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 on the iteration.” The band’s line-up has changed a little over the years, but Laessig and Wolfe have been a constant twin presence. The pair met in 2005 when they were students at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music.
They formed Lucius two years later, after moving to New York, and soon released an album, Songs From the Bromley House, which was named after their instrument-filled Brooklyn home. They don’t consider that release to be their true debut: that would arrive when percussionist Dan Molad had joined the band and snared Wolfe’s heart. After rapturous notices from such taste-making organs as Pitchfork, Lucius released Wildewoman, which was memorably described in The Guardian’s review as “1960s girl group-inspired songs doused in a tonic of baroque pop and saccharine folk”.
The beauty of Lucius has been their desire to reinvent. Their music has constantly evolved and so, too, has their image. It’s something that Laessig and Wolfe place considerable importance on, frequently sporting identical clothes, hair and make-up in concert.
They are not related but even on this Zoom call they look as though they could be sisters. A pair of albums, Good Grief (2016) and Second Nature (2022), came out after the LA move and went deep on marriage difficulties, divorce and motherhood. Second Nature was inspired by the end of Wolfe’s marriage to Molad, who is still in the band, although it’s far from a morose listen.
Much of it sounds positively joyous. Happily, the pair seem to be on good terms and Wolfe has remarried. The first thing she mentions when the interview starts is that she’s pregnant.
She will be six months gone when the band touch down at Dublin’s Button Factory next month. Not for a moment did she consider pulling out of the tour, even though morning sickness hit her hard. “I was really sick well into the second trimester,” she says, “but I’m feeling much better now and it’s all about excitement and feeling him move.
” Laessig knows all about the business of playing live while pregnant and recording in the studio when the baby is still young. Her son was just 11 months old when Second Nature was released. Though they opted not to tour that album, “we’ll definitely play some of those songs when we’re in Dublin”, Laessig says.
The band are especially looking forward to their Irish visit because they will get to share a stage with singer and actress Bronagh Gallagher, who is the support act on the night. “When we came to Ireland for the first time we met Bronagh and we became instant friends,” Wolfe says. “We’ve been friends ever since.
Her opening the show will be really sweet and nostalgic in itself.” Although the pair have embraced multiple genres, they see themselves, primarily, as folk musicians. To that end, the rich legacy of Irish music moves them.
“Irish music has such a great faculty for storytelling,” Laessig says, “and taking from that, as a songwriter, is inevitable.” Outside their band, Laessig and Wolfe have together played on the recordings of a huge number of musicians, many of them household names. They appear on tracks from a disparate group that includes Sheryl Crow, Harry Styles, The Killers, The War on Drugs and Ozzy Osbourne.
And that’s only scratching the surface. They have also played on recordings from Roger Waters and were members of his touring band for several years. The Pink Floyd co-founder has got into plenty of hot water of late thanks to allegations of anti-Semitism (which he denies).
Irrespective of what one may think of his politics, it’s hard to deny Waters’ importance in music history, especially when it comes to elaborate live shows. For Laessig and Wolfe, getting to go on the road with him was a remarkable experience. “We learned so much,” says Wolfe.
“There’s so much that goes into delivering shows of that size.” Laessig says they take much of what they learned from those arena shows and apply them to the more intimate scale of live dates with Lucius. She adds that all that collaborative work has made the band better.
A new studio album will be out next year: “It’s almost done, recordings-wise,” Laessig says. It will, Wolfe adds, be quite different to the previous record. “Second Nature was glittery and fabulous and fun, and we needed that coming out of a pandemic, but this [album] feels more grounded, more natural to us.
It still has wild moments, but it feels like a ‘coming back to ourselves’, in this really healthy, fun way.”.
