Producer’s Corner: Simone Felice on Producing The Lumineers’ Cleopatra

All last summer — the time we spent with Cleopatra — was genuinely one of the great chapters of my life. The Lumineers and I were lucky enough to find a place to work that was well off the beaten path: an old Rhinecliff farm-turned-studio on the Hudson River with rolling fields and a view of the Catskill Mountains, beckoning their blue majesty in the near west across the water. It’s long been my approach to hunt for a retreat far outside of day-to-day reality. Few distractions. A place you can feel safe. A place to get weird. No clock ticking. Bonfires every night. A place you can truly live the songs, live the album, every word, every note, every moment.

Bunking in the weather-worn clapboard farmhouse on the property, we’d stay up late around the fire conspiring, setting the world to rights, plotting, laughing, sharing ideas — sometimes in whispers, sometimes in shouts — and we’d wake each morning with one objective: serve the songs. And fortunately, due to the hard and inspired work the guys had done over the past few years writing, and the pre-production and arranging we labored over in the months leading up to recording, we were sitting on more than just songs. We had an album. A true story of restlessness and loss, life-altering taxi rides in far flung corners of the earth, and unknown legends; of revelations about what it is that makes us tick, what makes us follow our angels and demons up and down, losing ourselves sometimes along the way, and hopefully, in the end, what teaches us to fight for what it is we really believe in. I wanted to hear every word of the story. And I wanted that for the listener. Not only to hear it but to know it, feel it in the deep place where our favorite songs hit us always. The timeless poetry of rock and roll mapped in the coils of our DNA.

To achieve that we’d need to create a space: an environment where, if the stars are favorable, and the wind is right, spirits might walk into the room and join us while the tape is rolling. Summon the ghosts. Those are the good nights.

The converted barn studio had a big open room with high ceilings, ideal for cutting all live elements of the record — guitars, Neyla’s cello and harmonies, group vocals and percussion. When it came time for Wes to start recording his lead vocals we figured it would be cool to cut him in the same wide-open space. That was my mistake. He sounded great on playback in the control room but somehow it didn’t feel right, especially not to Wes. He needed a cave in which to return to the origins. A private temple to speak in tongues. So we created one from a small recording booth in the far side of the barn where we hid amps and dead drums. It had wooden shelving full of old books and we quickly started referring to it as ‘The Library.’ What power in intimacy. I’ve always loved Wesley’s voice — ever since we met and did a song together at a small festival in the mountains years back — but I never heard it like this. Achingly arresting. Brave. Eternal. 

Our vision with the drums was to go for a certain thing, hard to put it into words. Something big, primal yet new, retaining the minimalism and raw simplicity that we all loved from the first album, but amping up the theater — this was Cleopatra after all. Ryan Hewitt (blessing upon his name), our good friend and powerful engineer, hung a couple sick mics from the ceiling and we experimented with different ways to do just that. There were times when Jer and I would each bang a bass drum with a big beater in an identical pattern, grinning at each other as we hit the skins like a pair of Continental Army drummers gone AWOL hiding feral in the woods. Aside from giving us the result we were after it was also a hell of a lot of fun. And fun sticks to tape.

It never ceases to amaze me, no matter how many times I’ve holed up in the studio with a group of pure killers, that this is really happening. Without fail, usually a few weeks into the project, a night when the roughs are just beginning to click into that magic gear, I’ll pause and look around the room at the assembled posse and think Holy Fucking Christ we really get to do this. Make records for a living. To be breathing and sleeping and drinking in music, songs, lyrics, beats, melody. What a gift. 

Come to find out it’s not only fun that sticks to tape. It’s sorrow. Loss. Mystery.  Tears. Sunsets at David’s. Whisky with Byron. Motorcycle rides on country roads. Cold mountain creeks in August. Healing. Wonder.

All we can really hope for is that the work we do lasts awhile. Touches someone. Takes its place among the vast, humming tapestry of the universe. We were friends. We were explorers. We were kids. And we had the time of our lives.

Simone Felice‘s latest album Strangers was released in 2014 via Dualtone Records.