Son Lux’s Ryan Lott can’t get that crazy music out of his head—and now he has a band to share it with.
“I couldn’t shed the idea of being a composer. I always wanted to reinvent the wheel.”
Ryan Lott is offering his explanation for why, at 36, it took him so long to conform to the band dynamic. “I was always trying to create new arrangements and new ways of doing things,” he says. “And it wasn’t always successful.”
Which brings us to Son Lux, the band, as opposed to Son Lux, the vehicle for Lott’s always interesting—if slightly incoherent—forays into experimental sonic realms that fearlessly fuse indie rock, hip hop and electronica. For new release Bones (Glassnote), Lott is joined by guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang.
Son Lux kicked of its 2015 touring schedule in March with a handful of buzzed-about showcases at South By Southwest. And it would appear that this isn’t merely a temporary collaboration among many for the Denver native. “There’s something about this band that created a spark, where I realized that this a parallel and not a perpendicular pursuit for me,” he says. “Rafiq and Ian aren’t just performers. I knew I needed musicians who’d be able to see the music I created through a number of different lenses simultaneously. The idea has always been to create music that lives dynamically and successfully onstage—and that takes a certain type of creative energy that not all performers have.”
And while Bones does indeed have a life of its own, it doesn’t veer as far from conventional song structure as you might expect, offering a keen balance of the emotional and the intellectual. “Our music always begins with an investigation of sound,” says Lott. “We’re always looking for that small fragment of musical performance that we can launch off of. We find the song inside of the sound, and it’s a backward process. We create that environment and then imagine the song that can exist in that interesting world.”
A skilled pianist raised by supportive—if distinctly unmusical—parents, Lott is currently based in New York City, where he initially spent five years composing music for commercials. He’s also behind the soundtracks for Looper, The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby and the forthcoming Paper Towns. A self-confessed workaholic, he has no intention of completely abandoning either of those worlds. “I’m still doing the commercial work,” says Lott. “But instead of it being my day job, it’s something I do every once in a while, when there’s a really good opportunity. And I still love doing soundtrack work with my regular collaborator, Nathan Johnson, who also designed the album cover for Bones.”
Lott made his first appearance as Son Lux with 2008’s At War With Walls & Mazes. We Are Rising came three years later, recorded in 28 days for the RPM Challenge Global Listening Day. In 2012, Lott knocked heads with Sufjan Stevens and Serengeti as Sisyphus, releasing the Beak & Claw EP. A multitude of diverse collaborative projects include work with These New Puritans, My Brightest Diamond, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, the Antlers’ Peter Silberman, Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw and many others. Lott also enlisted Lorde to sing on “Easy,” a track from Alternate Worlds, an EP of revamped songs from Son Lux’s acclaimed 2013 LP, Lanterns.
Suffice it to say, Lott has an understanding spouse. “We will have been married 14 years in June,” he says of their relationship, which began when they were students at Indiana University. “She’s a dancer and a choreographer, and we’ve always had a pretty nontraditional life in pursuit of our own ridiculous passions.”
—Hobart Rowland
