CONFRONTING THE DARKNESS
The Lumineers come to Ottawa to share a moving story of addiction’s toll on a family
On their third album, III, the Colorado-based folk rockers
The Lumineers tell the story of a family torn apart by addiction. It’s a concept album in that each of the 10 songs add to the story, and each one has a dramatic video, directed by Kevin Phillips, to go with it. In this interview, singer-songwriter-guitarist Wesley Schultz explains the origin of the ambitious project, and how he hopes the videos help people understand the story behind the songs. The band is on a world tour that stops in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa in early March.
Q What inspired the story of the Sparks family?
A It came from what was going on in my own life. My wife and I have been taking care of this family member on her side. We tried to buy her a house and fix that up for her. She’s an alcoholic and we had to evict her from that because she was wrecking the house and herself, and we tried to put her in rehab and she escaped a number of times, didn’t want to be there. She ended up in jail in another state, and is now living in and out of shelters and basically homeless. There’s been 10 years of that, and it led to trying to make sense of it, and not hate that person but maybe try to empathize a little bit and understand it and cope with it.
Q You made it a fictional family. A Yeah, I was trying to tell the story but also not hurt someone in the process. I’ve been to Al-Anon meetings, and been around people who are addicts and I think the common thing is shame. I didn’t want to shame this person with these stories but I wanted to tell the story as it was and not sugar-coat it, or make it a caricature that wasn’t real and didn’t feel real.
Q Were you concerned the whole concept might not connect with fans?
A Yeah, we thought it was sort of a niche idea that might alienate a lot of people but it’s been really unifying for us. The amount of people that have said they can relate to something like this, that number is way bigger than I could have imagined.
Q The videos are a really compelling part of the project. What inspired that idea?
A Something I really loved was watching the series of videos by Florence and the Machine a couple of albums ago. And then my wife showed me some videos from Lemonade, Beyonce’s project, and I was equally blown away. But I also started to notice that there was a percentage of fans that never really understood some of the stories being told. At shows, I would sometimes say a little about the backstory, and through that, I realized that a lot of people didn’t know what I was singing about. So trying to couple this with visuals appealed to me because I felt like I could further tell that story. Q Was there a certain song that people misconstrued?
A I can give the example of the song, Ho Hey: It was about a breakup. But everybody started dancing to it at their weddings. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. But that’s also what’s so great about music, you can write something and someone can interpret it a different way.
Q I guess people don’t always listen to lyrics.
A I’m guilty of it, too. We’ll pick out one lyric or one line and that will define the whole song, and you ignore the story. I think that’s just the human thing. We just sort of skim things and cherry-pick the things that speak to us. If anything, I’d blame myself for failing to communicate well enough for people to know what I was singing about. The video idea was another way to communicate with an audience about what the songs were about to me.
Q Was it a surprise that the video series got into the Toronto International Film Festival?
A That was a really, really big deal for us. I remember telling the director, Kevin Phillips, that we got in, and he didn’t believe me. He made this beautiful movie, Super Dark Times, and that film hadn’t gotten in so I think he was really caught off-guard. The idea was that we wanted to make something that might be mistaken for a film, and it was a really validating feeling to be seen by TIFF as a film. We got into one of the top five film festivals in the world with a movie with no dialogue.
Q Do you think fans are getting the story this time?
A I think it’s like this underground thing. There are a lot of people who know of the story. Some followed it closely and some are brand new to it.
But I think the music itself is always the starting point, and I think that’s in a good place, so it allows people to be curious. If the album wasn’t any good, the story wouldn’t really matter. Q And how’s the live show going?
A So far, it’s been great. This is an arena run so it’s a totally different stage and setup. It’s been a big learning curve for us. It’s the biggest stage we’ve played on compared to any other tour. It involves a catwalk that surrounds an enclosed pit of people, and outside that, more people are standing and seated people behind that, so there’s a lot of moving parts and places and the show doesn’t really stand still too often. So for us, it really flies by. This is the fun part for us.