The Lumineers: "You can have AI write a love song that intellectually makes sense, but it appeals to no one because it doesn’t come from human experience"

Throughout the 2010s, The Lumineers became an inescapable fixture of pop music. Formed by Jeremiah Friates and Wesley Schultz in the hipster Petri dish of Denver, the band made feel-good, homegrown folk-rock about youthful romance, front-porch confessionals and flower-crown nostalgia. The singer and guitarist Schultz wore his hair long under a black, wide-brimmed fedora, and he’s seldom changed his look since. The band’s general vibe was low-key, save for the music, which exerted a hegemony over the airwaves and charts that spoke for itself.

The Lumineers emerged at a time when the market was in dire need of some backwoods authenticity, and the groundwork was being laid with the advent of the ‘stomp, clap, hey’ movement, along with Mumford & Sons and Of Monsters and Men. Year after year, critics have watched folk revivals unfold with an untrusting eye, and the early ‘10s iteration proved no different for The Lumineers.

Some cynics called them too “artificial” and a “caricature of themselves dressed in period costume” to seem genuine. Considering their chart dominance and lasting popularity, the wider populace clearly thought otherwise. The Lumineers brought freshness to radio playlists. They felt slightly out of step with the arch, punk-adjacent rock of the time, coupled with the suffusion of underground EDM into the wider cultural consciousness. In contrast, their music was unpolished and radiant, harkening back to a kind of rustic romanticism that offered a refreshing pivot from post-recession dolefulness.

The band’s second album Cleopatra, released in 2016, debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. The songs were more idiosyncratic, but exhibited a broad appeal. That February, the single ‘Ophelia’, a chant-like track named for the Hamlet ingénue, appeared in big-budget commercials, series and films. More albums followed — III in 2019 and BRIGHTSIDE in 2022.

With four chart-vaulting albums under their belts, the Denver-based band were flying at an altitude that few, if any, folk rock bands had ever reached. In effect, they’ve branded themselves as a household name, while retaining the comfort of grabbing a coffee or doing a grocery run without turning heads. They could coast off the success of their first album, and be sorted for life. But, clearly, that’s not the point. The music was always the lifeblood of The Lumineers.

They weren’t intending to write another album. At least, not yet.

Their fourth studio album, BRIGHTSIDE, was still hot off the shelves, and they were in the middle of touring the record with no plans for new material. That all changed when they arrived home from a concert in Texas one evening, and landed in the studio that night with a few demos to play around with.

“We’ve always worked typically from, let’s say, noon until eight or nine,” Schultz tells me over a video call. “Those are our business hours, so to speak, where we feel our most creative and effective at recording. We’re not wasting or killing time.

“So we flew in from a show, and got to the studio around five pm. Our whole intention was that we’d have three hours in the studio for our first time back. Our muscles weren’t trained and we were just hedging it.”

As they started teasing out the iPhone demo recordings and setting a tempo, something started to click – and the first single for Automatic took shape.

“We ended up recording the entirety of ‘Same Old Song’ that night,” he recalls, smiling humbly with lingering perplexity. “I even did vocals which I thought would be a placeholder for the final take.

“But when I went to sing the final take, they were like, ‘This is great, but we kind of liked what you did on the first day, when you didn’t know what you were doing. [Everything clicked] pretty much the first night we got there in the studio.

“You know how everybody always poses for pictures, but the candid shots are often your favourites? It’s like that. ‘Same Old Song’ was a great example of a candid version of us that we started embracing in the studio over the posed perfection. The rest of the album sort of took shape from there, because, all of a sudden, we realised that the more we did didn’t necessarily make it better.”

WHERE IS OUR FREE WILL?

Fire can’t materialise in a vacuum, and the same can be said for Schultz’s creative spark. Having spent the last two years raising his kids, a daughter aged 3 and and son aged 7, with his wife Brandy, the new dad found a different kind of muse in being with his his children. Watching them grow and make sense of the world taught Schultz how to dip into childlike wonder.

“I think music can turn into a bit of a business for a musician if you’re not careful. You have to find ways to keep yourself like a kid and how they see the world,” Schultz offers. “With Automatic, I was imitating what I was seeing, because I have a three-year-old and a seven-year-old. They ask a lot of questions that you don’t have answers to, or you don’t think about those questions anymore because you’re so busy with your own life.

“My wife’s mom, whom we loved deeply, passed away a few months ago. So, my son has been asking a lot about death. He wrote a song that has made myself and multiple people in my life cry, where he’s just beating a drum and saying how hard and unfair it is to lose someone. He’s well beyond his years, and I don’t understand how he’s doing it.

“I think, between his openness, curiosity and wonderment about things, I’ve started to include more of that in my lyrics and the way I think about life. It’s just so pure and more advanced than some of the artists I’m around that do things from their head, and not so much from their heart. You can have AI write a love song that intellectually makes sense, but it appeals to no one because it doesn’t come from human experience.”

With Automatic, the songwriting is less driven than before, and the sound is a bit more refined, propulsive and plugged-in. Across 11 tracks, the album throws the world’s chaotic uncertainty headlong into the whimsical and absurd. Such tracks as the tuneful ‘Ativan’ speak to numbing overstimulation with bone-simple lines like, “If I can’t make you happy, then nobody can / Then nobody can, your sweet Ativan”. Meanwhile, cryptic profundities come to life on ‘Asshole’ through observing the temerity of naivete: “All the twenty-something mannequins / Their hearts are barely broken in / But maybe now I’m just a coward envying the brave”.

There’s a sense of irony and humour permeating the whole of Automatic. Even the title itself feels a bit strange coming from a band who’ve staked their reputation on crocheting homespun anthems into the fabric of pop music. Schultz allays any concern for fans who might see the title and think The Lumineers have gone electric.

“To me, ‘automatic’ means having no choice in the matter,” he maintains. “Love is not a choice. It’s automatic. In other ways, it’s like when you open an app and it suggests reels, or a TikTok, and they’re often nailing it. What does that say about how predictable we are? Where is our free will in this?

“Whether it is the love you feel for someone or the actions you took that this tech company predicted. It has freaked me out on both counts, because I wonder who’s in control here, and if I’m relinquishing something.”

FLEETING NATURE OF FAME

This latest album became something of an exercise in shedding The Lumineers’ artistic lineage, following on from III, which pivoted from their semi-detached musings about love and life, and spoke frankly about the effects of drug addiction on loved ones. Growing up in New Jersey, Schultz became best friends with Fraites’ brother Josh, who died of a drug overdose in 2002 at 19.

In the wake of his death, Schultz and Fraites reconnected and started playing music together to cope with their shared loss. III offered a way to sift through the lingering grief and familial dysfunction, and while Automatic continues this thread of facing home truths, there’s more of a childlike approach. There’s also a lot of sincerity underscoring the album’s absurd and paradoxical bent.

“Throughout the record, I repeat the phrase ‘You’re all I got’, which encircles all of the different relationships that I have – my kids, my wife, Jer [Fraites] – and I love them deeper than I thought I could ever love people, especially my kids. But, with that, comes a heavy price where if something bad happens to that child, even if someone picks on them, my heart breaks.

“There’s this element of when you love someone, you’re vulnerable to being hurt. That’s where you get all the good stuff. That’s where the richest part of your life exists.

“I kept imagining this two-sided coin that someone hands you and they go, ‘You can have this, but you have to have this with that’. A lot of that happens with kids. My wife, for instance, had severe postpartum depression with our second child. I remember she even shaved her head with a Bic razor because she had patchy hair. Months later, she luckily came out of that and felt a lot better. All of a sudden, there was this well of unconditional love that you can’t even imagine feeling when you’re in the depths of that depression. So for me, there was some of that swimming around in my head.”

Having navigated the music industry together for two decades, the simplicity of “You’re all I got” speaks to the creative kinship between Fraites and Schultz, perhaps more than anything.

“Jer and I have been making music for 20 years and, like any band, there’s a point in which you don’t want to feel like you need anybody. Yet, it’s better in collaboration between him and I. Sure, there’s been tension at times. Whether you realise it or not, that’s what causes a lot of bands to break up. Someone wants to take the credit and feel like they’re independent.

“So talking through that in the songs a little bit – whether it’s with my kids, Jer or my wife – showed how that feeling of beholden-ness is tough. But it’s also one of the most rewarding things ever.”

In an industry with a high turn-over rate, The Lumineers have confirmed themselves as something of an outlier: there’s no formula to their staying power, but it works. Hoping to impart a bit of speculative reasoning, Schultz tells me that it takes a bit of ego-death to stay the course.

“Reflecting on the last 20 years, more so 13 years with Jer and I in the spotlight, a lot of people come and go, and we feel good for still standing – but we hope we’re doing it in the right way and not getting swallowed up by it. You’re still yourself.

“People who interview us often say, ‘You guys are a bigger band, please explain that'. I think it’s because we don’t go out of our way to get big, no one really knows what we look like, no one cares about our social media. They care about our songs, and I’m totally cool with that. I can go to the grocery store and restaurants, and no one bothers me. I think that’s why people are a bit mystified by it, because when a song or a band gets big, you think that’s by design.”

Artists navigating the music industry are often under pressure to compromise principles in pursuit of fame, leading some to become moulded by external forces. Tracks like ‘Plasticine’ address this dynamic with blunt-force impact: “Plasticine, I can bend me into anything you need / Self-assured with a team of writers feeding you the words / Welcome to this party”.

Having been around the block for nearly two decades, Schultz reflects on the fleeting nature of fame, emphasising the importance of ignoring external noise to endure long-term.

“There’s this feeling where people will do anything to get big, and get out of obscurity and even poverty,” he says. “Jer and I made music for eight years with no one listening, and I’m glad none of that caught on, because it was us trying to please the audience and show off to our musical friends the cool chords we had or the clever, complicated things we’d say. When we finally became more simple and shed our ego, it suddenly bloomed into this thing.”

Credit: Noa Griffel

THE BEAUTY OF MUSIC

Automatic makes a pretty strong case for ditching any formulaic approach to songwriting, encouraging a focus on curiosity and authenticity instead. The message is clear: music with real substance generates more lasting power than catchy tunes that fade away quickly. Or it certainly does for The Lumineers. With this as backdrop, Schultz focuses on the artist’s responsibility to voice their own convictions, naysayers be damned. In a world beholden to a kind of “shut up and sing syndrome”, he highlights the importance of the protest song, and why the best ones hide the brushstrokes.

“In art, you’re supposed to have an opinion to express your angle on things, and that’s why people tune in,” he says. “That’s where I think when someone’s being super opaque, just trying to be big, they tend to fall through the cracks. No one holds on to it long, because there’s not much to it.

“There’s an old saying that music isn’t prescriptive, it’s descriptive. It doesn’t tell you what to do, it just describes what’s happening. The audience is smart enough to process that, and do with it what they will. Even good protest songs don’t tell you what to do, they are more of an observation and when it’s put that way, you’re so struck by it that you want change.”

Protest songs have long served as the soundtrack to social change around the world, and certainly in the States. From Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ to ‘Killing In The Name’ by Rage Against The Machine, there’s no shortage of movement-defining music. As we are increasingly mired in the ongoing horrors around the world, the demand for a song to inspire grows.

In a state of affairs where we can become all the more desensitised to its graveness, what is the role of the artist?

“I think they have an important role to play right now for the very fact that they bring us back to our emotions. When I need to feel something, I turn to music. Music reminds us more about who we are as people, and there’s no substitute for that. We need music.

“A lot of what a phone, a glass of wine or a pill do is numb you out of a lot of things. The beauty of music is that it’s the antidote to not feeling. It makes you feel something, whether you want it to or not.”

Automatic is out now. The Lumineers play St. Anne’s Park, Dublin on May 31.