In Conversation With #122 - Jeremiah Fraites
Jeremiah Fraites from The Lumineers has just released his debut instrumental solo album ‘Piano Piano’. We caught up to talk about his writing process, putting the album together in lockdown and tour plans (one day).
Did you want to tell us a bit about the recording process?
So basically it was all done in my house in Denver and it was all during lockdown of-course, I think I started in April. I dedicated April, May, June and some of July to record. It was pretty crazy, I have an upright piano in my house where I recorded it and once I finished writing all the music, it just came down to deciding which piano would go with which song. It was pretty crazy, our son was 2 at the time, and we have a dog in the house so it’s always pretty loud which isn’t ideal for recording a quiet piano album.
There was also a house being built next door so there was lots of construction going on and heavy trucks driving by, so the whole thing was pretty chaotic at times. But it was one of the best and worst things I’ll probably never do again. It’s special when I listen to the music back now though, I can sort of remember bits and pieces of those moments captured in time. I think you if you listen to the song ‘Arrival’, around the second chorus very carefully on headphones, you can hear my son in the background playing upstairs. Things like that I think are cool.
So did you produce it yourself or was it collaborative?
I produced it with a guy called David Baron and he’s fantastic. He lives out in New York State, I’ve worked with him a bunch on Lumineers albums. He engineered our last album ‘III’ and has played lots of synths and ethereal type sounds on our records, so he was the first guy I thought of to work with, he helped me co-produce and co-engineer the album. We did it all remotely, which had its interesting points. He was in New York, I was in Denver but thankfully it’s only a two hour time difference. I would set up the microphones to record the grand piano for example, then I would record something and sent it to him and he would say ‘oh try this’, it was a lot of back and forth like that. We would facetime and look at microphone placement and stuff like that, it was kind of crazy, but it worked. There was a wooden wine rack behind my head when I was at the piano and I stuck a microphone in there as an ambient room mic and it sounded great! It was not the most ideal way to do it but it worked.
How long have you been working on these songs?
Believe it or not, back in 2007 I studied in Kingston Upon Thames, I was 21 and it was my first time in Europe and I was there for about 6 months. I came home from a pub one night and I recorded a guitar track and that very same exact recording ended up being the one you hear on ‘Nearsighted’. And that’s the take I did back in 2007. I always thought I would re-record it do it ‘right’ or ‘better’ but then I realised it had a cool vibe, so I just added new piano and strings to make it sound proper. But that’s the oldest on the record.
Some were written last year, so there’s a big timeline. It’s sort of like my greatest hits from the last 15 years of instrumental ideas, it’s been a long time coming to do this album. I intended to work on it more like 2022 when a big Lumineers tour would have been coming to end. But when Covid hit, that in a weird way afforded me all this time at home, staying safe in isolation so I tried to stay active creatively. My wife urged me to use the time to record the album. I had a lot of hesitation, you know without being able to go to a real studio and everything. Not all the songs were done but at some point, it ignited a fire and I started to work very intensely on it. I’d wake up in the morning and for a few weeks I just listened to voice notes of all my ideas and I found about 30 that I liked, then I whittled those down and I think I recorded 13 or 14, then ended up cutting a few and eventually that became the final album ‘Piano Piano’.
Does it feel different releasing your first solo music?
Oh yeh, big time. It was interesting I actually spoke to a buddy of mine, he was in a band I love. At one point he left the band to do numerous solo albums. Now he goes by his own name, but when he left the band originally, he created a band name for his solo project. He said he felt trepidation and fear to go from the protection of your band to go out on your own. I obviously haven’t left the Lumineers, were stronger than ever and everything’s all good. Even Wesley the singer put out his solo album of beautiful covers from other artists. So all is well here, but to leave the protection of the Lumineers and put out something and go out ‘I’m Jeremiah Fraites - check out my album’ originally was terrifying, but I just thought ‘whatever, just keep going’. So, it was really different in that regard. But I treated it in the same way I would for a Lumineers album with the way I listen back to the songs, the way I edited stuff, the way I sequenced the album, the way I wanted it to sound and feel. I treated it like this album was really important to me and I wanted it to feel like an album. So I would say the process was the same but different emotions surrounding it for sure.
Lots of the songs from ‘Piano Piano’ are very cinematic, and I saw when the Lumineers wrote ‘The Salt and the Sea’ it was for a movie. Do you often write for film or other people or is that something you would like to do?
We haven’t done a lot of writing for movies in the Lumineers, we’ve had some stuff when they needed end credit songs. But I think of that differently, for that they want a Lumineers song for the end credits but in terms of actually scoring for film we haven’t done that and I have never done that on a personal level either. I think there will be some things in the next year or two maybe this album will bring me, some work like that perhaps writing for a tv series or something. What would be cool if a director heard something from ‘Piano Piano’ and they wanted to use that, that would be a lot easier!
But ‘The Salt and the Sea’ was interesting story. We got to meet M. Night Shyamalan, the director of lots of fantastic movies when we were opening for U2 in Philadelphia where he came back-stage and met us with his family. He said that “The Lumineers was the only music that every family member could listen to at the same time without wanting to change it”, which was a cool compliment. He reached out to us about a film he was working on called Glass which was the third instalment of this cool trilogy he had. The first one was called ‘Unbreakable’ with Bruce Willis, the second was ‘Split’ with James Franco and then the third instalment was with Samuel L Jackson called Glass. We wrote him this song thinking it would be in the end credits or in the movie somehow, but he couldn’t find a way to use it in the film and called us to say he loved it but it doesn’t work in the movie. But we were fine with it because we wanted to use it on the album anyway. It was interesting though because I think knowing it was for M Night and it was for his movie, we did different things with the way we produced it and how we wrote it. If it was for a Lumineers album we might have approached it differently.
On album 2 there was a song called ‘Patience’ that I wrote that was an instrumental piano piece and then on our last album another instrumental song called ‘April’. It wasn’t like I was leaving breadcrumbs… and they could have been on ‘Piano Piano’, but they just felt so perfect in the Lumineers context within the album. So I’ve always been writing this kind of music and it feels so great to get a whole album of it out there.
Have any of the songs on the album ever had a vocal on them or were they always written as instrumental pieces?
Interesting you should ask that, they’ve never had a vocal but just last night I was looking on Instagram… I found this girl, she just posted a video where she took my song ‘Chilly’ and she said she had been really inspired by it so she made up lyrics and a melody and I was really moved. I’ve probably heard the song a million times and I never pictured vocals over it. It was really cool what she did, but there’s never been plans for vocals over them. I interpreted them as ‘they are what they are’. With this album what I really tried to capture was how some moments get really big with orchestration, and all the things I wasn’t doing intentionally was what makes it special in my opinion.
I wanted to allow the songs to breathe and have a lot of space. It’s interesting when I write for the Lumineers and I know there’s going to be Wes’ beautiful voice and beautiful lyrics on there, I think it seeps into the writing naturally. But with this I think these felt like they wanted to be instrumental and not have any lyrics or vocalist on them.
And I suppose when you’re writing these arrangements you know you aren’t leaving a space to be filled by vocals?
Exactly, It’s a cool thing it’s a different approach. Having limitations can be healthy for any creative, knowing there’s not going to lyrics or sung melodies. Well then you think ‘should the piano be the focal point or is it the violin? What is going to hold the attention of the listener’, which was hard to do at times. Not having a melody from a voice can be the biggest challenge, I think. ‘Is this interesting enough? Is there enough information for a listener?’. I can love it and I can love the chords but is there enough happening here that makes it worth releasing. So it was tricky at times for sure.
How did you name the tracks on the album?
Some of it was reverse engineering, a lot of the time the song title came last. Lots of them in the writing process had names that I gave them so I could remember what-was-what in my phone. For example, ‘Tokyo’ which is one of my favourites was always called ‘A major classical’ in my phone, because it in A Major and it reminded me of classical music. But when the song was done I thought ‘well that’s a terrible song name’, but I really did want every song title to mean something, knowing there wasn’t a potent lyric to name the song after. With the Lumineers I’ve been fortunate enough to visit Japan and Tokyo a few times and I fell in love with the country. It’s so wildly different from where I grew up in New Jersey, the buildings and the lights, it’s so beautiful and the song reminded me of that. Also, in some ways, over the last 15 years with everything I’ve experienced been through on the rollercoaster ride or growing up, being in the Lumineers, getting married, having a child, it was a cool way to name it Tokyo. It meant a lot to me.
Other songs have more specific meanings, like the song ‘Maggie’, on the day that I was mixing and finishing the song, my wife’s parents dog named Maggie passed away in Italy. Over the last 7 or 8 years I would go to Italy to visit her family and see that dog and it was so sad when she died, I thought it was a beautiful way to respect to the dog and name the song after her.
There’s one track called ‘Possessed’ I wrote within 15 minutes in my living room, I was on the couch with my son twiddling away on the guitar. I wrote this whole song on guitar, which is weird because it ended up being on a piano on the record. So when my son went to sleep, I ran down to the basement to my upright piano and figured out the chords and the melodies and I just kept working on it for 2-3 days straight. I called it ‘Possessed’ because I quite literally felt possessed. In a good way. This thing just came out of nowhere.
You know as songwriters its really cool, Neil Young said something like “songwriters when they sit down, it’s almost like they’re listening to static on a radio, and you’re just tuning the dial ever so slightly until you start to hear music.” It’s a pretty deep metaphor. It’s a weird and abstract art. You never really know where the songs or ideas come from but if you just keep going back to the well and tune that dial ever so slightly, you’ll start to hear something.
Do you have plans or hopes to do a solo tour?
Yes definitely. I would say that’s the biggest bummer for me, I moved to Turin, Italy in September of last year and I live here now and obviously some places in Italy would be amazing when the world starts to open back up. And of-course London and other places in Europe are so close now, just short flights. It would incredible. Even if it were just at a Nando’s or a Starbucks, I’d love to just play live anywhere they would have me really.
Maybe just me on piano and some strings, just something really small and intimate I think would be fun.
That would be lovely to get to play in some different styles of venues to where you may have played with the Lumineers before?
That would be lovely, someone told me about Union Chapel in London – maybe I could play there one day, and I could open up for someone who could sell the tickets.
I don’t think you’d struggle – one of the last shows I saw pre-lockdown was the Lumineers at the 02!
Oh yeh in November? We were really excited for that show. We’ve played London a lot but never in such a huge arena venue before. That felt insane.
If you were to curate a festival who would be your headliners – dead or alive?
Oh wow, I’ve never been asked that before. I would say Oasis, I don’t know about the order, but I always loved Oasis and it breaks my heart they can’t get their shit together and work it out but yeh, Oasis. Rage Against the Machine and then just to throw a ranch in the spokes, let’s say Beethoven, just because I would love to see him perform. So let’s say Beethoven would open, then Oasis and then into Rage against the Machine.
Alright and finally if you wanted someone to listen to one track first from the album what you would you pick?
I would say, go for ‘Tokyo’.