So you think you know what a perfect opening line is? Try this one: “I had a dream where you were standing there with a gun up to my head / You were asking how it felt, to which I said: ‘I cannot lie, there is a tingling down my spine’.”
Throw in a swell of strings and a dreamy harmony that might as well be asking what flavour ice cream you would like today and you know you’re in for something special.
When it comes to Lucius, you should never judge a book by its cover. The Brooklyn indie-pop outfit, led by vocalists Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, pitched Wildewoman, their 2013 debut, as a sweet 1960s-throwback pop album. But its follow-up, Good Grief, which spawned the above-mentioned opening track, Madness, hints at a darker underbelly to their sound.
Wolfe, who formed Lucius with Laessig when both were studying at Boston’s Berklee School of Music in 2005, laughs when her line is thrown back at her.
“That song is an actual transcription of a dream that Holly had,” she says, chuckling, “so the darkness does exist. It’s not just there to surprise people.
"I do think that people will be surprised by these songs, even if it's a 'pop' album, or whatever you wanna call it. There is a lot of depth and darkness to this record – definitely more than Wildewoman. That's all just based on experience and trying to dissect a load of these feelings that were accumulating across a couple of years, because we're together all the time; we're musical collaborators and the best of friends. So I'm seeing her experience, she's seeing mine, and we're sharing a lot of them."
The past few years have been a tumultuous period for the pair. On one hand, Wildewoman sprouted legs and galloped into the distance in a way neither of them expected; they have shared stages and collaborated with people such as Roger Waters, Mavis Staples, Jeff Tweedy and David Byrne. On the other, the relentless touring took its toll.
“It was a really special couple of years touring, seeing the world and performing in all these different places,” Wolfe says. “It was a dream come true, and so much momentum was built here and in the States. But it was also a surprisingly difficult experience, because there was so much time spent away from home. I think we were home for 20 days in 2014.
“So I think by the end of our touring cycle,” she says, “there was so much that had to come out that there was sort of an explosive writing session afterwards, a collection of feelings and thoughts that had been floating around for a couple of years that Holly and I sort of unloaded. It was very therapeutic.”
Never break up
To be fair to Lucius, Good Grief does not fall into the cliched trap of moaning musicians with nothing to write about except the hard graft of the road. And as hard as it was, there was never a point where they considered not continuing.
“There were moments where I felt tired, but I never felt like I didn’t want to make another record or play another show,” Wolfe says. “The shows are everything to us: being able to use that energy and find some connection with the audience, and hopefully the audience are looking to journey with you. There’s no greater joy.
“Even if it’s one hour of a very laborious 24-hour day, it makes it worth it, or we wouldn’t be doing it. Or we couldn’t.”
When they came off tour, the partners took two weeks off before throwing themselves headlong into the writing process again. Instead of writing and recording in New York, they spent time in Los Angeles, although Wolfe says the change didn’t have any major impact on their methods.
“The songs came from a lot of different places and all different environments, and all different emotional states,” she says. “I don’t think that it necessarily had to do with where we were in the world.
“You have an endless amount of time for your first record, because nobody’s expecting anything. With this one, it hits some different sounds just because we’re older, and there’s a different sound because we’ve played together as a band for several years now, and we know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.”
Throwback sound?
The songs – darkness, lightness and everything in between – come together beautifully, and there is a definite sense of moving on from the well-done pastiche sound of Wildewoman into more daring musical territory.
A lot of the “throwback” comments, says Wolfe, came from the fact that she and Laessig have distinct fashion styles and dress alike on stage and for photoshoots.
“We are admirers of that era, the 1960s and 1970s, musically. Some of our favourite songs ever written and favourite artists were most active at that time. But it was never a conscious effort to say we’re going to make a record that sounds like the 1960s.
“It was the same for this record,” Wolfe says. “There was not a decision made where we said it’s not going to sound like the 1960s. I just think it was because [people] saw us, and they saw two women singing together, sometimes harmonising, wearing exactly the same thing, I think if we wore jeans and flannel shirts, they might think of us differently.”
When all is said and done, eras and influences – sartorial and musical – had less of a hand in Good Grief than good old-fashioned human experience. Whatever happens with Lucius in the future, says Wolfe, they feel like they have cracked open a vault of possibilities with this album.
“We were just exploring things; we were open to whatever was going to happen. There wasn’t a particular motive in terms of what we wanted to accomplish, or whether we wanted it to be a pop record or not; we didn’t have guidelines in that way.
“We just said: ‘Let’s try to be as honest as possible.’ And I think that good songs have been born from that.”
- Good Grief is out now. Lucius play the Academy, Dublin, on April 5th
