production of "Whatever It Takes" is built around an aggressive, compressed sound that emphasized percussion and a driving energy. The verses are delivered over a minimalist arrangement that creates anticipation, before the chorus explodes outward with the kind of full-band impact that the production team had become expert at calibrating. This structural approach, the strategic withholding of sonic energy to maximize the emotional impact of its eventual release, is a technique with deep roots in rock production and one that Alex Da Kid and the band deployed with considerable effectiveness on this track.
The music video for "Whatever It Takes" was a highly stylized production incorporating elements of aerial performance and dance that gave the song's themes of striving and overcoming physical form. The visual presentation reinforced the song's energetic quality while adding enough narrative and visual interest to sustain repeated viewings. The video accumulated hundreds of millions of YouTube views as part of the broader commercial success of the Evolve album cycle, contributing to the visual legacy of the song alongside its audio impact.
Critical reception of "Whatever It Takes" and the Evolve album was mixed in the sense that art critics tend to hold Imagine Dragons to a different standard than commercial audiences, but the quality of the songwriting and production was widely acknowledged even by those who questioned the band's artistic ambition. The song's anthemic quality was recognized as a genuine craft achievement rather than mere commercial calculation, and Reynolds' vocal performance was consistently praised for its emotional conviction.
Imagine Dragons had emerged from the Las Vegas rock scene to achieve a commercial breakthrough with "Radioactive" in 2012, which became one of the best-selling digital singles in history at the time. "Whatever It Takes" continued the trajectory of a band that had managed to maintain genuine commercial momentum through multiple album cycles, a genuinely difficult achievement in an era when one-album breakthroughs were common and sustained careers were comparatively rare.
The song's use in advertising campaigns, television programs, sporting events, and film trailers extended its commercial life and cultural reach well beyond its initial chart run. This kind of sync licensing success is partly a function of the song's sonic qualities, its driving energy and anthemic chorus make it well-suited to contexts that require music with motivational or triumphant associations, and partly a function of the song's cultural recognition level, which makes it immediately communicative in contexts where an unknown track might not carry the same weight.
The Evolve album earned Imagine Dragons Grammy Award nominations and multiple award wins, confirming that the band's commercial success was accompanied by genuine industry recognition of their craft. "Whatever It Takes" was central to this achievement, serving as one of the album's most-recognized singles and a consistent presence in the band's live set, where its driving energy translated into one of the stronger audience-participation moments of their concerts. The song's legacy within their catalog is secure as one of their most representative and commercially successful recordings.
02 Song Meaning
Ambition, Cost, and Determination in "Whatever It Takes"
"Whatever It Takes" by Imagine Dragons is a song about the price of ambition and the willingness to pay it. This is not a comfortable or uncomplicated subject. The song does not celebrate ambition in a simple, cost-free way; it acknowledges explicitly that the pursuit of extraordinary success requires extraordinary sacrifice, and it interrogates whether the narrator is genuinely prepared to make that sacrifice or merely believes he is. This self-questioning quality beneath the anthemic surface is what gives the song its emotional texture and distinguishes it from more straightforwardly motivational anthems in the rock tradition.
Dan Reynolds wrote the song from direct personal experience with the demands of creative success at a major commercial level. His public discussions of depression, of the physical and psychological toll of constant touring, and of the tension between personal wellbeing and professional ambition give the song's themes a grounded authenticity. The "whatever it takes" position is not a triumphant declaration so much as a determination that has been hard won, a choice made with full knowledge of what it costs rather than in blissful ignorance of the price.
The production by Alex Da Kid and Jayson DeZuzio creates a sonic environment that enacts the song's themes through its own qualities. The driving percussion, the compressed sound that seems to push against its own limits, the explosive release of the chorus following the controlled energy of the verse, all of these choices create a physical experience of straining toward a goal. The listener feels the effort as well as hears about it, which is a mark of production that genuinely serves its material rather than simply accompanying it.
The song's thematic territory connects it to a long tradition in rock and pop music of treating personal ambition as a serious and worthy subject. From the work ethic anthems of early rock to the more psychologically sophisticated explorations of success and its discontents in later decades, popular music has always found a receptive audience for honest engagement with the desire for extraordinary achievement and the complicated feelings that accompany its pursuit. "Whatever It Takes" participates in this tradition while inflecting it with a specifically contemporary awareness of the psychological costs involved.
There is also a more intimate reading of the song's meaning available. The "whatever it takes" position can be understood not just as a statement about professional ambition but as a statement about relationships and commitments. The willingness to do whatever is necessary for something or someone you care about is a fundamental expression of love and loyalty, and the song's ambiguity on this point, whether the "whatever it takes" is directed at a professional goal or a personal relationship, broadens its emotional scope and allows listeners to find their own most resonant interpretation.
Released in 2017 through Interscope Records, "Whatever It Takes" arrived at a cultural moment when conversations about the psychological dimensions of success and the costs of ambition were more open and widespread than they had previously been. The decade had seen significant shifts in cultural attitudes toward mental health, toward the acknowledgment of personal struggle even among the publicly successful, and the song's honest engagement with those themes felt timely and necessary rather than merely personal.
The meaning of "Whatever It Takes" is ultimately found in its honest ambivalence about the position it advocates. The song does not simply celebrate relentless determination; it examines it, acknowledges the cost of it, and then commits to it anyway with open eyes. This mature, complicated relationship with ambition, understanding what it demands and choosing it consciously rather than naively, is what elevates the song above the generic arena-rock anthem category and gives it a lasting resonance with listeners who have faced similar choices in their own lives. That resonance is the foundation of the song's enduring commercial and cultural impact.
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