High Water Festival 2023 kicks off tomorrow at Riverfront Park in North Charleston.
The Charleston City Paper had a chance to talk with vocalists Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig of Los Angeles-based indie-pop act Lucius, who will perform at 3:30 p.m. April 16 on the Stono stage.
“When we first formed the group — unofficially, officially — it was just me and Jess,” Laessig told the City Paper. “That was 2005, and we were in college. And we had this dog Lucius as our mascot — like we had a T-shirt with his face on it.”
Both Wolfe and Laessig were students at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Lucius gained momentum in 2007 when they moved to Brooklyn together and played open mic nights regularly.
”We were really diligent about it,” Wolfe said, ”and we would do little shows on the East Coast and mostly in New York. And people started responding.”
Fast forward a few years, and current members drummer Dan Molad and guitarist Peter Lalish joined the band. After recording the first Lucius EP as a four piece, the band sent it off to NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts series host Bob Boilen. He took a particular liking to the song “Don’t Just Sit There” and invited Lucius to perform a Tiny Desk session in 2013.
“That was like a very pivotal moment for us,” Wolfe said, “and that Tiny Desk ended up with a lot of views and people started showing up to our shows. It was a notable difference.”
Lucius’ sugary, eclectic pop dives into melancholic folk and resurfaces with baroque dramatics throughout the band’s four albums, Wildewoman (2013), Good Grief (2016), NUDES (2018) and Second Nature (2022). Wolfe and Laessig’s coalescent vocal harmonies, wardrobe and visual aesthetic tie it all together.
“We both grew up listening to artists who had a strong visual representation of their music like David Bowie or Buddy Holly, Prince, Bjork — those were people that really inspired us,” Wolfe said.
“I also grew up in the theater, so being transported on stage was a really important thing for me and for us, feeling like we could become something,” she added. “When we sing together, we try to create this other voice: It’s not myself, not just Holly, but it’s us together. We just became more and more playful with it. As the music changes, so does the look, and we get to explore various parts of ourselves that way.”
In the songwriting process, Laessig and Wolfe said they often make demos on piano or guitar using their voices to represent strings or background arrangements.
“We usually keep it super simple and then bring it to our bandmates when we record and arrange everything together,” Laessig said.
“A lot of times we’ll have a song that feels happy and upbeat,” she said, “but the lyrics are tragic — that balance of the two worlds. Because that’s life, and I think that’s a good way to represent it.”
After almost two decades of working together, the two said they are locked into each other’s creative process.
“Music — it’s our relief,” Wolfe said. “It’s like our connection to things that are the most vulnerable. It’s our way of connecting to other people. It’s a language that everybody understands.”
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