MC: How would you describe the Lumineers sound?
Schultz: Kind of a combination of Billy Joel and Feist. We’re crafting these songs that are in their own little worlds unto themselves. But there’s a lot of spontaneity and vulnerability within the songs.
MC: I certainly hear the Billy Joel influence. In particular, his early work was very storyteller-oriented and that’s what you guys are all about too.
Schultz: I came from the background of wanting to be a singer/songwriter. And then I met Jer and he brings this whole different element to what we do. He wasn’t particularly concerned with lyrics or stories before we met. And I wasn’t particularly concerned with the nuance and sound and the cinematic quality to music. He colors the music and brings something very different to what we do that makes it more interesting than just singer/songwriter music. For instance, if you listen to a song like “Ophelia” Jer came up with these effects on the line “honey I love you” that sound like a stick through the spokes of a bicycle wheel. He creates these little Easter eggs or this noise floor to a lot of things that we do. It’s very subtle, but if it wasn’t there a lot of the songs wouldn’t be half as good.
MC: You’ve been quoted as saying, “We want to focus on the core, not the illusion.” What do you mean by that?
Schultz: I feel that, by and large, in a lot of mainstream music there isn’t a lot of storytelling. It’s sort of like this is how I feel and this is who I miss. It’s like you’re sitting there and holding a mirror up to your face. We were trying to get to a point where there were actually characters in the stories. I harvested a lot of stories I heard growing up or that were in my family for the first and most recent album. They were inspired by things I’ve seen and heard.
Regarding the core versus illusion, a lot of people get caught up in the window dressing. If we play these songs on a synth or an electric or acoustic guitar, a lot of people get hung up on how you dress it up. But the reality is that it’s really about the song. A good song is a good song.
See More: PHOTOS: The Lumineers at the Santa Barbara Bowl
MC: Can you give me some examples of the inspiration for some of your songs on your most recent album?
Schultz: If you look at a song like “Gun Song” the backstory was that my dad had just passed away and his clothes were still in his drawers. And I was running late for work and I needed black socks for the waitering job I had, or I’d be sent home. I went into the dresser drawer in his room to grab some socks and found a gun in there. And that got me thinking about him.
And then “Cleopatra” was inspired by a person that I met through a friend. She was the first female taxi driver in Georgia next to Russia. And hearing about how her life began, with falling in love at 16 and being proposed to. But her father had just passed away and she never gave the guy an answer. And he left rejected and heartbroken and she viewed it as her great love that she missed out on. And so as he left he left these muddy footprints and she refused to wash them off her carpet. So I used chunks of this story along with some other things and pieced a story together. So there are a lot of these folklore type stories that are passed down and you’re always waiting for that next morsel of a story that’s so bizarre or interesting in some way that it has to be true.
MC: When and why did you make the decision to add keyboardist Stelth Ulvang and bassist Byron Isaacs to the live band?
Schultz: So Jer plays piano and we both write all the parts in the demo process. We just realized that a lot of the songs were gonna need more instrumentation and more hands on deck. The first thing we needed was piano so we went to Stelth and he was eventually available to work with us. And our producer Simon Felice knew Byron personally. He’s got an amazing backstory playing with Joan Baez, Levon Helm and a ton of other people.
