How Lucius Embraced ‘Good Grief’ on New LP
In 2013, folk-pop five-piece Lucius made waves with its debut album, Wildewoman — a record filled with lush harmonies and a soulful Sixties feel. But fans thinking they’d be in for the same kind of sound on the band’s follow-up couldn’t have been more wrong. Following the success of Wildewoman, Lucius’ Jess Wolfe, Holly Laessig, Dan Molad, Peter Lalish and Andrew Burri spent most of their time on the road. It was a huge change for the then-Brooklyn-based band. “All of a sudden we were gone 300 days out of the year, and we didn’t know what we were going into,” says vocalist Wolfe.
Lucius’ latest album, Good Grief, reflects the challenges the band met on tour and confronts them head-on through moody Eighties-synth melodies and raw lyrics about the hardships of marriage. The band’s second LP is a clear departure from their sunny debut, but the introspective effort shows a new sense of maturity. Lucius’ dual lead singers, Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe, opened up about the pains of success, how touring affected their relationships and finding humor in grief.
How have your lives changed since your debut record? It feels like a million years ago now.
Holly Laessig: It does feel like a long time, but it wasn’t that long ago. So much has happened, so it feels like a long time. It was two and a half years ago.
Jess Wolfe: “We’ve been gone for such a long time” — it’s a lyric from “Dusty Trails.” It’s wild because it feels like we’ve experienced so much and when you experience so much in such a concentrated period of time, sometimes it’s just completely overwhelming and you can’t process it. Sometimes it feels like every day is the best day of your life. It’s a weird partnership of feelings, if that makes any sense.
Do you find humor in sadness? Obviously the title Good Grief is an amalgamation of those feelings.
Laessig: We wanted to make sure the title did have that kind of humor and poking fun at ourselves for complaining. We were recording all of these songs that were so heavy, and we needed some kind of comic relief. It was the perfect way to describe the good, the bad and the funny. It’s really important to find humor in those kind of things because it’s too much to air otherwise. Things can be too heavy if you can’t find that, so I think it’s a really important thing to maintain, especially when you’re gone so much and live in such a nontraditional existence.
Wolfe: Embracing grief — finding the light in the darkness, so to speak.
Does this theme carry throughout the whole record or just certain parts?
Wolfe: Well, certain songs like “Born Again Teen” are that sort of “relief” from the darkness. We have a couple of songs like that, that provide an escape. As a whole, the record speaks to both of those sentiments and in each song, that title stays true and relevant.
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