16 years ago today, Foster The People released ‘Pumped Up Kicks.’ While working as a commercial jingle writer for brands like Honey Bunches of Oats and Verizon, Mark Foster used his home studio at Mophonics in Venice, California to write and record 'Pumped Up Kicks' entirely on his own, releasing it independently as Foster the People's debut single before it later landed on their 2011 album, 'Torches.' Foster wrote the chorus first, originally conceiving the "gun" reference as a metaphor for confidence, before freestyling the first verse during a session and realizing the song had shifted into something far more literal and unsettling. Told from the perspective of a troubled, isolated teenager named Robert, the lyrics explore themes of alienation and troubling fantasies of revenge, with Foster explaining to Rolling Stone that he wanted to inhabit the psychology of a character rather than simply narrate from an outside perspective, comparing his approach to Truman Capote's character s...