Song Exploder - The Lumineers - Ophelia

Episode Date: April 28, 2016

The Lumineers released their second album on April 8, 2016. Their first album went platinum, and they spent months touring relentlessly in support of it. That schedule took a toll on their relationship, but they ended up putting it into their songs. In this episode, Wes and Jeremiah break down their song “Ophelia." You’ll hear their demos and a version that didn’t make it to the album. They’ll explain how the final track is not just a product of what they put into it, but what they decided to leave out. This episode is sponsored by SeatGeek and Lagunitas Brewing Company.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hurway. The Lumineers released their second album on April 8, 2016. Their first album went platinum, and they spent months touring relentlessly in support of it. That schedule took a toll on their relationship, but they ended up putting it into their songs. In this episode, Wes and Jeremiah break down their song, Ophelia. You'll hear their demos and a version that didn't make it to the album. They'll explain how the final track is not just a product of what they put into it,

but what they decided to leave out. My name is Rishi K. Sherway. You're listening to Song Exploder. My name is Jeremiah Freitz. Yeah, my name is Wesley Schultz. And we're the Lumineers. Ramsey, New Jersey is where we grew up. To prepare for this podcast, I was looking through my old files,

and I found this file. It was this old janky idea called Ophelia, I think, hyphen Ramsey. I can remember that moment being a little. Ramsey and it was really cool to find that. I mean, especially to hear how unpolished and there's nothing that cool about it. There's not really much there, you know, but with me and Wes, we see these ideas and they make sense to us. I don't know if you sent me that right away or what, but in my head, when I hear it, I hear it the same way I heard it the first time, which is, I love this, I love this, let's do this here. Can we change this? Can we shorten that?

No, no, that's cool. There was something you do that. I really like, there was like a little more spaced out. It just reminded us how much we worked on a song like this. These songs don't come easy to us. You can hear that, we call it the deedle-deeep part of the piano, and yeah, Wes said, let's cut that in half, let's try that. I remember playing right around the time our first album came out in a back bar in LA. They had this piano, this giant circular booth, a bunch of our friends. We had played a set, and now we're gathered around a piano.

And now we're gathered around a piano. And Jair's playing that. And I'm saying, oh, Ophelia. Don't you come up with that? You wish it was like that every time? And sometimes it's like pulling teeth. I heard Tom Waits talking about how, you know, you almost have to sneak up behind the muse and like take it out.

So the song began as Ophelia, but immediately they felt like they had to change it because the 60s band, the band, already had a song called Ophelia. I felt like it was a parking spot that was already taken, I don't want to encroach on this sacred space that is their song called Ophelia. But the more I started using other names, it just didn't work. It wasn't the right musicality to the word. I was trying to think of like a jo-jo or something with the O and the A at the end,

but it wasn't working. Finally, I had no choice, but go with it. Oh, Ophelia, you've been on my mind, girl, since the flood. Oh, Ophelia. The chorus poured out in a very effortless way. But they got stuck. They couldn't come up with a verse they liked. Eventually they wrote something, but...

I just knew, hey, this verse is just weak, and it doesn't live up to the power of the hook melody that Jared come up with. So I was like, it almost makes you more upset because you know that there's this shiny, beautiful part of the song, and then you're not really matching it with something to balance that. No one will ever hear the chorus. if you don't make the verse hold its own. And nothing can be worse sometimes

than having what you know to be a chorus with no verse or a verse with no course. It's like you have the winning lottery ticket, but you don't have anywhere to cash it. You're like, what the hell's the point? Well, then four years passes. And when it came time to make a new record, they dug this idea back up.

Yeah, we started really working on it in January of last year. I remember thinking, well, it's called Ophelia, so maybe I'll go back and read Hamlet and I'll figure out how to tell the story of Hamlet and combine it with something else. That felt really contrived. So we just ended up demoing the song and through the demoing process

just playing with the melody, these lyrics just kind of popped out. I, when I was young, I should have known better and I can't feel no remorse. Can't feel no remorse. It keeps talking about this idea of this massive disconnect.

I felt very disconnected emotionally from a lot of different things, and I don't know that I had actually understood that I felt that way. I thought I was being really good at being on the road and at life, I guess, and I was really just surviving the road. I think we ended up on a bus together

and touring together, and we'd look over at each other, and it was like we were kind of strangers to one another. And I can't feel no remorse. and you don't feel nothing bad. So a big part of the writing this record was just sort of understanding who I'm sitting next to when I do the writing and not having it be this literally like a stranger to yourself and to that person. I'd never planned to say those phrases.

It just poured out and I didn't really know how to feel about it. I thought West did a really cool job of articulating these experiences that we were really experiencing. We went with those lyrics because I felt like they did the song justice, but that's the That's really not how I'm usually comfortable working. I usually want to make sure of it or something. There's like an OCD quality to it. When it came time to record, the band went to upstate New York, where producer Simon Felice had picked out a studio.

It's called the Clubhouse in Reinbeck, New York. So right near Woodstock. It was kind of awesome to watch because the engineer, Ryan Hewitt. So he's going around with essentially a stethoscope, trying to figure out where in this clubhouse recording studio is the best place to stomp. We did some group stomp's. to get that sort of wall of sound vibe. It was me, Wes, and the producer Simon with our boots.

On the wood floor in the studio. I'm walking in, drinking a coffee, watching these guys walk around a room stomping. That's how that you guys found it. It's just one corner of the room that just happened to have just enough, you know, give to the wood, and we all just gather around a mic

and stomped in unison. Dinosaur footstomp, that was the kick drum sound in our head, like a brontosaurus just being like, boom, you know, just heavy. thick. You're kind of creating drums around that simple footstop that used to be the blues players. You know, that was it.

And then you're just almost giving that some steroids. You're just pumping that up. But that's all you need sometimes. In the last chorus, I sort of heard this idea of dropping a beat. You know, I hate beats, but I was like, maybe we could do a beat for the last course. And we tried it, and it just felt really sluggish and just didn't vibe.

We were like trying to be somebody else that we weren't. As a drummer, Jarrah's putting his ego aside a lot. He's not going to really show off a whole lot, even though he could play circles around a lot of players, but he's deciding that I'm going to serve the song, and it's sort of acted out in the restraint. I get so much out of my system to help write chord structure and melody and instrumentation

that when it comes to writing or performing drums, I've already gotten so much out of my system of being able to help with the song that it allows me to be simple. We had Byron Isaacs on the bass. He's got chops. He's nasty. Wes and I have a very strong idea of what we want the music to sound like. And we can do everything, at least we think we can do everything, but bass. You know, this electric bass is like this sort of mystery to us still,

how to implement that into our own song. It has the only, like, bass fill we've ever had on a record. So it was the grand piano that I used mostly, and then there was an upright. And normally I'd be more drawn to the upright, but working with Ryan Hew at the engineer, he was able to get the sounds that I was explaining to him. There's a moment the word paycheck where I thought the microphone clipped, and it's just a vocal chords kind of mashing together.

It's just that's how it actually sounds. And it's one of my favorite moments. So every time we would listen back, it's like this natural overdrive that just happens because we picked just a right. note where I probably couldn't sing anything above that, but it's the ultimate you're sort of reaching for the note. I think the reverb acted as almost as like a stitching.

Wes's vocal and the piano, since there was no other instruments, literally to glue those, the extra reverb really made sense and we really fell in love with that quickly that sort of bridged the gap between one instrument and the lead vocal, and it sounds awesome. It's like an emotion combined with a physical place. You describe these really vague things. Like, I'm thinking of a, you know, a very long, dark cave where I can barely see the light. That's Simon. That's Simon, Jare, and me.

I think it was just kind of, we call it like a gang of sailors just singing. It's got sailor gang all over it. We tried guitar and it was like, is this song just going to be piano? You remember we brought in horn players? It was like Bruce Springsteen's horn section. We knew somebody who knew them and they came. in and they laid down all these beautiful horns. I got a new girl top.

It's totally different, but we realized it wasn't really what we were going for. So we kind of had to laugh because we were with these world-class musicians in a band that we love and we didn't use it. Ultimately, like most of our songs with Wes and I, the best ideas are sitting right in front of us. But we just still got to check out what's behind them and like, oh, what's under that rock? rock and it's just funny we'll usually come back to something that was pretty evident from the

get-go but we still got to make sure that what we have is good and now here's ophelia by the lumineers in its entirety visit songexploder.combe and i can't feel low don't i feel long I've got a new That's all she wrote. Visit songexploder.net For more on the Lumineers, including a link to buy this song. I have a new album of my own

coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out of full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, her way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade,

I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby,

Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage.

And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website. Rishi-kesh.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of Song Exploder at songexplor.net or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Next time on Song Exploder, Carly Ray Jepson. Song Exploder is a proud member of the Radiotopia Network from PRX, made possible by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork.

Find the show at Song Exploder on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. This episode was edited by Christian Coons and me. My name is Rishi Kaysh Your Way. Thanks for listening.