Lucius is playing at The Depot on Saturday, November 15. Attention Bird Utopia opens.
When I caught up with Lucius singer Holly Laessig, it was Halloween afternoon.
Her kids were dressed as aliens, she was set to be an astronaut, and there were plans to build a UFO later. But in the midst of the casually-controlled chaos, she was gracious enough to answer a few questions before the band heads here Saturday.
Heres what Laessig had to say in an interview ahead of Lucius’ Salt Lake City show:
What went into creating the latest album?
We did our re-recording of Wildewoman for our 10-year anniversary. It was the first time in a long time that it was just the four of us again, in the studio, working on our own ideas, remembering how that functioned so well. I think it was part of the inspiration for recording a new album. Coming together, doing this record with just the band, with Danny producing and mixing it. We wrote some songs in the studio right then, and some were brought in and finished there. It was so enjoyable. We know each other so well, personally and musically, and we have a language. It felt like a bit of a homecoming.
Did you enjoy the nostalgia of going back and re-recording what you had done before?
It was interesting. There’s a lot of things that change on tour and with a live show, and I didn’t even realize it at the time. It’s organic, but when you’re touring a record or playing some of these songs for 10 years, things shift. Going back and listening to the original recording, I discovered I sing a completely different harmony now. How did that even happen? Or the instrumentation or the way we end the songs changed. It was cool, because none of us had really listened to it in all that time. For that reason alone, it was fun.
And the new album is self-titled. What was the thinking behind that?
We were trying to think of titles, and nothing fit. This feels like us, so why not just call it Lucius? We didn’t already have a record called Lucius, and we love to experiment and go far out with music, and follow the muse. This felt really grounding, and we feel like we’re in a grounding place in our lives. It felt really personal and honest. Why not just call it what it is?
When bands do that in the middle of the career, it can feel like a statement. Youāre saying this is who we are. This is the best representation of what we can do.
Yeah, this feels like our feet are touching the ground.
How have you evolved as a band since you started out?
As far as our musical influences are concerned, weāre all so different. While we have been a band together, we’ve all been part of other projects, and gained a lot of knowledge within our own instruments, and itās fun to then bring all we do and learn back to the band. Evolving separately and together has been cool. When you’re with people as long as weāve been a band, you get to know each other so intimately. Now most of us have families, and being a part of each other’s families and family lives has been special.
The new album seems like itās a reflection of that. Itās not your domesticity album, per se, but you’re creating families and slowing down a bit.
No, I think you can use the word domestic. We have been on the road so much, just living on wheels. Now weāre grounding ourselves by growing gardens and having kids and dogs. It does slow us down in the best of ways, and it opens us up to other parts of our creativity and perception of what is magical and beautiful. That’s absolutely where we’re at right now.
The album after this is going to be what you see through the eyes of your children.
Totally, yeah. Or the escape album.
How fast after meeting Jess did you feel like creating a band out of your combined talents was an inevitability? Walk me through that a bit.
Well, we met in college, at Berklee. She became friends with my roommate, so we were friends through friends. At a party, we started talking about similar influences musically, how we got into music, how our dads used to play us all these channels in the car. We both loved old girl group music, old rock and roll and soul music, and the visual aspect of how entertainers used to have a whole character. We decided to do a show for the school, a cover show of The Beatlesā white album but as a girl show. We rearranged and recorded āHappiness is a Warm Gun,ā but that’s as far as we got. We continued to get together and work on music, though. I was doing a songwriting major, and she was doing performance and music business, and we would work on songs together, and she would get us gigs, and we kept going from there with no specific plan. Once we moved to New York together and started going to open mics and meeting other musicians, eventually we got together with Pete and Danny, who we had also met in school, and the band came together. It was a long and pretty organic process. I think we both were just driven to do it, but to do it together.
Thatās a good way to put it. When you hear the two of you singing together, it does seem like it was predestined to happen.
When we recorded that Beatles song, there was a moment of that. Weāre such different singers, with such different voices, especially then. But there was something about when we were recording, when we both had headphones on. We were deciding who was going to take the lead and who was going to take the harmony, and we both started singing the melody at the same time. Hearing that in the headphones was like hearing a double-tracked vocal that sounded like a different person altogether, two textures blended that made a new voice. And that felt like something special, so we honed in on that.
Tell me about your live show. How much forethought goes into how you perform?
Back in the Brooklyn days, we were figuring out how we were going to do this. We were in Jess and Danny’s apartment at the time. Weād rehearse, trying to figure out how we were going to play. And the neighbor downstairs would beat the floor with a broomstick because they were so pissed about hearing the drum.
Danny put the drum on legs so it was a standing kick drum, so it wouldn’t be against the floor, and we stopped getting yelled at. But we liked it, the standing drum kit, and kept it for the Wildewoman tour, two identical standing drum kits on either side. There’s always an element of symmetry, the two voices as one, and there’s the visual element of dressing the sound. And we assign keyboards and tambourines and shakers to everyone, so everyone’s got multiple hands in multiple things. Itās dynamics, really. Seeing how songs can be played live.
And is the best part of touring getting to be in front of a crowd or something else?
Getting to see and know so many different cities and what they’re about, as well as meeting so many people. It gives me hope in our country, to be honest, to travel around and see how many people are good, loving people that want a lot of the same things. We love that aspect of it. And now we have our kids with us on the road, so we have to get off the bus, and get to a playground or museum during the day. Outside of that, of course, the live show is so much fun and the audience is hugely responsible for that. We wouldn’t be here without them.
It’s almost like you said we’re a country that is divided in lots of ways, but in a live performance setting, that sense of division disappears for a couple hours.
I think so. Sometimes we’ll have moments at the end of the show that are meant to feel a little bit like a communion, where people can join in and sing together. When you’re all together in the room singing, it’s hard to feel anything more unifying and human than that. You feel present. And that is whatās so important right now, an awareness of what’s real, and meeting the person next to you, looking them in the eye. We experience so much through the screen and scrolling and comments that are thrown into this weird ether. It’s a vastly different experience when you’re next to someone sharing this experience. It’s so important.
Has becoming a mom shifted your perspective in how you approach being a musician?
In a multitude of ways. Creatively, the way I see and perceive. What I find inspiring now, I probably overlooked before. Prioritizing time is different. Prioritizing our kids and making sure we route travel so we have a sufficient amount of time at home, making sure we’re not stuck somewhere where they can’t get a good night’s sleep.
It seems like, as a band, you have a good control over your image and how you want to be perceived and sound.
That’s been a prerequisite. Whoever we work with, we want to make sure that we are in charge of our presentation. We’re visual artists as well and we like to do things our way.
And how often does everybody think you’re sisters?
All the time. And we’ve learned how to dress ourselves and do our makeup in a way that makes it even more that way. It is definitely part of the performance we’ve nailed down.
Do you feel like sisters at this point?
Oh, yeah. And every time someone asks if weāre sisters, we always answer we’re soul sisters.
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