Some lead singers of bands about to put out their eagerly awaited follow-up to a hit first album might be stressing out in the days just before release. Wesley Schultz of The Lumineers, on the other hand, went off on a casual mountain trek. “I was hiking to, like, a tent-mountain ranger hut or something,” he tells Billboard over the phone from Denver, where his folk-rock trio (including drummer/pianist Jeremiah Caleb Fraites and cellist Neyla Pekarek) is based. “It was beautiful once you got there,” he explains, “but I think I climbed, like, the equivalent of 100 flights of stairs with a 50-pound bag on my back in the snow. I don’t think we knew what we were getting into, but it was fun.”
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Schultz could well be describing the past few years for The Lumineers. They were a struggling trio “playing living rooms, house shows, and if we played a venue it was sometimes without microphones” — that is, until late 2011, when their jangly, uber-earwormy first single “Ho Hey” became ubiquitous, catapulting the band into the pop stratosphere (it stayed in the Hot 100’s top ten for 14 weeks; its eponymously titled album reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200).
”It happened so fast,” Pekarek says. ”I was living in this really crappy apartment working a bazillion side jobs just to pay student loans off, and all of a sudden we’re at the Grammys. I’m just now sort of getting to the point where I’m able to reflect on it.” That made moving forward — especially in an effort to “not make ‘Ho Hey: Part Two,” as Pekarek puts it — difficult. “It’s hard enough to write one good song, much less ten or eleven good tracks,” Schultz says. “I think the hard thing was putting one foot in front of the other and getting the first song finished.”
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“Ophelia,” the jaunty, piano-driven first single on their new album Cleopatra, was that song. “It felt like the missing link,” Fraites explains. Like the rest of Cleopatra (which has defied their expectations yet again and is set to debut atop next week’s Billboard 200 chart), it was conceived during a kind of intensive six-week band camp in a Rhinebeck, N.Y., barn, where Schultz, Fraites, and their producer Simon Felice descended into a songwriting cocoon of sorts. Pekarek was initially invited, then asked to just come for the last ten days; “I was pretty okay not be involved — it was a lot of a bro time,” she says with a laugh. ”It was almost a spiritual existence ‘up on the hill,’ as we called it,” Schultz says. “The seclusion and privacy…we really felt like this hive mind,” Fraites adds. “It’s like when I’ve watched this old Red Hot Chili Peppers documentary, or watching The Band make an album — the real band experience.”
The result is a record of songs that feel like the mature older cousins of “Ho Hey:” less guitar-centric, more piano-forward, light on percussion without totally forgoing the band’s “stomp-and-clap” leanings. “When I listen to [The Lumineers] now, it’s really bizarre how innocent or almost like a demo it sounds,” Schultz says. “A lot of people connected with that, and it’s not like a great tragedy has happened to us because we’ve had a level of success. There are certain pressures, and ‘Ophelia’ definitely touches on that — the pressure you face dealing with the inevitable changes around you. But there’s no quick way to get over that pressure. We just try to have tunnel vision and return to the roots of what got us here.”