The Lumineers to say ‘hey’ to SA

The Lumineers

The Lumineers

Published Aug 6, 2014

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‘I BELONG with you, you belong with me. You’re my sweetheart…” If you don’t recognise the lyrics to this song, then you have probably been living under a rock for a while.

The catchy words of the American indie-folk song Hey Ho by The Lumineers are so hypnotic that you can’t help but sing along.

South Africa finally has the opportunity to do so live as they are making their way to our shores with performances in Joburg and Cape Town in a few months.

With no time to spare, their first Cape Town show was sold out already on the first day and a second show has been announced due to massive demand.

Tonight bagged an exclusive interview with band member Jeremiah Fraites (drummer and percussionist) from The Lumineers to chat about their tour and what can be expected.

Fraites is in Japan with the rest of the band for the Fuji Rock Festival as we chat over the phone. He tells me how stoked he is about playing here in December.

“The Lumineers are insanely happy and overjoyed that our show in Cape Town is sold out.

“For the past couple of years, we’ve just been touring wherever people would want to see us. We’ll pretty much go anywhere on this planet that people will have us.”

Fraites says the band tries to keep it as simple as they can.

“I think anyone with a guitar could play our music, but not necessarily anyone can write our music. We really try to pride ourselves on having it feel simple, but it takes a long time for us to write every song, so we put a lot of hard work into the songs like Ho Hey, which comes across very simple.

“In that way, music is like therapy. It kind of feels like religion without church, if that makes sense. Or rather, a church without religion. It feels like an experience that you can participate in. It’s pretty good.”

As for their tour to South Africa later this year, Fraites says as Americans, they have an idea of what Africa and South Africa will be like, but they can’t wait to experience what it’s really like.

The Lumineers are working on their second album and are touring at the moment.

“We’ve been in Europe doing festivals, then we have three-and-a-half months off before we go to South America and South Africa in December. So we’re gonna be writing and recording as much as we can. The tours have been great but we’re also very excited to get back to writing the second album.

Shedding light on what he considers the key to staying relevant in today’s music industry, he shares: “Wow. I don’t even know how we became relevant in the first place. I think you have to work very hard and be very lucky. I think as a band, we never tried to be relevant, we just kind of wrote music. We were just kind of writing music that we thought we would like.

“We just spent so much time writing music that eventually, we got it right.

“Our main focus is that we really try to write good music with kinda more of a selfish endeavour, where we want the music to resonate with ourselves.”

• The Lumineers perform at Cape Town’s Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens on December 4 and at Joburg’s Emmarentia Dam at on December 6. Book at Webtickets.

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