Chart topping Americana band The Lumineers have officially released their brand new single ‘Angela‘ in the UK today. The folk/rock style track is the latest single to be taken from the US bands number 1 UK album ‘Cleopatra‘ which was released in April of last year.
The song came about after band members Wes and Jer were jamming some guitar chords over and over again in a bid to work out the song’s melody. The jam session lasted so long that Simone Felice and Ryan Hewitt went out to dinner, and when they returned the song was almost complete.
Thankfully they had left the tape running in the recording studio, so it was all recorded and became the hit song ‘Angela’. The hit release has been streamed over 25 million times on Spotify, and is one of The Lumineers’ strongest pieces of writing to date.
Talking about the new single, Wesley Schultz, says: “We came into the studio with a batch of songs, but Angela was not one of them. But soon after we arrived, I found myself strumming the chords over and over and trying to work out verse melodies. Eventually, we decided it was a good verse, but wasn’t yet a song because it had no chorus. Simone, the producer, and Ryan Hewitt, the engineer, began recording me and Jer just running the song over and over. It went on so long, the two of them left, without us noticing, and ate dinner and came back. By the time they returned we had come up with the chorus and bridge. Luckily they had left the tape running, so we could go back and figure out what we had done and loved so much. Unlike the rest of the album, this song was written entirely in the studio. Because of that, you can hear a rawness and danger in it, that tends to go away as you get more familiar with a song. Also, most of the lyrics were written on a motorcycle – I was riding my Triumph through the Catskills with Simone (on his Suzuki), singing lyrics over the melody.”
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