The Lumineers are headlining

The circumstances surrounding the creation of The Lumineers’ fourth album, BRIGHTSIDE, 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. But finding themselves with time on their hands, they figured they might as well make use of it.

In July, Fraites 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 coproducer/engineer/mixer David Baron lived and worked. Two months later, Fraites returned to Denver, and they resumed working on the songs that would comprise BRIGHTSIDE with renewed energy and perspective.

“In our demo sessions for the previous records, Jer and I would typically do anywhere from 10 to 50 versions of each song; 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. But this time it was bare-bones. We started demoing in Jer’s basement and didn’t even touch the computer — we just used my phone to record voice memos on. For me, it was about wanting to have more curiosity in the studio and not have everything all dialed in. It felt like a new path.”

Liberated from their routine and invigorated by this process of in-the-moment give and take, Schultz and Fraites headed for Felice and Baron’s Sun Mountain Studios in Boiceville, N.Y., to begin tracking BRIGHTSIDE in March 2021. Also on hand were two members of the touring band, bassist/backing vocalist Byron Isaacs and violinist Lauren Jacobson, while Baron would contribute keys and synths.

“What excited us about this record was that it was coming from a very different place than our previous albums — all of them,” says Schultz. “When we first got together,” Schultz says, “Jer and I were making really different music — heavy electric guitars, really dissonant. When we made our first album, we got into this phase where we started enjoying more innocent, happiersounding stuff. Our goal for this record wasn’t that it would make total sense right now but then seem weird in a few years. It was more like, what are we really going through as humans, as families, as a country? How can we talk about that honestly, and not namecheck the word ‘pandemic’ or ‘quarantine’?”

“A big part of [it] was just finding the spirit of each song,” recalls Schultz. “So this is an exciting new direction for us. I don’t think I could go back to making records the old way now, because this one was so much more fun to make, and it feels so much more alive. There’s a fire to this record that I don’t think we were willing to go for in the past.”