The Commercial Appeal - Go Memphis
LUCERO
Memphis roots-rockers return with the pandemic-recorded LP, ‘When You Found Me’
Memphis Music Beat Bob Mehr
Memphis Commercial Appeal USA TODAY NETWORK – TENN.
Ask Lucero's Ben Nichols about the making of the Memphis roots-rockers' new album, “When You Found Me,” and his assessment has little to do with production techniques or new sounds or even music at all.
“Well, we all made it through with no infections,” says Nichols of the sessions that took place last summer in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Doing this record was a little different than usual, to put it mildly.”
Following 2018’s “Among the Ghosts” Lucero — Nichols, guitarist Brian Venable, drummer Roy Berry, bassist John C. Stubblefield and keyboardist Rick Steff — elected to return to Sam Phillips Recording and reunite with Grammywinning producer Matt Ross-spang. That familiarity proved to be a comfort amid the uncertainty of 2020.
“It’s nice working with Matt, who’s a hometown guy and at a place like Phillips, which is literally half a block from our practice space. We’ve built a welcoming, at-home feeling there. Which made working during the pandemic a lot easier. It felt pretty safe,” says Nichols.
“I was mostly singing in a vocal booth by myself and the guys on the [studio] floor were wearing masks. If we were together in the control room listening or mixing, we were all wearing masks. So we made it work.”
For most bands, 2020 was a completely lost year, but Nichols says Lucero was among the lucky ones.
“Everything especially touring came to an abrupt halt in March,” he says. “Fortunately we’d done about a monthand-a-half-long tour in January and February, and so we came home with money in the bank before everything stopped. Otherwise we would’ve been in dire straits.”
Although Nichols had actually started working on new songs immediately after the release of the band’s 2018 album, “Among the Ghosts,” when the quarantine hit in the spring, he was able to dig in and further refine the material.
“I was home and really dove into the demo process working in Garageband. The demos got developed, or maybe overdeveloped, but I sent them to the band and everyone learned their parts separately,” says Nichols. “Which isn’t how we normally do stuff. We usually get together and bash it out in the prac
tice space. So we came into the studio not having played the songs together at all. We started with my demos and chipped away at them until we found the Lucero songs underneath.”
Recorded over a two-week stretch in July, the band may have been ensconced in the studio, but Nichols notes that the chaos of the outside world crept into the sessions.
“Lucero’s not usually a very socially or politically oriented band, it’s always been more of a personal emotional thing with the songs for me,” he says. “But recording during the Black Lives Matter protests and as California was burning with wildfires, it had an impact. Last summer was a highly intense moment in numerous ways. Some of that tension that leaked onto the record. Which was fine because we wanted this record to have a darker sound to it.”
Some of that moodier quality comes via the introduction of synthesizers into Lucero’s sonic palette. Nichols had already been toying with synths in his demos, and Steff was encouraged to indulge further on the record.
“Rick didn’t want to do it. He loves synths, but he didn’t want to be blamed for bringing synthesizers to Lucero,” chuckles Nichols, of the veteran keyboardist who was added to the band in 2012. “Rick’s always been worried about upsetting the hardcore Lucero fanbase.
But we felt like, man, that’s our job, we gotta keep them on their toes. We gotta do what makes us happy. And synths were really what we wanted to hear. It was a lot of fun putting those sounds on a Lucero record for the first time.”
Nichols, who got married in his early 40s and has a young child, draws on his daily domestic life on several songs, while considering his deeper family roots on “Coffin Nails,” the story of his grandfather dealing with the death of his own father, a veteran of World War I. The album also boasts a selection of epic story songs like runway lament “Outrun the Moon” and the stomping “Back in Ohio,” about American adventurer William Morgan who fought in the Cuban Revolution.
The album plays as an emotional journey, opening with “Have You Lost Your Way” and closing with the title track “When You Found Me.” “I like the feeling of starting off lost and ending up found,” says Nichols.
Having been together nearly a quarter century and recorded a dozen albums, Nichols marvels at the fact that each Lucero album feels like a process of discovery.
“Each one is a learning experience; each one is an experiment. We feel free to pursue whatever direction we’re pulled in. At the same time we’re making records that are more intentional,
we’re hitting the mark more consistently,” says Nichols. “I felt like ‘Among the Ghosts’ was our best record in numerous ways. And so the goal is to try and make something better than the last record every time.”
After completing the album, the band reunited to play a series of ticketed livestream concerts. “Luckily the fans have been really supportive online,” says Nichols. “Without them and without those livestreams I’m not sure what we would’ve done.”
Despite the current inability to tour, Nichols says there was no thought of holding back or delaying the record’s release.
“We looked at it like, a band does two main things: You tour and make records. We can’t go on the road, so we might as well make and release records. Will we be able to sell as many without traveling to support it? I don’t know. It still beats waiting around indefinitely for things to go back to normal,” he says.
“I mean a lot of people say the world is never going to go back to normal, or back to the way it was. Which is really scary for musicians. Will people come out to live shows? Some people will be jonesing to get back out there and some people are going to be more wary, understandably,” says Nichols. “It all still is a big unknown.”