The Lummineers!
One of the great success stories of the last few years has got to be Denver-based alternative folk trio the Lumineers. Wesley Schultz (vocals, guitar), Jeremiah Fraites (drums, piano) and Neyla Pekarek (cello, backup vocals) arrived on the national scene in 2012 with chart-topping singles like “Ho Hey,” “Stubborn Love” and “Submarines” off their self-titled debut album. Their musical journeys took them from appearances on the Grammys telecast and Saturday Night Live to capturing the attention and praise of President Barack Obama. The trio’s newly released follow-up album, Cleopatra, continues their path of songs and stories––and a No. 1 Alternative and Triple A single “Ophelia”––with a lyrical and humanistic bent.
Music Connection: I’ve been enjoying your new release Cleopatra. What’s the story behind making it?
Wesley Schultz: We spent a lot of time waiting to make the new record because of the success of our first album. It’s a blessing and a curse, but mostly a blessing. It became something where we were really eager to write and record new music. But we also got really lucky with the opportunity to play all the countries and places we ended up playing. So, it required a lot of patience, and we hoped we still had the ability to write songs. You spend so much time away from it you worry that it’s like a muscle that’s atrophied.
MC: Interesting. So, you’re busy working your current material and playing live. Yet you hope you have the ability to revisit that songwriting process once again?
Schultz: You know we tried really hard to write while we were on the road. We actually had a mobile rig built that was, like a little transformer in a case that you open up and it’s a full-on studio, set up in the green room in each venue we played. But it put unnecessary pressure on us to write so we ended up mostly getting the ideas for songs recorded with the voice memo feature on our phones. All that energy we put into making that mobile rig went into something much simpler that we already had in our pocket. It was kinda funny, but I think we just wanted to feel like we were being creative on the road. We were trying, but it’s a lot easier for us to go at something over and over steadily versus visiting something a few minutes or hours a day. We stay pretty busy each day when we’re on the road.
Read the whole story here:
http://www.musicconnection.com/the-lumineers-denver-sound-cleopatra/
[Thank you to Alex Teitz, http://www.femmusic.com, for contributing this article.]