hmv talks to... The Lumineers

Congratulations on the new album! With Automatic releasing on February 14th, how would you describe it in just a few words to give listeners a glimpse of what’s in store? 

Jeremiah Fraites: Playful. After being in a band [together] for 20 years, I was just like, this is so cool to be this inspired. I felt like I was 15, 16 again playing the drums. I couldn’t believe how much fun I was having. I’m very proud of it. 

Wesley Schultz: “The album explores some of the absurdities of the modern world, the increasingly blurry line between what’s real and what’s not”

If listeners could take away one key feeling or message from Automatic, what would you want it to be?

W: “There’s lots of love on this record”

Can you share any memorable or unexpected moments from the recording sessions that shaped the album? 

J: Same Old Song is a great example. We flew in, from Texas, playing a show, five or six hour travel day, got to Woodstock and I remember making the joke, but I was serious, like “let’s just get like a snare drum sound tonight or something, we’ll tune Wes’s guitar.” Very meek, humble aspirations. We basically cut that song that night. 

How was the process of writing and creating Automatic different compared to your previous albums? 

Wesley Schultz: I heard Jer say this not that long ago, it [being parents] kinda forces you to be hyper efficient with your time, there’s this saying that married couple have after they have kids that’s like “what did we do before kids?” it’s like, we had so much more free time! But I will say I don’t know if it’s because of that or as a by-product of that mentality, but we do things faster even though we have plenty of time allotted and I think the end result of that is you’re getting something that’s less filtered and less poured over in terms of like, it’s gotta be perfect. All my favorite bands growing up, I think they were like much more raw than today’s edited stuff. When you have limitless editing options and you do everything isolated, I think for our recent album it was a lot of bleed between different instruments, tons of it, most of it, was done live, and it was an effort to recreate what the bands were doing in the 70s - some of these records that just stand the test of time. And a lot of that was like, let’s not use a click track, let's play it as we would play it, and if it gets a little faster at the chorus cause we get excited and we play it together, let's do that. For us that was liberating.   

This album seems to represent a new creative chapter. How do you see Automatic shaping the band’s evolution going forward? 

J: When we were writing Cleopatra we were still living in Denver, this was before kids, it took about six months to write that record. We had kids, and then the writing of III was about half that time, say two, three months. Brightside was written in a month, Automatic was written in a couple of weeks and I think that me moving 8,000 miles across the world, it was very important to maintain that

W: To save our musical marriage 

J: Yeah, how do we keep that spark? I don’t know if anybody does this but it’s not like I send an idea, Wes puts it in his pro-tools, he sends it back. It’s more like, it’s very crude, raw vulnerable recording that have mistakes, bad singing, out of tune guitars, the works and a lot of that might not be that cool and one of us finds something very interesting within that. We made this record in 21 working days. It was astoundingly fast and astoundingly fun.

Your music is known for vivid storytelling. What themes or emotions stand out the most in Automatic that you think listeners will connect with? 

W: I think there is an insatiable thing that we have in us and it can lead to a lot of great things and it can lead to a lot of depression and sadness. It’s more of a Rorschach type of song - there’s not really like this is what it means - but for me it started to mean, you know our behavior is becoming so predictable, depressingly so, because look at the ads placed on your instagram feed, that you’re like “oh that looks like a good shirt, I need some coffee, that kayak is on sale” like it is relative to that but it is relative to a lot of things, but just this idea of like are we hard-wired to want more, is that automatic, and are we automatic? It’s almost like where does the line end of the technology and us?  

J: I think the advent of social media and Amazon and everything’s at your fingertips, this idea rarely gets felt that I have enough, that I am enough. I’ve been guilty of not feeling that but lately in my life I’ve been trying to remind myself, “I have enough, I have more than enough.” All these things that are beyond zeros and commas in your bank account, all these things we need to try and take stock of.