AJR‘s latest hit, “The Big Goodbye,” sounds very different from the other songs on their What No One’s Thinking EP. For one thing, it starts with a very unusual sample of a group called The Fortunairs Barbershop Quartet singing a song called “The Auctioneer.” AJR’s Jack Met tells ABC Audio that they wrote the song because they really wanted to use that sample.
“We were sitting on this sample for like five years, ‘The Auctioneer’ sample,” he says. “And we didn’t really know how to make a song out of it. We tried to make this kind of happy party song. We made this, like, really weird song with a weird concept.”
When those didn’t work, Jack says, they decided to embrace the EP’s overall vibe.
“And then we said, ‘This is an emotional EP, probably our most emotional body of work,"” Jack notes. “We said, ‘Let’s try to put some emotion into this."”
What they ended up with is a song that covers the “mixed feelings” that come with “leaving home and leaving your hometown,” Jack says.
“The best day of your life is you going off and living your dream, and then the mixed feelings about leaving your friends and family behind,” he explains. “And they’re gonna kind of go off and do their own thing together, and go get married, while you’re sort of off alone, achieving your dream. There’s sort of that complexity there. So that was the mindset behind ‘The Big Goodbye."”
You can hear AJR perform “The Big Goodbye” on their upcoming album, Live from the Hollywood Bowl. You might also hear them sing it when they perform on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2026, airing Dec. 31 on ABC.
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