The ladies of Lucius find diarizing life on the road therapeutic
Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe are on their way to a dance class. When they take Lucius on the road to perform songs from their latest album, Good Grief, they want to have a few moves ready to augment their vocals. “Our plan is to turn our stage show into an extravaganza,” Laessig says with a laugh.
The duo penned the record at the end of a grueling two-and-a-half-year tour to support their first CD, Wildewoman. “When we finished recording, we hit the road,” says Wolfe. “We’d never toured or been in a band before, so it was a difficult couple of years. You’re never home, you never have a full night’s rest, you don’t see your family, but you’re constantly surrounded by people. You feel like your life is in shambles. Luckily, since we co-write and travel together, we were able to talk each other through the difficulties and turn them into songs. Writing Good Grief became our ultimate therapy.”
The LP is full of smooth, mid-tempo laments that express the giddy highs and lows of life on tour, but the tunes could also be parables about the push and pull of personal relationships.
“When we got o the road, we had a bunch of lyrical ideas and voice memos of things we wanted to put on the album,” says Laessig. “A lot of it was so heavy that we decided to start with something o the wall that we could dance and scream along to. We wrote ‘Born Again Teen’ in one sitting.”
The track’s jubilant energy is a good balance for the darker melodies that make up the bulk of the record. “The songs cover the good and the bad, the heaviness and lightness,” says Laessig. “To keep the album from being too serious, this one has some comic relief.”
—j. poet
