INTERVIEW: A Great Big World says something about upcoming tour

Amid shopping for clothes, scheduling their days-off activities for the next month and writing a Broadway musical, A Great Big World’s Ian Axel and Chad King have been planning a North American tour.

The Grammy Award-winning duo will kick off their Kaleidoscope Tour March 1, performing songs off their new album, “When the Morning Comes,” as well as some old favorites.

“The tour is named after the song,” Axel said. “It’s one of our favorite songs on the album. It’s so much fun to play — it’s a big party. We want people to know that we’re a fun band and that all of our music isn’t sad and depressing like ‘Say Something.’”

The multiplatinum hit “Say Something,” changed the duo’s lives quite literally overnight.

“Chad and I have been doing this for seven or eight years, just really grinding away, not stopping and trying to build something and all of a sudden, a song we had written years prior, ‘Say Something,’ we get an email that it’s going to be on ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’” Axel said. “Then Christina [Aguilera] hears it and we get catapulted into this cool, crazy rollercoaster ride.”

Reflecting on the past few years, Axel said they are still recovering from their whirlwind of experiences and opportunities. Now, there are certain pressures on them with their new album and tour — a different kind that they have never experienced.

“There’s all this pressure … this pressure that we never felt before, so we’re dealing with that and staying true to who we are and not letting that change and get affected by expectations and opinions that are in our lives every day,” Axel said. “But we’re super lucky and blessed to be in this position where we get to make music and people listen and it’s really amazing.”

Axel and King had about eight years to write their first album, “Is There Anybody Out There?”  King explained that it wasn’t created like a traditional album.

“We formed A Great Big World and we did songs to fill an album,” King said. “We looked at the catalog of the songs we’ve written over the last eight years and were like, ‘Let’s take that one and that one,’ and put them all together and put out an album. That was the first album.”

For “When the Morning Comes,” however, King said they were given strict writing and recording deadlines to abide by. Additionally, the added pressure of creating songs to follow the success of “Say Something” made the writing process of the new album drastically different than the first.

“We were definitely writing with deadlines in mind,” King said. “I think that put a different sense of pressure, and also there was a pressure with ‘Say Something’ and how that success changed our feelings of what a true pop song was or what we should be writing and what will connect with audiences. Whereas the first album, we were just writing to write and it was writing whatever we wanted to write — it had no real direction. So this was definitely directed a lot more.”

As if writing their sophomore album wasn’t hectic enough, the duo simultaneously wrote the music for a new musical.

“We were approached three-and-a-half years ago by a couple of Broadway producers,” Axel said. “They were working on an original Broadway musical with a book writer and they wanted us to write the music because they heard the theatrical sound in our music. We don’t know what we’re doing, and they held our hand through the process. We didn’t realize how big of a commitment it was, but this musical became our own and became our baby.”

Unfortunately, the two aren’t ready to share the musical, tentatively titled “Strokes of Genius,” with the world just yet — it is “in an incubator,” Axel said. But following the Kaleidoscope Tour, they plan to premiere the show’s music and work toward the show’s ultimate end game — Broadway.

“At the end of April, we’re playing a show at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater in New York,” Axel said. “We’re playing some of the songs for the first time. You don’t know how long it’s going to take to get the show up, but our plan is to start workshopping it this year, hopefully in the summer, and then putting it up somewhere outside of New York or Off Broadway and eventually putting it up on Broadway. That’s the goal.

Until then, audiences can catch Axel and King perform their energetic, optimistic pop music in various concert venues across the country. King said he is thrilled to have the opportunity to tour again and connect with fans after months of hard work.

“I would love [for audiences] to walk out of the venue after seeing [our show], feeling happier than when they walk in,” King said. “I would love to put a smile on people’s faces, and I would love for the experience to last. Hopefully it’s an experience they will remember for a while, in a good way.”