- The band is based in Denver, Colorado.
- The founding members and songwriters are Jeremiah Fraites and Wesley Schultz.
- The band has been around since 2005
- Most people think that ‘Ho Hey’ – which reached No. 1 on three different charts – is about a romantic relationship, but that’s not the whole story.
“The essence of the song was that I was really struggling to make ends meet in the big city when I was living in Brooklyn and working in New York. It was a myth, this idea that you’d go there and get discovered and it would be this great place for music,” explains Schultz, who, like Fraites, hails from New Jersey and moved to Denver in recent years, where they met Pekarek.
“It’s about a lost love in some ways, but it’s also a lost dream. It’s funny that a lot of people play it at their weddings because it was written from a different place. But it’s kind of a beautiful thing, actually, that people can take something I was feeling really, really down about and turn it into a message of hope.”
- That’s Schultz’s mom on the cover of their debut, self-titled album.
“It’s my mom, Judy, as a child, and her mother,” he explains. “I’d asked my mom if she had any old photos that I could look through a while back, and I fell in love with it. You know if you set up a child for a picture then can’t get out of the frame in time? My mom had a funny take on it: It’s our first album, kind of our baby, like this child.”
Schultz thanked his mom for all her years of emotional support with some heavy metal when their album went gold. “I had the plaque sent to my mom, because she’d been really supportive of us and believed in us when a lot of people were pretty concerned. And now she’s got a platinum one!”
- Their band name has more than one meaning.
While Schultz and Fraites have been playing music together for more than eight years (previous band names include Free Beer, 6Cheek, and Wesley Jeremiah), they’ve only been known as The Lumineers thanks to a mistake. - “We were playing a small club in Jersey City, N.J.,” explains Schultz, “and there was a band out there at the time called Lumineers who were slotted for the same time, same day, the next week. The person running the show that night [mistakenly] announced us as The”
- The name stuck. “It doesn’t mean anything literally. It’s a made-up word,” says Schultz. Another strange coincidence they learned? “It’s also the name of a dental veneer company,” he adds.
grew up in a New Jersey suburb and started as a cover band called Free Beer.
They picked the name to try and trick people into thinking that their shows were open bar. Crafty! “It wasn’t serious at first,” Fraites told the Chicago Tribune. We were a crappy band doing terrible covers. But we slowly started getting away from covers and writing originals.
They’re maybe the only band to ever move OUT of New York in search of musical success. Schultz and Fraites left the city in 2009 after finding it too expensive and competitive. They relocated to Denver, CO. “The mentality of New York bands…was very dog-eat-dog. Denver was more community-oriented.
Neyla Pekarek met the other guys in the band through Craigslist. After they moved, the two dudes put up a Craigslist ad looking for a cellist. Pekarek was one of two people that responded, and she met them in their basement to jam,
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