Lucius Normalize Being Moms in Music: ‘It Shouldn’t Be Radical’
[Rolling Stone]
The duo of Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig make the best album of their career with a self-titled LP informed by family and all that goes with it
“Here, hold him,” says Lucius’ Jess Wolfe, plopping her 6-month-old son Leo in my lap. I have never held a child during an interview before, but it feels appropriate: There are babies everywhere at the East Nashville home where the band is stationed for the day, also including Mia, the young daughter of Wolfe’s bandmate Holly Laessig. Mia is sleeping downstairs, and Leo is munching on the cuff of my sweater. When my son calls twice during our chat, Wolfe and Laessig encourage me to pick up, and I do. I’ve never answered my own phone in an interview before, but it too feels appropriate. We are all mothers, and this is just how things are now.
It’s easy to look around the room and notice how much has changed for the L.A.-based duo since the release of their breakthrough label debut, Wildewoman, in 2013. Husbands, ex-husbands, babies, toddlers, and a tour bus full of it all. A career as some of the most in-demand collaborators in music, lending their uncannily exact harmonies to records by the likes of Brandi Carlile, Harry Styles, and the War on Drugs, and touring with Roger Waters. They’re even in Joni Mitchell’s inner circle for her “Joni Jams.”
That’s what makes their fourth studio album, Lucius, almost defiant in its return to form. Out last month, it’s more connected than ever to where they came from, showing how, when it’s Lucius alone (alongside their two bandmates, Peter Lalish and Dan Molad), they have a sound that’s just as deserving of center stage as the people they often sing alongside.
“Collaborating comes very natural to us, and building community is so rich,” says Wolfe, sitting on the couch while I bounce Leo on a knee. In person and out of their stage makeup, Wolfe and Laessig no longer look alike, but they still move in a subtly interconnected rhythm. Even their babies cry at the same time. “But over the years, people start recognizing you for that and not for your writing, what you’ve poured so much time, energy, love and care into. And we have worked too hard and too long to not make sure that gets consideration and the care it deserves. It’s our baby, the band is.”
While Lucius is not exactly an album about motherhood, it is a family record. It tells stories of loss, of the joys and trials of long-term commitment, of the almost terrifying love that comes with being a parent. It is gorgeous and adventurous, but soft as a lullaby at times, too. The band handled all production and writing in-house, with Molad (who is also Wolfe’s ex-husband) producing.
Though Wolfe and Laessig have always created a visual where they mirror each other onstage, down to the matching hairstyles, fluorescent capes, and winged eyeliner, their lives, and the lives of their bandmates, also started to synchronize. Leo and Mia were born within a year of each other, and Lalish recently became a dad. “We’re all settling in, settling down, for lack a better term,” Wolfe says. “Building homes and families and getting dogs and growing gardens.”
That unison in both song and in life has made these transitions much easier in an industry that isn’t exactly built to nurture or embrace mothers (or women over 30, for that matter). Mothers in music are expected to slow down, change, let go of their former selves. So there’s something radical not just about continuing to make records at the same time as making babies, but in releasing a self-titled album 15 years into their career, when you’re supposed to be further away than ever from where you started.
“It shouldn’t be radical, though,” says Laessig. “Because the things you experience as a mother are perfect for art.”
Lucius is evidence. It’s some of their best work yet, grounded in that signature voice they create together, equally euphoric and tender. Songs like “Stranger Danger” and “Do It All for You” could just as easily be about love for a child as they could love for a partner, wading imperfectly through the existential questions of adulthood. “What is home,” they ask on “Stranger Danger.” “Possessions, or a feeling?”
Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes and the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel both lent guitar while Madison Cunningham is featured on “Impressions,” but that’s as far as any collaborations go. It’s a switch from their last record, 2022’s Second Nature, which was produced by Carlile and Dave Cobb and had Wolfe and Laessig venturing into danceable disco territory as a way to wiggle out of grief.
“Second Nature was fun and necessary,” says Wolfe. “But there was also something that felt not entirely natural after.” After re-recording Wildewoman for the album’s 10th anniversary while building their young families, that alchemy of both the new and the old phases of life intertwining built Lucius, an album that shows that home is most definitely a feeling, after all. A feeling that doesn’t change even when the tequila bottles on the tour bus get replaced with baby bottles.
“I think it’s impossible for us to go out there and perform every night and expect people to believe us if we’re not being a hundred percent real,” says Wolfe. “We can dress up in costume and be playful and have a wild-spirited, transported experience at our shows and also be moms.”
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