The Core: Lotus
Photo credit: Sam Silkworth
Bassist Jesse Miller and guitarist Luke Miller navigate the new world of drive-in concerts and socially distant shows as they drop their band’s 10th LP, Free Swim.
PUSHING THROUGH THE LOCKDOWN
JESSE MILLER: Free Swim’s earliest compositions started right after we finished Frames Per Second, which came out at the end of 2018. For the past 10 years or so, any time we would have a break between tours, Luke and I would work on demos at home, especially between albums when we didn’t know what our next project was gonna look like. We’d just build up a collection of these demos to get some ideas flowing. In the spring of 2019, we focused on finishing a big batch of 20 demos. And, after we dialed them in, we got them out to the band. During the late summer and fall of 2019, we rehearsed them as a band and then, in February 2020, we went into the studio for a week and cut the record. Then, the lockdown started halfway through the mixing.
As we saw all of our shows start to get canceled, we didn’t really know where things would end up—at first, we thought we might be able to do our festival or some shows at the end of the summer. But we pushed through with this idea that we still should put out the album one way or another. To me, it didn’t make sense to hold it to some yet-tobe-determined time when we could return to normal touring.
LUKE MILLER: This is the first album, from top to bottom, where we did everything ourselves. The last piece was mixing; Jesse built a home studio and mixed the whole album there. For some reason, that element made a huge difference. When we first started the band, we didn’t have ProTools or any recording software, so we wrote by jamming or putting parts together during rehearsals. So a lot of those songs were vamps with a breakdown that we would work out. Then, as we played them live, we would shape them into full songs. It was around Hammerstrike when we finally got ProTools going. That’s when Jesse and I started forming the songs before we played them live and shaping them from there. I’m continually trying to learn how to be a songwriter and not just be a vamp writer.
FREE WITH PARAMETERS
JM: There wasn’t really an overriding concept this time around, except that we let the instrumentation guide us a little bit. But, on this one, we set out to do a similar thing as we did on Frames Per Second, where we tracked it live. It was designed around the band performance first, instead of being this studio concoction that we had to go back and try to figure out how to perform live. We wrote songs that we hoped would have the energy of a live show; the album’s generally pretty upbeat, funky and uplifting, though we didn’t do any of this stuff live prior to recording it.
Frames Per Second had 19 songs on it and, though we have been incorporating those songs into our sets, some of them have only gotten a few plays. So we didn’t feel this big need to rush out a lot of material. It was good that we were able to get these definitive studio versions done first, and that’s gonna be the first thing people hear before they hear the live interpretation.
LM: The sound of the album arose organically. It was a year and a half of writing demos and some of those were cut before they really got ironed out. We had 20 songs going into the studio and ended up recording 19. Then, we whittled it down to the ones we thought worked best together. In my mind, I had one group of songs that had a more retro-ey, soul-funk sound and a second group of songs that had a more electronic/disco vibe. When I am writing music, I have to at least give myself some parameters. But Jesse had his own ideas, and when we combined them, [the results were] genre-less. If we tried to force all the songs that we had into two more stylized albums, then we would’ve ended up with two groups of songs that sounded a little too one-noteish. We would have had two albums that weren’t as strong as one.
When an album comes out and it’s all songs people haven’t heard, it’s more of what I used to experience in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. When I used to wait in line at a store to get a new album, I’d be so excited. That feeling is pretty much gone but you can come a little closer to it without releasing anything beforehand. During the lockdown, we wrote an entire new album, so our thinking was: “If we hold this until we can tour, then what are we gonna do? Are we gonna have this years-long backup of albums?” So we figured that we’d just put it out. And, when everything comes back, we’ll probably have another album ready to go.
A MIDDLE – CLASS BAND IN MOTION
JM: [Since the pandemic started], I’ve mostly shifted into this studio mode. A lot of it has been focused on Free Swim, working on some mixes and videos that go along with the album. Similar to Frames Per Second, there’s in-studio videos for every single song, and I also worked on all the promotional things that surround [a release]. In the meantime, Luke and I also wrote about another album’s worth of material and finished up a few things we had already built up before this started. I’ve also been writing stuff for Octave Cat, which is my band with [Dopapod’s] Eli Winderman, and I did a lot of work in the spring in terms of going back through some of the Lotus catalog that had videos. I’m compiling any live videos that we have—reediting them and remixing the shows. We have already rolled some of it out and some of it we’ll roll out later this year. Then I’ve been doing mixes for other people and a lot of studio work, so I’ve actually found myself still able to stay quite busy with music.
LM: We’ve been doing this for a long time and with the nature of being a middle-class band—where you’re not getting rich off of it but you’re making a living and it’s your only job—it’s hard to justify taking a yearlong hiatus to recharge. So, in that sense, there was something nice about being forced to take some time off the road. But the biggest hit is that this is how we make our living and, all of the sudden, you’re looking around thinking, “How am I gonna pay this mortgage?” That, for me, was the biggest shift; all of the sudden, that paycheck was cut off.
I’ve done some musical stuff [since March], but I’ve also been helping some friends out. They have a farm and they’re building a house, so I’ve switched from music to manual labor. But I still do a lot of writing for Lotus, and I’ve been doing some of my Luke the Knife DJ gigs here and there.
AT THE DRIVE-IN
JM: Besides when we were not at the same school—that probably would have been about the same amount of time—this is the longest Luke and I have been apart from each other. We got the band together [around Labor Day weekend] and, in some ways, five or six months flies by pretty quickly; it didn’t seem that foreign to get together and rehearse and do a show. Time definitely seems to take on a different meaning when you’re not moving on to the same places or at the same rate that you’re used to. The drive-in show we did [at Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank parking lot] didn’t feel that different from any other show, at least in terms of our preparation. We got together, rehearsed, went to the show and played.
But it felt a little weird onstage because people were pretty far back, and it wasn’t exactly like looking at a normal crowd. We could see a couple of people in the front, but we were also in this massive parking lot, with people extending all over the place. We didn’t quite get the same kind of feedback that we would at a festival or at a normal show, where we really feel it when the energy is rising. But other than that, we were still on a big stage and, even though there wasn’t a PA, we set up some subs on the stage just to make it feel the same as when we’re playing a show.
In terms of the sound, it wasn’t that different, besides our interaction with the crowd. They still let people stand around their cars in the parking space that was designated next to them so there was this festival vibe to some degree. But people obviously were very spread out. We debuted five songs from Free Swim and they went over really well.
LM: It was just one show: it wasn’t that difficult to write the setlist beforehand and do one day of rehearsal. I guess it’s the old “like riding-a-bike” cliché. We’ve been doing this for a couple of decades, so it felt natural to get back into it. As for the actual show, most of it seemed like a festival set, with the exception of the fact that, when you finish a song, you don’t hear that crowd roar; you hear this random honking in the distance. So that felt a little bit like you were playing to a void. But it was great to get back out there and, especially, to debut some of these new songs. I thought they streamlined well into this show. We did half of the album at the concert, and it just felt natural and comfortable.
Sometimes in the past, when we’ve had new material, it’s been more difficult to work it into the set. The learning process that we’ve been going through over all these years has been about figuring that out—especially with the last two albums. We recorded those songs live in the studio so we were already set up to perform them live. If you build a song, track by track, then, all of the sudden—when you’re playing that live—you start to think, “We can’t make that sound. This has to be different,” and it’s harder to integrate it into the live environment. The way we’ve done it for the last two albums is beneficial for making those songs go over well live because we recorded them that way.
NEXT STEPS
JM: We don’t have anything scheduled right now; it’s definitely a little complicated with the band spread out in a couple of different areas. [Jesse Miller and drummer Mike Greenfield live in Philadelphia and the rest of the band is in Colorado.] To us, it wouldn’t make that much sense to take a risk on some small-production, streamed show if it meant flying in a bunch of people and moving all this gear around; the Philly show, at least, was on a scale that made sense for us to do. I did a streamed show with Octave Cat and, while that went over pretty well, I don’t feel like it’s something that I can do on a regular basis unless there’s maybe some concept. It’s not the same, to me, as traveling to a different city and accessing a different crowd. You’re pitching a similar thing to the same crowd, just in different ways.
Since so many people decided to put records on hold or tours on hold, in some ways, I feel like the initial release of our album got even more attention than usual, just because there wasn’t as much noise surrounding it. Back before any kind of pandemic, there was so much music coming out, fast and furiously. And, with all of these bands touring, sometimes it is easy to get lost in the sea of constantly updated information.
LM: We did a last minute show at Red Rocks on Sept. 27. They had to abide by county restrictions so we could only have 175 people there—it felt like the soundcheck just kept going as it got dark. It was in my backyard, so that was nice; I didn’t have to get on a plane or anything. But beyond that, we don’t have any other live shows scheduled. As I said, we wrote pretty much a whole album during the lockdown and we’re gonna see if we can start moving on putting that down on wax. I’ve seen that some bands out here in Denver have been playing quite a bit wherever they can. Obviously, we can’t do that because we’re split up geographically, but playing at least a couple of shows has been nice.
