The Lumineers’ new single ‘Angela’ was recorded without them knowing.
The ‘Hey Ho’ hitmakers spent so long working on the different parts of the song with producer Simone Felice and engineer Ryan Hewitt that they left to go for dinner and luckily left the recording running while frontman Wesley Shultz and drummer Jeremiah Fraites continued to jam the chorus, resulting in the track’s "rawness".
Reflecting on the creative process behind the track, Wesley shared: "We came into the studio with a batch of songs, but ‘Angela’ was not one of them. But soon after we arrived, I found myself strumming the chords over and over and trying to work out verse melodies. Eventually, we decided it was a good verse, but wasn’t yet a song because it had no chorus.
Simone, the producer, and Ryan Hewitt, the engineer, began recording me and Jer just running the song over and over. It went on so long, the two of them left, without us noticing, and ate dinner and came back. By the time they returned we had come up with the chorus and bridge. Luckily they had left the tape running, so we could go back and figure out what we had done and loved so much. Unlike the rest of the album, this song was written entirely in the studio. Because of that, you can hear a rawness and danger in it, that tends to go away as you get more familiar with a song. Also, most of the lyrics were written on a motorcycle – I was riding my Triumph through the Catskills with Simone (on his Suzuki), singing lyrics over the melody."
And producer Simone added: "I believe it all sprung from this cool, driving piano idea of Jer’s, which inspired the vocal melody of the verses, which opened the door to the song as a whole. It was the only cut off of ‘Cleopatra’ that was written from scratch in the studio, a sort of 11th hour Hail Mary that we didn’t really see coming, which might explain that special, spontaneous urgency hiding just beneath the surface. One of my strongest memories is how good it felt when we finally got the middle 8 right, ‘Vacancy, hotel room, lost in me, lost in you…’, I was in the control room listening to Wes sing and I just spontaneously started clapping, I couldn’t help it, felt like a hallelujah moment, we quickly put up a mic and recorded the claps together that you hear on the record."
‘Angela’ is taken from their latest record ‘Cleopatra’ and is out now to stream and download.
The Lumineers’ Angela recorded off the cuff
