So, a lot of it came out of wailing away and getting lost in that and then recording it on my phone, but then listening back and going, ‘There’s something to this what’s happening here?’” “So, a big part of this record was just finding the spirit of each song. That was all he had, but I was like, ‘There’s something really compelling here.’ At other times it was just a feeling. “With ‘BIG SHOT,’ for example, Jer sent me a demo that had the line, ‘I want to be a big shot, big man,’ something like that. “Sometimes it’s a kernel of an idea or some random line that becomes your north star,” Schultz points out. And that was exciting.” As they got down to business in Fraites’ basement, the absence of premeditation and second-guessing supercharged their creative process. So, when we went into the studio with Simone, he just had these shitty, very low-fi iPhone recordings that left a lot more to the imagination than the previous processes. “I finished the solo instrumental album, and when Wes and I started working on songs together, I felt alive and switched on, and we worked really fast. “As weird as it sounds, I feel like 2020 was the most fertile creative period of my whole life, for so many reasons,” he says. It felt like a new path.” Fraites concurs. For me, it was about wanting to have more curiosity in the studio and not have everything all dialed in. We started demoing in Jer’s basement and didn’t even touch the computer-we just used my phone to record voice memos on, and that was what we sent to Simone. “In our demo sessions for the previous records, Jer and I would typically do anywhere from 10 to 50 versions of each song using Pro Tools we’d orchestrate it differently, speed it up, slow it down or change keys in an effort to find the most potent version of the idea. And that experience seeped into the making of BRIGHTSIDE. There was no planning or choreography-we were creating in real time. “I was showing up at Simone and David’s studio not really knowing what we’d be doing that day, just letting things happen. “The way we did Vignettes was so different from how I was making Lumineers records with Jer,” Schultz recalls. Two months later, Fraites returned to Denver, and they resumed working on the songs that would comprise BRIGHTSIDE with renewed energy and perspective. There, they spontaneously proceeded to record a batch of stripped-back covers of songs from, among other favorites, Dylan, Warren Zevon and the Blue Nile he would title the project Vignettes. At that point, Schultz headed to the Catskills, where the group’s producer Simone Felice and co-producer/engineer/mixer David Baron lived and worked. In July, he and Schultz started working on new material together, continuing into September, when Fraites moved to Italy. With time on his hands, Fraites, who’d been storing up pieces of music for years, composed three instrumental songs for the Calm app and wound up recording an album of piano instrumentals, which he would release as Piano Piano. Each wound up recording a solo album- “accidentally,” Schultz jokes-and those spontaneous side trips inspired them to flip the script on their collaborative creative process. But finding themselves with time on their hands, they figured they might as well make use of it. That gut punch occurred as Fraites was preparing to relocate from Denver to his wife’s hometown in Italy, where COVID-19 was running rampant. They were five months into a projected two-year tour behind their 2019 album, III, with no plans to start work on another LP, when the pandemic forced them off the road in March 2020. The circumstances surrounding the creation of The Lumineers’ fourth album, BRIGHTSIDE (out January 14), were unlike anything Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites had previously experienced in their nearly two decades of making music together. Snowmass Town Park – Friday September 1st, 8:30pm
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