THE LUMINEERS Coming to Myth
The Lumineers announced today the release of their second album Cleopatra via Dualtone, an Entertainment One company, on April 8th. In addition the Lumineers have announced the first leg of their World tour commencing April 14th in the UK. The band also shares their first single "Ophelia" which can be heard here. It took four years for The Lumineers (Wesley Schultz, Jeremiah Fraites and Neyla Pekarek) to follow up their platinum-plus, multi-Grammy-nominated, self-titled debut - which spent 46 weeks on the Billboard 200 and peaked at #2 -- but Cleopatra is well worth the wait. After exploding onto the scene with their monster single, "Ho Hey" (which spent a staggering 62 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #3) and its follow-up, "Stubborn Love" (recently featured on President Barack Obama's Spotify playlist), The Lumineers spent a solid three years touring six of the seven continents. During that time, The Lumineers earned a pair of Grammy nominations (Best New Artist, Best Americana Album), contributed two songs to The Hunger Games franchise (including the hit Jennifer Lawrence/James Newton Howard collaboration, "The Hanging Tree") and sold an impressive 1.7 million albums in the U.S., and 3 million worldwide.
Cleopatra proves the band are neither taking their good fortune for granted, nor sitting back on their laurels. With the help of producer Simone Felice (The Felice Brothers, The Avett Brothers), the man Wesley calls "our shaman," the band ensconced themselves in Clubhouse, a recording studio high atop a hill in rural Rhinebeck, N.Y., not far from Woodstock.
"We took the same approach this time as we did with the first album, recording demos in a small house we rented in the original Denver neighborhood where we first moved," explains Wesley, contributing the lyrical ideas while collaborating on the music with Jer, who tackled a variety of instruments, including guitar, the very prominent piano and trademark tribal drums.
"The record is our greatest hits reflecting what's happened to us over the last three years," added Wesley. "We tried to come up with the best possible version of every song, so we recorded a lot of different iterations, changing the tempos, dressing 'em up, stripping 'em down. It took a lot of work to make them sound so easy. We're very passionate about the process. It was a very intense and beautiful experience. There was a lot of battling, a lot of tears, but some amazing stuff came out, and at the end, we were much better off. It transformed our relationship."