The Lumineers

BIOGRAPHY

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. 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. 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. Suddenly, everything was up in the air. But finding themselves with time on their hands, they figured they might as well make use of it. 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.

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. In July, he and Schultz started working on new material together, continuing into September, when Fraites moved to Italy. 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. 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. Two months later, Fraites returned to Denver, and they resumed working on the songs that would comprise BRIGHTSIDE with renewed energy and perspective… [FULL BIO]