photo: Noah Griffel

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The Lumineers’ frontman finds joy in the granular details that make up a band’s universe.

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A letter from the renowned Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung in 1950:

Dear Miss Hardy,

It is of course a somewhat hopeless task to advise an unknown person of her course of life across the width of the ocean. I only can tell you one thing—that you should not set out to seek happiness for yourself. This would be a straight way to unhappiness. You better ask where and how you could be useful to whom. Happiness is not a thing one seeks. It comes to you as a reward for efforts.

Yours sincerely, Carl Jung

I found this letter framed on a shelf in a friend’s house. It leveled me with its directness and simplicity. The way I understood the letter, happiness is a symptom of toil—and it is temporary. Conversely, in my experience, helplessness is something I am far more familiar with than happiness. To combat this feeling of helplessness, I would create little jobs for myself around music to keep busy and feel like I was somehow moving forward.

It began with a cheap red binder in 2005. I was writing a lot of songs with my writing partner and bandmate in The Lumineers, Jeremiah. The issue wasn’t writing. We loved to write and had recorded probably 100 plus songs in our makeshift studio before our first LP was finally released under The Lumineers.

The real issue was how to get those demos out to the world and get on a stage in New York City and beyond. I began filling this binder up with pages, like some sort of dossier on the things in music I didn’t understand. That was my mission—to crack the code on how the hell a band gets signed, plays certain venues and, eventually, begins to tour.

So first, I focused on venues— local venues in NYC and then Boston and Philly. I would try to hone in on places we might actually get into—versus, let’s say, a big theatre—as well as where to send the demos. Specifically, I chose a dream venue, the Mercury Lounge—I wanted to know which bands were playing there in the upcoming two months, who they were signed to and where they were from.

Lastly, I looked at labels, compiling a list and putting them in different tiers based on who they’d signed. Some labels were more of a dream and some seemed possible. I had a buddy who worked as an intern at Island Def Jam that reviewed demo submissions and passed them up to his bosses if he thought they were promising. He told us to include candy in the demo in order to get the young interns to listen. Apparently, we didn’t pick the right candy because nobody ever responded to the demos.

I’d like to tell you that it all led to some great break or epiphany. But, sadly, it didn’t. The one thing it did do, though, was lead me to The Felice Brothers. They happened to be playing during that two-month window of time I was looking into at the Mercury Lounge and I loved their music immediately. It sounded so honest, real and different from what was being played in the mainstream. I noticed they had a gig in Kingston, N.Y.—a couple hours north of us. So I got a few of us together and we headed up one night to go see them play. If nothing else, then that red binder full of “label and venue research” led me to one of the most beautiful nights of music I’ve ever witnessed. And it also set me on a new path to try to make music that sounded like we really sounded—nothing polished or fixed. Albums like Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker and The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street also became part of this mantra of making music that felt raw. I have always thought of being an artist as a war of attrition. You don’t succeed because you’re brilliant; you outlast your enemy. And your enemy is ambivalence. You have to care or it won’t work. I’ve got tattoos that remind me of this—a turtle to remain steady and the German adage “to begin is easy, to persist is art.”

But what makes someone stick around? What keeps a person coming back to something over and over? I believe they find nourishment in the work. I have seen supremely talented artists drop out, for various reasons— money, comfort, status.

Music offers an artist so many “jobs” beyond simply writing songs—album art, scheduling rehearsals, band photos, music videos, “content” for socials, booking shows, making merch, building a website, burning CDs (sadly, no more), writing band bios, contacting press for interviews, radio, etc. For some reason, these side quests gave me some purpose when I wasn’t writing and playing music. I enjoyed designing a band T-shirt like I enjoyed hunting down images for album art. They were related somehow, part of the same feeling I got while creating a world that I got to live in. I kept finding things to keep me interested in all things music.

So many musicians take some sort of strange pride in having no hand in anything other than the music itself. It’s as if they view the rest of it as either beneath them or un-artistic. But 20 years ago, I remember learning about Jack White and how he had his thumbprint on everything when it came to The White Stripes’ look—right down to the three colors he chose for The White Stripes (red, black and white) in their music videos, album art and stage clothes. He remained obsessed not only by the music, but also by the granular details that made up their universe as a band.

And so, for me, what crystallized the truth within this 75-year-old letter from Carl Jung was that it was not only the music itself but also the little missions—making myself useful to someone or something—I had created for myself had kept me not only interested but also inspired as a musician.

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Wesley Schultz is The Lumineers’ singer and guitarist. The Colorado based project, which Schultz co-founded with Jeremiah Fraites, released their fifth studio album, Automatic, in February. The LP was produced by The Lumineers, David Baron and Simone Felice