Jeremiah Fraites and Wesley Schultz of The Lumineers sat down with host Brad Steiner for an Audacy Check In from the Hard Rock New York Rockstar Suite, providing some insight into their now 20-year career together, the brand new album Automatic, and more.
LISTEN NOW: Audacy Check In with The Lumineers
The Lumineers just released their brand new album, Automatic, on February 14 and will soon be hitting the road this summer on the North American leg of their Automatic 2025 World Tour, with dates beginning July 3.
Now 20+ years into their careers together, Jeremiah and Wes have proven their ability to cross generations, which left Brad wondering where the duo felt the best place was to hear one of their songs -- whether it be a coffee shop, MMA fight, or otherwise. “I always feel like they're just so quiet in a coffee shop,” Wes admits. “Two teenagers making out in a car,” adds Jeremiah. “I was thinking a dentist’s office,” Wes laughs.
Congratulations are in order for their new album, Automatic, released on Valentine’s Day 2025. They could credit the release date to an idea from another musician friend, Ben Kweller, who told them “Lumineers is for lovers,” says Wes. “I like that. We're trying to put out a shirt that doesn't get us sued by the State of Virginia, but no, it was not intentional,” he admits. “It was pure happenstance, but it does feel weirdly appropriate.”
In their efforts to stay true to their sound, Wes says the duo tries to “say the most with the least,” figuring out “minimal ways to do something,” while also spending the appropriate time with the lyrics. The words, he says, may not be “about my life necessarily, or it's trying to tell a story and tell that as unflinchingly or as honestly as you can. I would like to believe that that has a resonance, that if you're just writing to sound clever that has a different feeling to it. It's also something that I got early on, listening to Tom Petty's 'Free Falling,' where he's like, ‘She's a good girl, loves her mother. Loves Jesus and America too…’ and it's this smattering of imagery that only he could come up with. It's just perfect though, and he kind of takes you to the scene and he sets it in a way that feels so personal. I think that that as an example was like, ‘Wow, no one's writing like that.’”
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This album came about rather quickly, over seven days of writing, “Which is very quick for us,” Jeremiah says. “I would imagine it'd be quick for any band, but six months of writing ‘Cleopatra,’ about three months of writing album three ['III'], about half that for ‘Brightside,’ and you see a trend happening. I live in Italy full time and I moved back to Denver. Well, I went back to my old house. It's still there in Denver where Wes still lives. We met in my basement.”
“Ironically, no one lives in your house in Denver anymore but we still go in the basement,” Wes laughs. “We have like, the whole run of the house. It's like, ‘Let's go where there's garden level.' It’s just where we prefer.”
“But, it was really fast,” Jeremiah continues, “and I think that it was odd that Wes and I looked at each other and Wes was like, ‘I think you can fly home,’ and I was like, ‘Nah, there's still gotta be more toil… a little bit of doubt. I think in the past we tended to maybe strangle our music metaphorically to the point that we knew, and I think it had to be done that way.”
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“From that sort of, you can call it OCD, I'm even proud of our obsessiveness with our songwriting format together over the last two decades, I think that it developed a series of creative shorthand with each other, whereas when I'm playing piano typically Wes is playing guitar and he's singing, we start to kind of fill these grooves in where I don't feel like it's copy and paste from previous songs we've written together. It's sort of like there's an incredible hive mind or synergy that we have creatively that can only be obtained through so much work together.”
Don’t miss Brad Steiner’s full Check In with Wesley and Jeremiah of The Lumineers above.