The progression of an AWOLNATION show feels eerily similar to being in the Sahara Tent at Coachella—there’s a lot of neon lights and lasers and hands waving through dense fog, so much so that you can barely make out the man at the center of it all. But Aaron Bruno is very much there, leading the crowd through energetic beats from both his first album, Megalithic Symphony, which spawned the mega-hits “Sail” and “Not Your Fault,” and his current venture, Run, which includes the anthem “I Am” and the electo dream “Hollow Moon (Bad Wolf).”

It’s hard to believe the figure jumping through the fog is the same one who, just two hours earlier, sat backstage with a nervous, almost frantic energy as he prepped for his hometown show. “This is a fucking stress case show. It’s agonizing,” he admitted about the August 1 performance at the Palladium in Los Angeles. “That’s what having a good woman in your life is all about—she can handle all of that.” 

That woman is Bruno’s fiancé, and we talked to the surfer-turned-musician about her influence, the unexpected success of “Sail,” and how he’s carved away a space in the alt landscape that’s truly his own.

You were in a number of bands before AWOLNATION. What made you want to start a solo venture? 

It was really a natural progression of what I had been listening to and all of the influences I had up to that point, and, circumstantially, finally realizing the moment of being alone and not having to answer to any other songwriters or band members—just having complete freedom to explore this wild idea of writing songs that suited me, my voice, my message and whatever layers of feelings I felt like putting forth at the time. There was never a definitive moment, necessarily, other than my last band had broken up and I didn’t want to start another band and go through the issues of meeting all these other dudes. Once you’ve been in long relationships a bunch of times, the last thing you want to do is go through that again. I became a loner. It couldn’t have came at a better time, because I was finally prepared for that moment. 

What were you thinking when “Sail” blew up?

I thought someone was playing a trick—they’d figure out it was me and stop playing it. It went down the same way you always see in VH1’s Behind the Music. They didn’t think the song was ever going to be a single. It was the last song they wrote for the record and then it blew up. It almost didn’t make the cut for the album. It was fitting, in a weird way, that it wasn’t a more typical or traditionally radio-friendly song. I still can’t believe that happened. It continues to do really well, so I’ll always be a multi-platinum artist. That’s really weird. Six, but who’s counting? 

What were the biggest changes you felt from your debut to Run?

I gained a lot more confidence in the stranger side of my songwriting and the stranger sounds that I use. At the time that “Sail” broke, there was nothing like Megalithic Symphony. Bands followed the sound a little bit, and labels have tried to find that next “Sail.” You can hear some of that if you listen for it on the radio, so the last thing I was going to do was that again. I felt very confident and comfortable continuing down the stranger path of my pop sensibility, in addressing these essentially pop songs with a different kind of edge and intensity behind it. 

Do you have a favorite song to perform live? 

It’s always the newest one we’ve been working on. Right now, I enjoy “Like People, Like Plastic.”

What do you feel your biggest inspirations were when recording Run? 

Isolation. There’s a lyric in “Like People, Like Plastic” that feels cheesy to say, but I felt more alone than I ever had. I had the woman in my life—the woman of my dreams, now my fiancé—and all that fun romantic reality, but I still felt it. The label hasn’t had any success with other bands, so they felt a lot of pressure to do well again and were looking at me like, ‘When are you going to give us with this follow-up?’ I didn’t want to let our fans down, who had believed in me so much. And then me. I wanted to make the best record I could possibly make, so that was the main thing that went into it. Having a little bit of that fear, that pressure and intensity, fueled the fire of the record and brought out a different kind of angst. 

How has your fiancé supported your music career?

There was a balancing act in various relationships in the past, where this felt very natural. I wasn’t pushed or pulled in any direction. I was allowed to be myself, and that’s first and foremost the most important thing when you’re writing songs.

What kind of music did you listen to growing up?

I grew up in the ‘80s, so Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna. My dad was into funk records—Stanley Clarke’s School Days was played a lot—and my mom liked The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. That was my parents’ music, so I ignored that until I was old enough to start messing around with smoking weed. Then I discovered that the Beatles were the bible of music, in my opinion. Nirvana was my favorite band in high school. But I like everything. I was lucky, I listened to rap music before it became popular. Metal, dance hip-hop, classical, country—name a genre of music, I like it.