Wildewoman may not have had quite the impact of Funeral when it was released in 2013, but for those who fell in love with the debut from US quartet Lucius, it’s an album to treasure. But the Los Angeles-based band, fronted by Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe, aren’t just touring that album, with a Dublin date next month; at the end of May, they released a brand-new version, titled Wildewoman (The New Recordings). As the name suggests, it’s not a remixed, remastered job, but one in which each song has been rethought and reworked.
“It’s been 10 years and we’ve been playing so many of those songs throughout the years,” Wolfe explains. “We’ve changed and evolved as musicians and people and we wanted to do something to celebrate that album and pay homage to the thing that we did then. “There’s a lot of it that we still love, but the songs take on new meanings with age and the arrangements keep evolving because we’ve been playing them for so long.
” “We may have been playing the songs for years,” Laessig adds, “but we hadn’t listened back to the album for the best part of 10 years. “And it’s a curious thing to do it after a long time and really listen to the songs anew. It was like, ‘Oh, that’s what that harmony used to be’ or ‘I haven’t sung that part in a long time’.
We wanted to get those little tweaks that we’ve made over the years on to the record, the little changes that came with the four or five or six of us playing, depending .