Q&A: Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig talk with Paste about re-recording their 2014 masterpiece Wildewoman, finding each other again after making Second Nature, working with Adam Granduciel and Madison Cunningham, and their eponymous new album.
Maybe you’ve heard Lucius harmonizing the titular chorus in Harry Styles’ “Treat People With Kindness,” or tweaking their singing into celestial patches in the War on Drugs’ “I Don’t Live Here Anymore.” Or, perhaps, you saw them in Roger Waters’ band on his Us + Them Tour in the late 2010s, where they both took the lead on Clare Torry’s wordless “The Great Gig in the Sky.” I promise you, Lucius is a part of you somehow. They’ve sung with the likes of My Morning Jacket, Jackson Browne, the Killers, Sheryl Crow, and Mavis Staples. They performed a Tiny Desk Concert before the series got really massive. Their pastoral-rock furrows in cavalier, capable, and countrified tempos, tones, and ‘tudes.
And last year, Jess Wolfe (who was deep into her pregnancy at the time) and Holly Laessig joined Joni Mitchell’s backing band for her Hollywood Bowl shows. I tell them I was at the second night’s show. “It was really quite transcendent,” Wolfe says. The duo were a part of the original ensemble that accompanied Mitchell during her Grammy-winning comeback performance at Newport Folk Festival in 2022. They, along with Brandi Carlile, the Hanseroth twins, Blake Mills, Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, Marcus Mumford, Allison Russell, and Matt Chamberlain, started the whole thing, decamping to Mitchell’s house in California and performing the “rehabilitating jam sessions” that became the “Joni Jam” performance at the Bowl in October 2024.
But Lucius, the titanic pop group found in the smartest corners of the indie and mainstream world, have never sounded like this before. Three years ago, on Second Nature, they dawdled in sun-dappled ‘80s pop and filtered lockdown fears and restlessness into big dance bops. Then, they returned to the studio to redo their breakthrough, sort-of-debut album Wildewoman, which led them to a record titled after themselves. With their longtime bandmates Dan Molad and Peter Lalish—Wolfe and Laessig are back at their finest now, evoking roads they’ve crossed and named often since forming in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn in 2007: girl-group revivalism, cosmic pop, and a kind of bicoastal harmonizing that once echoed through western canyons.
Wolfe and Laessig are vocal foils for other singers but plug so perfectly into one another. “Gold Rush” fantasizes through a groove replete with funk beats and dauntless, sensual caroling; “Strange Love” is a piano ballad warped into a cowboy croon, the duo’s voices wrapped around walloping synths and bright, fretty guitar; “Impressions” is a collision of schools both old and new, with a pop-country charm and effervescent nod of electronica—the plinking synth-and-bass melody behind Lucius’ vocalists sounds big enough to fill a stadium. They’ve called Lucius their “coming home” record. And in the versatility of these new songs, be it the psychedelic glissando of “Stranger Danger” or the muscular guitars measuring the melody heroics of “Old Tape,” and the presence of contributors like Rob Moose, Luke Temple, Madison Cunningham, and the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, it’s clear that their homecoming is a party you’ll want to RSVP to.
Earlier this spring, I had a chance to sit down with Wolfe and Laessig to discuss their re-recording of Wildewoman, how they found themselves again after making Second Nature post-quarantine, working with Granduciel and Cunningham, and their new eponymous album. This interview has been edited for clarity.
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Paste Magazine: You re-recorded Wildewoman for its 10-year anniversary last year. How affirming was it, getting to not just revisit those tracks but getting to perform them from where the two of you are at now in your career?
Jess Wolfe: It’s like living in something for a long time. The revisiting of that record brought us to this most recent album. It’s like wearing shoes for such a long time with the same people—for the most part—you’ve evolved, hopefully, as a person. The way that you sing, what you’re singing about, even if the song was written with a certain sentiment, it changes for you—and hopefully for the listener—while keeping a strong element of nostalgia there. The revisiting of that album and how we made it and how we did it ourselves and where it was coming from, it really did inspire [Lucius].
Some of those songs, you’ve been singing them every night for a decade. How does the meaning shift when you take them back into a studio, as opposed to performing them on stage? Do you notice yourself growing up alongside those songs in the moment, or does it take a concentrated effort like the re-recording to let you step back and look at not just who Lucius was in 2014, but what Wildewoman is now in 2024?
JW: As we’re going, you get tired of a certain sentiment, or there’s a certain song that doesn’t feel authentic—depending on where you are at a certain moment in time, or what city you’re in, or how you’re feeling that day. But getting into the studio, you really are picking apart a song and how it was originally recorded. You forgot certain elements that were there that had naturally evolved during a live show. We wanted to both honor what the music had become and who we had become as people and, also, the way it was recorded to begin with. We did a little bit of both—both things are true.
Holly Laessig: I remember, when we started going back into the studio, listening to the record again and being like, “Wow, I really haven’t listened to this in so long. It sounds different than I remember. It sounds awesome.” Even when we were picking apart the songs, you come across things and you’re thinking, “I have not been singing that harmony for the last, like, seven years. That’s what it’s supposed to be? Okay, I’ve been singing something totally different.” For some of the recordings we did, we did try to go back and learn what we originally did. There were a couple instances where I was like, “Well, I want to do this too, because this is what has popped up over the years, doing it live.”
I interviewed Ann and Nancy Wilson last year and we were talking about songs like “Crazy On You” turning 50, and Ann had said that she didn’t know how to relate to that song 50 years later—because she’s not going through what she was going through when she wrote it. And Nancy told her, “Yeah, but somebody could relate to that song.” And that recharged her before their tour. I feel that way about a lot of Wildewoman. I was getting a lot of it five, six years ago, and then I started looking at other parts of the record and thinking, “Okay, I’m getting this now.” It’s really holding up in different ways.
JW: Right, you need a certain song at a certain point in your life, and that significance of that song still holds true 10 years later. But even if your life has shifted, or you find a completely new meaning for it, or you hate it, all of that can still exist and be useful.
You two made a record, supposedly, called Mother before you made Second Nature in 2022. Have you returned to any of that material at all since then?
HL: The lore… the legend.
I had to ask about it, because Lucius is something of a detour from the upbeat, dance-pop stuff on Second Nature. Is it more in-tune with what Mother was going to be?
JW: Neither record has anything to do with Second Nature. I think we needed that album at the time. It felt upbeat, it felt like we needed to take this twisted moment [of COVID-19] and make something fun out of it. Second Nature felt like… us. And, in going through that process, I think it helped solidify what it was that we love to sing and what it is that makes us feel the most ourselves. That’s where the focus went.
Mother also feels like ourselves but, with [Lucius], we were responding, in the moment, to having re-recorded Wildewoman and coming back to ourselves after Second Nature. It was a natural response—it felt like a natural time for this record to be here. I wouldn’t say we’re putting off Mother so much as the time is coming for it, as well. And we’re equally excited. And it’s also different. We never make the same record.
HL: We like to take the scenic route, and we like to explore whatever is intriguing us at the moment. We end up going into all these different worlds and Mother is definitely a world. And, because we had gone out into disco land with Second Nature, we wanted to come home for a minute before going back out again.
I think artists are a little adverse to admitting when an album doesn’t feel like themselves. Did you know that was going to be the case for Second Nature when you began working with Dave Cobb and Brandi Carlile, or did that come after the recording?
JW: That part of the process felt totally natural. Brandi is a longtime collaborator, and one of our dearest friends, who we greatly respect and admire. The songs we wrote, we loved them and we loved making the record. But, once we got out on tour, it just, for some reason, felt hard to do. It felt harder than other records. I’m sure that comes from the pandemic. It was a different time, it was a weird time to be touring. It felt hard to deliver it in a way that felt completely natural to us—not lacking authenticity, just harder for us to feel like ourselves. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying that, but it’s true. It doesn’t make me love the record less. It just feels less natural. And that’s what we felt like we needed, funnily enough.
Does time play a factor into that at all? By the time Second Nature came out, it had been six years since Good Grief. Did the distance between those albums play a part in that loss of “home”?
JW: It’s a good point. Probably.
HL: It wasn’t planned. We went on tour with Roger Waters for a while and planned to come home and do a record. And we came home, and then it was lockdown…
JW: Lockdown, divorce, baby—all these things conflated at once. You set expectations for yourself. You want to connect to a lot of people and you want to connect to a lot of people who are probably having a hard time in that moment.
You mentioned Roger Waters and, maybe this is a reach, but did the fact that he has a song called “Mother” have anything to do with the title of the record that hasn’t come out yet, since you spent so much time with him on the road?
HL: I’m sure it’s not a crazy coincidence, because we sang that song over and over, night after night.
A lot of bands tend to name their first record after themselves, not their fourth. Or fifth? I’ve thought Lucius is your fifth record, and then I’ve seen you both refer to it as your fourth. We’ll just call it the fourth.
JW: Well, Nudes was a record that felt like a natural way to reconnect with our audience and strip everything away while we were on the road with Roger. But there were covers, there were covers of our own songs, too. It wasn’t a set of new songs.
I wasn’t even considering Nudes. I was considering Songs From the Bromley House.
HL: Oh, wow. OG, Matt. Thank you.
JW: So, is it six albums? Does it matter? [Laughs] Well, in that case… We always consider our first to be Wildewoman, because it was the four of us as a band. Songs From the Bromley House was a record we made when we first got to New York, and it was just us two with a rotating cast of characters. Not to belittle that record, but it wasn’t who we were when we found our people.
It’s more “Jess and Holly,” not so much “Lucius.”
JW: Yeah.
Considering the relationship that you guys have with each other and this catalog that you have built, and the fact that naming an album after yourselves is such an important, almost sacred tradition in music, was it obvious from the jump that it was deserving of the name Lucius?
HL: I think we thought, “What could we title it?” And it just came to that. We couldn’t think of anything that fit. We kept talking about “coming home to ourselves.” We kept talking about coming home to each other as a band and how it felt so Lucius. That just kept coming up, so we were like, “Why don’t we just call it Lucius?” We’d never done that before, but it just felt right. [Holly’s daughter babbles next to her] Mia agrees.
JW: Life’s a little different these days. [Jess holds her phone up to the camera, showing her son sleeping in his crib] Here’s Leo. Babies everywhere. But, like Holly said, [Lucius] felt like coming home to ourselves, and that was the natural title. We didn’t want to overthink it.
The music that you two make is so intertwined. There are very few bands that have a chemistry like Lucius. When I was listening to this new record, I started thinking about how you both met at Berklee and then you moved to New York together, and you’ve had this band for almost two decades. What kind of trust did you have to put into this project all those years ago, and how does that trust continue to get tended to on a record like this one?
HL: It’s funny—I don’t know if this is totally related but, when were talking previously about the title, I was thinking about how there are some things in our process that are so painstakingly nitpicky, and then there are some things that are very gut-instinctual. Like the album cover: We were just like, “That’s a sweet picture. We really like it. Let’s do it.” It wasn’t toiled too much, and neither was naming it Lucius.
There are some things that we are quick to just be like, “It just feels right. Let’s go with it from there.” And that was how we started the band. We didn’t overthink our partnership or writing together. It was like, “Let’s meet at Au Bon Pain tomorrow and smoke cloves and talk about what we’re going to do.” And then it was just every day after that. It’s continued and evolved in that way—the look of everything, the costumes, the sets, they’re all based on the previous thing and growing outwards. And we both just, luckily, always had a similar instinct in those foundational things. I think we both trust each other’s taste, which is a huge part of it… for both of us! We’re visual people and, for whatever reason, that part feels innate.
Are you still surprising each other?
JW: Not emotionally, because we’re pretty in touch. But certainly musically. It’s really cool to see what is spilling out of each of us, whether it’s in the moment that we’re producing it or if it’s one person bringing an idea to the other. And, in our case, it spills out of us together. We’re always trying to be on the pulse of our own journeys and trying to be as honest as we possibly can, artistically and emotionally.
HL: When we bring songs in, we’re both staying curious about whatever subject we’re writing about.
Jess, you have this quote from a few years ago, where you spoke about each of your voices coming together to make a “third voice.” What felt special about that third voice this time around?
JW: I don’t even know how to sing without Holly now. The third voice feels so set in stone. It’s a part of me, a part of Holly. It’s us and it’s outside of us at the same time. And I think that’s coming from years of singing together, knowing each other, living our lives side by side. We don’t have to look at each other to know what the other is going to do. You can’t buy that. You can’t just put that on. That comes from so much time and music and love poured into something—and the commitment to seeing where it can fly.
HL: And I think that also extends to Pete [Lalish] and Danny [Molad]. There’s trust in Danny’s production and arranging and Pete’s guitar playing. We don’t even have to think about it at this point, because there is a sound in what everyone’s bringing.
JW: They’ve been working together even longer than Holly and I, because they had a band called Elizabeth & the Catapult. That’s where they first started making music together. So, as much symmetry and duality there is between Holly and I, it’s equal for Danny and Pete’s musical kinship.
Well, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about Pete and Danny. Lucius features the best work they’ve done with you both. And they play so many instruments on this thing. Anyone can look at the personnel and say, “Okay, Dan’s playing drums, Pete’s playing guitar, maybe the two of them are doing synths.” But can you give me an instance of their expertise and talent really bringing this record to life behind the scenes?
JW: Danny’s always been this landscape artist. We’re always building tracks, and he is someone who’s not just an ideas man, but who can help facilitate the musical expression. He’s always there to capture and he knows how to do so in such an elegant way. And Pete is the wild man. He is the one that can never play the same thing twice—and wouldn’t want to! What you get is going to be brilliant and unlike anybody else. That partnership there, it’s this wild and brilliant thing. It’s what makes the band the band and gives us the ability to really let go and explore and be free in our voices and be free in our songwriting, in a way that we never could be without them.
Taking this songwriting process, which you two have shared together for so long, and opening it up to Danny, as well, how quickly do the dynamics in the music change for the better? Is there much trial-and-error you have to go through with that? Or are you all so musically and personally tight that the transition from two songwriters to three has some ease to it?
HL: I think the thing that’s so great about working with Danny from the beginning is that he’s building tracks as we go. We’re building as we’re writing, because he’s just so proficient as an engineer. That’s really fun to play with, because you can lay down a bass track and a rhythm section and we can sing over it. It brings up a different type of writing than if we were sitting with a piano or an acoustic guitar.
This era of Lucius is quite openly colored by trauma and tragedy, be it death of a loved one, miscarriages, divorce. But there’s also a score of really great change, like life partners being found and children being born. I mean, they’re on this call with us. Life seems to have revealed quite a lot over these last couple of years for the four of you. Had the personal informed the music to such a high degree in the past?
JW: Yeah, but we were at different parts in our lives and we were younger versions of ourselves. We’ve lived a lot more. We’ve also done it for such a long time—and done it for such a long time together—that it’s easier to access both the words to the feeling and the words to the experience and the musical language. It’s easier than before, but harder, too, because we have higher expectations of ourselves.
HL: Right. I feel like we’ve always written very truthfully—coming from an honest place of our own experiences in our life. It’s just that, now, life has a lot more depth. We’ve been singing and writing and playing together for longer and accessing those things more easily.
You’ve collaborated with Adam Granduciel before, and I will say that the I Don’t Live Here Anymore title track is my favorite War on Drugs song. But you’ve toured with the band before, there’s a collaborative relationship there. And I love how “Old Tape” lets that chugging War on Drugs sound really color both of your voices. I love what it is as a collaboration too, how it’s really a proper parallel to your work on “I Don’t Live Here Anymore.” You two have spent so much time honoring each other in your work, how does it feel to get to honor someone outside of Lucius in a song?
JW: It’s so special to become a part of someone else’s world and to explore their world. And I think, in doing so with so many different artists—obviously the War on Drugs have a special place in our hearts and we love that band—we became more ourselves. We get to try new things, and it gives us ideas for our own material. And it also solidifies who we are, regardless of the music, as the two of us.
One of my favorite songs this year (so far) is “Impressions.” I love it and I love Madison Cunningham. She’s a rockstar through and through. How did that connection come about?
JW: We’ve been fans of hers for a long time and absolutely love her songwriting and her guitar playing.
HL: We were trying to get a session with her, and then we had a session with Ethan Gruska, a longtime friend of ours, and we were like, “Do you guys all want to write together?”
JW: Yeah, we wrote [“Impressions”] the first day, in a couple hours. It really felt on fire, like one of the songs that just had to exist. And Maddie just has so many wonderful ideas—we were really just bouncing off of each other.
You’ve always surrounded yourself with musicians who, when they walk into the room, they’re immediately the best players in that room. People like Brandi Carlile, Mavis Staples, Roger Waters, Wilco, My Morning Jacket… The list goes on and on. Even despite folks like Adam Granduciel, Madison Cunningham, and Taylor Goldsmith being on this new album, it really feels like a recentering of Jess and Holly. I won’t call Lucius a “back to basics” album, but it does, to me, feel like a reawakening for you both—a return to yourselves, as you’ve been calling it. 18 years in, what’s the greatest reward you get from paying attention to each other and feeding off each others’ instincts and talent? Or, as you put it once Jess, “being witness to each other’s lives” in and out of music?
HL: What you said—you noticed that it was back to ourselves. That was very intentional, because we do love collaborating with people. And we’re good at doing supplementary parts. We like doing background parts for people, because they know us for what we do and let us explore and do what we want, as far as vocal arrangements. But we were doing a lot of it, and we really wanted to come back to our original partnership as songwriters and lead singers. We wanted to be lead singers together from the beginning, and that was really important for us to stamp back into where we are now. It feels good to write songs about our lives, because we know each other so well. Even as far as recording, doing a lot more single voices, instead of layering ourselves 10,000 times—which we love to do, too. But there was something intentional about that, too, about bringing just the two of us back into the room.
JW: Having experienced a lot of life together—I’m a new mom, and Holly just had her second. It’s such a pivotal thing in our lives, always being able to come back physically, emotionally, and spiritually to the anchor that is the two of us together and balance that out with home life and family life and the importance of community that we share. And the community that we share as just us, too—our families, the families of all of our bandmates. To create in this new space, in this new, profound version of ourselves—after having experienced all that we have together—and being here now and being able to access that, it feels really good. It feels very much we’re where we’re supposed to be.
