Lucius turns heartbreak into dance floor joy
Album co-producer Brandi Carlile guides duo’s performance to maximum payoff
Brandi Carlile already knew the women of Los Angeles’ Lucius were special when she brought them along to Joni Mitchell’s place in Bel-Air one night not long ago.
“Whatever that intangible thing is that a singer has that can grab you by the nostrils and make you pay attention — they’ve got it,” the Grammy-winning folkrock star says of Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, who’ve performed with Carlile many times over the last few years, including at the recent Recording Academy’s MusiCares Person of the Year gala honoring Mitchell in Las Vegas.
Still, it didn’t hurt that evening at Mitchell’s — where Lucius was taking part in one of the private all-star “Joni Jams” she has held occasionally since recovering from a 2015 aneurysm — to have her feelings confirmed by one Paul McCartney.
“We’d heard Paul might drop in, and he did,” Carlile remembers. “Just in preparation the girls had learned a deep cut: ‘Goodbye,’ a song Paul wrote for Mary Hopkin. And after having backed up everyone else vocally all night, they step out, and they sing this song, which prompted Paul to go into a 15-minute speech about how good he feels about where music is headed because of people like them.
“There’s just moments that Lucius have facilitated that I’ll never forget,” she adds.
Now Carlile is hoping to spread the word beyond Mitchell’s A-list circle with “Second Nature,” a dazzling new Lucius album she produced alongside her regular collaborator Dave Cobb. The duo’s recently released fourth studio LP follows work they’ve done as in-demand background singers with everyone from Roger Waters and Ozzy Osbourne to Harry Styles and the War on Drugs.
Yet unlike the duo’s rootsy earlier stuff, “Second Nature” mines an ’80s-pop sound with lush synths and sleek disco grooves under the women’s laser-guided vocals. Many of the album’s 10 songs address Wolfe’s recent divorce from Dan Molad, who plays drums in the Lucius band; some of them ponder the isolation of the pandemic. But the effect throughout is a kind of plaintive uplift — “like dancing with a broken heart,” as they put it in the opening title track.
“We wanted to be able to turn something dark into something joyful,” says Wolfe, 37. “Give me something to move to. Give me something that makes me feel like we’re gonna be together again.”
As tasty as the throwback arrangements can be — many a funky bass line here — it’s Lucius’ singing that gives the music its emotional wallop. Wolfe and Laessig, 36, who met as students at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, intertwine their voices with almost-telepathic precision; they can do complex harmonies but they often sing in a striking unison that, especially when deployed in tandem with their matching stage outfits, lends the songs an otherworldly voice-fromabove quality.
The collaboration with Carlile and Cobb grew out of a Lucius gig the two saw a couple of years ago during Carlile’s Girls Just Wanna Weekend festival in Mexico.
“We were standing on a balcony watching them, and Dave was like, ‘That’s
the best band that nobody knows about,’ ” Carlile recalls. Cobb, a fellow Grammy winner for his work with Carlile and Chris Stapleton, told Carlile that he thought they could help the duo make a killer disco album, which intrigued Lucius when word later reached them.
“That didn’t sound like something they’d do,” Laessig says with a laugh. “Talk about outside their comfort zone.”
The women had started writing songs in Nashville, Tennessee, working for the first time with pro co-writers such as Trent Dabbs
and Lori McKenna. This was before COVID-19 — barely. “The lockdown was announced while we were writing in Sheryl Crow’s barn,” Wolfe says.
Back in LA to quarantine — and off the road for the longest stretch in ages — Wolfe says she came to face the truth she’d been avoiding about her and Molad’s broken marriage. She reckons she and Laessig wrote 80 songs together and with others over Zoom. “And probably 65 of those were about my divorce,” she says.
To record the album, Lucius returned to Nashville and set up shop
for three weeks in Cobb’s RCA Studio A, where Dolly Parton famously cut “Jolene,” as Wolfe points out. Cobb talked about channeling ABBA, Donna Summer and the Bee Gees; Carlile invoked the music of what she calls her “adolescent immersion into gay drama: Elton John and Erasure and Janet Jackson.” The idea was dance music played by hand, with a strong dose of nostalgia meant to “feel like a hug for people after lockdown,” Laessig says.
Carlile notes that amid all the sparkle and flash, the women “wanted to keep some reverence on those vocals — to keep being this twin Sinead O’Connor tidal-wave thing.” In the studio, she guided their performances toward maximum payoff.
“I think one of the places you can see my thumbprint is that basically every final chorus goes through the ceiling,” Carlile says. “Those girls can blow. Nobody can out-sing them. So it’s hard not to use those tools when you have them.”
Choosing to concentrate on their own music didn’t come without a cost for Lucius, who spent much of 2017 and 2018 earning steady pay as background singers on Waters’ massive Us + Them world tour.
“We were living very comfortably,” Wolfe says of the top-flight amenities of a road show that rang up more than $220 million in ticket sales, according to Pollstar. Sitting out the Pink Floyd co-founder’s upcoming tour, “we’re gonna have some FOMO (fear of missing out) for sure,” Wolfe admits. “But it’s time to turn the page and focus on getting ourselves out there again.”
Lucius’ own tour is set to kick off at the end of April, and the women also have a handful of upcoming dates opening for Carlile. Along for the ride will be Wolfe’s ex-husband/ bandmate — “We’re in rehearsals now, and it feels more comfortable than I thought it would,” she says — and the 1-year-old son Laessig shares with her husband. Of launching a new album while caring for an infant, Laessig says, “It’s great. I mean, it’s a lot. It’s a lot of greatness. And a lot of tiredness.”
Yet the songs on “Second Nature” could be just what she needs.
“I can’t not dance to it, and I do not dance,” Carlile says of the album. “I’m like the awkward lesbian. But my friends and I, we put it on and we go (crazy).”