Dan Reynolds

Dan Reynolds sings for Imagine Dragons, a band whose records are built for the largest possible room, and his chart has no air in it at all.

He was born in Las Vegas on 14 July 1987 with five planets in water, four in fire, a single one in earth and none in air. Air is the faculty that steps back, compares and keeps a working distance from its own feelings. Its complete absence, with that much water and fire, describes somebody who feels enormously and asserts enormously and has no mechanism whatever for standing outside either. Stadium music that is sincere to the point of discomfort comes out of exactly that arrangement.

The Sun, Mercury and Venus group together in Cancer, which builds identity around belonging to something and looking after it, and defends it faster than the threat warrants. Having speech and taste in that group means the writing and the sound are both in service of the belonging, which is why the records are addressed to a crowd rather than to a listener.

Five of his ten planets are retrograde, including Mercury, which makes easy contact with Pluto a quarter of a degree off and faces Neptune across the chart. Speech with concentrated force behind it and image directly opposite: words that carry weight and a public picture that argues with them. A band accused of being too earnest by exactly the audience it filled stadiums with is that opposition in practice.

His Moon is in Pisces, absorbing the room whether it wants to or not, and sits in hard contact with Jupiter by a third of a degree. Feeling against the planet of more, which in a performer is the aspect of needing a bigger room and finding it does not help.

His Jupiter return came in May 2023, at thirty five. On a chart with no air and a Moon already fighting Jupiter, expansion is the thing it is least equipped to enjoy.