The Lumineers: Three-Dimensional Optimism
Wesley Schultz hasn’t always considered his music to be inherently hopeful. But something shifted for The Lumineers singer and guitarist while making Brightside, the Colorado group’s fourth LP, which arrived in January. Schultz first had to learn how to embrace the inevitable darkness before he could allow the gleam of optimism to pervade the band’s music. It’s not only a common thread throughout Brightside, but also how Schultz wants to approach 2022, as The Lumineers step out on a massive North American tour that will keep them on the road throughout the summer.
“I feel like we’ve made the best record we’ve ever made, in a very honest way,” Schultz says, speaking over Zoom from his home in Colorado this past April. “We didn’t over plan—we just sort of let it happen. And that feels like a beautiful way to enter a tour and [come out of ] the tour we just went on in the U.K. and Europe. Every place we went to, they said, ‘You are the first international band to play here.’ That’s good and bad in a lot of ways—you don’t want to be the first one over the hill, but somebody has to be that guy or that band. And you could feel the positive effects of that. So many people couldn’t believe that we were there, and we couldn’t believe we were there.”
He continues, “So, there’s this feeling that the whole year is going to feel new. Something has been renewed. There’s all this underlying skepticism that I’m just used to as an artist, where everyone is doubting every move you make until you’re gone, so you have to be used to that noise. There’s a part of me that’s like, ‘This could all change and stop on a dime like it did two years ago.’ But I can’t live in that mode. I’m just choosing to live in my little ‘I believe it’s gonna be OK’ world and march on. And that’s the album, in a funny way. There’s a lot of dark clouds throughout the album, but it’s also this hopeful record through that, and that’s why it feels more three-dimensional to me.”
Brightside, a follow-up to The Lumineers’ 2019 record III, was recorded over two sessions in the winter and spring of last year with producers Simone Felice and David Baron, who also engineered and mixed the album. Schultz and his bandmate Jeremiah Fraites returned to upstate New York, where they’d recorded 2016’s Cleopatra and III—both of which were also produced by Felice—and settled into Baron’s Sun Mountain Studios in Boiceville, N.Y. A small space where they happened to record a few parts of III, Sun Mountain was the location where Schultz crafted his recent solo album, Vignettes. The area has become something of a second home to the musicians when they’re not in Colorado. While some of the songs were written ahead of time, much of Brightside came together in the studio, an experience that felt, to Schultz, comparable to capturing lightning in a bottle.
“Of all the albums we’ve ever made, it was the easiest in that way,” Schultz recalls. “In the past, we would have recorded it to death and demoed it to death. Going in the studio was more about execution—you have this idea and then execute it. It was kind of absurd because [it’s like] if you were a painter and you painted it all in private, and then you get your real paints out and your real canvas. Some of the magic vanished because you’re not in that moment anymore. So I felt that [Brightside] was much more to the source. But, like anything, you have to trust yourself enough to be on the clock in that way. I think, when we were starting out, we didn’t want to do things under the gun in a studio. We just wanted to work out our ideas on the cheap, in privacy of our own homes with ProTools or GarageBand. Now, we know how to do that. We can trust ourselves a bit more and it rewarded us a lot because you get better performances.”
Schultz and Fraites performed most of instrumentation, with Baron playing keyboards and Felice singing backup vocals. The album also features contributions from touring members Byron Isaacs and Lauren Jacobson, Bruce Springsteen/Dave Matthews Band collaborator Cindy Mizelle, The Felice Brothers’ James Felice and singer-songwriter Diana DeMuth. The recording was done in two separate sessions, scheduled around the arrival of Schultz’s baby—which ended up benefiting the process.
“We met up at the beginning of last year to record, then my wife had our baby around late March. So we recorded just before that, which she didn’t really like,” Schultz remembers. “It was the only way to do it. And then, a month later, I went back to finish recording when I had a one-month-old. Luckily, my wife is a ride or die for this thing. We just knew that, if we could get that done, it might help our sanity and help align a lot of things when and if the world opened up again. We wanted to have a new record, and we were so inspired by what we were doing. But, it was also kind of centered around the baby being born, which broke it up nicely.”
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On III, Schultz and Fraites built a three-part narrative about a fictional family battling addiction—something that has impacted both of the musicians’ lives. The band released music videos to accompany the songs, which recounted the story in a visual way. Although beautiful, it was a heavy album about an equally heavy subject matter and perhaps not always universal in terms of its themes. Brightside, on the other hand, reflects a broader scope of human emotion. However, getting to that place was a journey for Schultz, who grew up with the idea that you should always put your best foot forward.
“It took me until I got older, after I was around a lot of different approaches, to be able to be really honest when things weren’t good and to confront that,” he explains. “When things were hard, when you weren’t feeling your best—I had to allow space for all of it. But when you tamp down [and say,] ‘I don’t want to feel that,’ you tamp everything with it. So now it’s more about wanting to feel all of it and less about wanting to feel a particular emotion. You just don’t get that choice. So, in a lot of ways, strangely embracing a little bit of the darkness allowed me to feel both happiness and sadness a lot more— and hope.”
Of course, Schultz is aware that hope is a tricky emotion to capture. He calls it a “dangerous thing for a lot of people,” but he’s also interested in the possibility of rising against the challenges that confront us, which comes into play on many of Brightside’s songs, including the title track. It’s why the band is pushing forward with their tour even as the pandemic lingers.
“We have a strange defense mechanism against hope,” Schultz reflects. “That’s a common reaction. It feels like our ability to hope is being tested. But also we’re a pretty hopeful people—human beings are just naturally hopeful—so I think everybody wants to get back to whatever normal means.”
Schultz offers “Where We Are” as an example of a selection that embodies the full scope of emotion and ends up with an uplifting sense of what’s possible. The roots of the song date back 10 years to a car accident. The car rolled over two and half times, leaving both The Lumineers frontman and his wife injured. It felt like they should have been dead, but they weren’t. In fact, a few days later, the couple hiked 18 miles into the Grand Canyon. “It’s like we didn’t care,” Schultz says. “It couldn’t stop us. There’s a perseverance of hope in that song and in us. Part of it is probably ‘Hey, this is how I’m feeling,’ and part of it is ‘This is how I need to feel to get through this.’”
The song hinges on the line “I don’t know where we are/ But it will be OK,” which Fraites sent Schultz during the writing process. “I remember thinking, ‘There’s something to this; even though, if you read it on paper, it sounds so basic, simple and on the nose,’” Schultz remembers. “But I heard the way he was saying it and it just all clicked because, sometimes, the honest, simple thing is the one where it gets done. You can get so honest and poetic sometimes. But, other times, just saying what you mean can be just as powerful and disarming.”
He adds, “You can’t consciously try to do that or anything. When that happens, it’s special because you can get in the trap of writing music to impress fellow musicians instead of just saying what the real, honest blunt truth is. The real, coarse language that you just need to use actually says what it is. At the end of the day, time is the best judge. You don’t always know that right away.”
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In April, The Lumineers celebrated the 10th anniversary of their self-titled 2012 debut album, a breakout release that peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Top 200. Schultz and Fraites have been making music together even longer—17 years—and it feels miraculous for the band to not only still be together but also to have made something like Brightside, which Schultz feels is their best effort yet.
“I don’t know why it’s happening now, but I think that happens to artists,” Schultz says. “Your debut is very different than your fourth album. So, often times, you get some of your best work between albums three and five because artists don’t care as much about the things that they shouldn’t care about anyway. Part of it is that you can just go and tap into the source of the magic in the moment and not have to wait six months or a year to afford to go into the studio. Without trying to be ridiculous, I think that there’s something special here and we’re lucky that we’re making music that we’re fed by. It’s not like, ‘Yeah, we’re making another record,’ as if it’s just part of the game. To be inspired to go do what you do, feel connected to it and see the reaction of it with the live show is amazing.”
The Lumineers are especially excited to tour Brightside because they didn’t have an opportunity to play any of the album’s songs live before recording it. Like with III, the musicians are playing the entire album rather than spotlighting specific songs.
“No matter what, it can give you goosebumps, it can make you cry, it can make you laugh, it can make you put your arm around the person next to you—and that is something we all yearn for and we all find through different things,” Schultz says, noting how emotional it was to return to the stage after so long. “You find it through religion or you find it through music—there’s a lot of different ways—but, for me, music always short-circuited all that and brought people to feel. When I played music in college, it always surprised me that the most seemingly hardened, tough guys would always be the ones crying into their beer when I’d bring them to a show. They would be the ones telling me how much this or that song meant to them. They would just be so relieved to finally be allowed to feel something, after being told to not show emotion. The role of the artist is to remind people to feel; whether that’s a painting, a meal you have or a song you hear. All of it is interconnected in that way. Music’s the coolest of them all because you don’t even have to understand a language to feel things. It’s just this weird version of magic that we still don’t really understand. We’re just here for it.”
