Jam titans Lotus reflect on the weight of their reputation before Thursday’s show at The National

by | Feb 10, 2016 | MUSIC

There are thousands of bands today who would literally give everything to attain the success electronic jam band Lotus has in their career.

There are thousands of bands today who would literally give everything to attain the success electronic jam band Lotus has in their career. Few bands are in such high demand as the eclectic Indiana quintet and they’ve spent years perfecting a live show that enhances their twisty sound leaving fans with an indelible memory. Naturally, this lauded status and bold repertoire didn’t come out of thin air. Since 1999, the band has worked tirelessly at pushing the boundaries of their music and performances. In 2016 now, one might think that hard work is slowing down to a degree, but if you ask Lotus themselves, they’ve only begun to scratch the surface on what “hard work” truly is.

Currently, the band’s hard at work finalizing what will be their tenth studio album, due out at some point in 2016. Fans got their first taste of the album’s musical direction in the new single “Eats The Light” released at the end of January. At its core, it’s undeniably still Lotus, but it definitely shatters what people would come to expect of any type of jam band like Lotus. “It’s definitely on the dancey end,” bassist and songwriter Jesse Miller admitted. He wasn’t shy in our conversation about revealing the new direction, steering away from dismissive talking points like “well, it’s still Lotus” and instead fully deconstructing the band’s approach to this music. “We kind of approached each song with more of a pop construction. It’s not a glossy sound though, but you can see it in the basic structure. For me, it was a lot of looking back to that kind of late 70s, early 80s, dance-rock stuff that I think fits with our vibe. It doesn’t sound like this, but T.Rex in the sense that the things are stripped down to live instrumentation. That’s kind of what I was going for when writing for this project.”

On top of T.Rex, Miller also pointed to bands like Talking Heads and Television for better sonic comparisons with Lotus’ new direction. “I mean, I listen to ‘Marquee Moon‘ about once a week,” he revealed. “It’s pretty much non-stop in my rotation so of course that came through.” To really push their music in the atmosphere of those musical giants, Miller posed a singular question to himself as he approached the songs. “How can I get something that gives off a driving and propulsive sound, but is also melodic at its core?” The aforementioned bands did it perfectly in Miller’s eyes and that’s the kind of musical dichotomy Lotus set their sights on when veering off their established path. So far, fan reaction to “Eats The Light” has been strong as well as the few new compositions the band has debuted at live shows. “They’re all high energy live and people have been responding well,” Miller stated. “It doesn’t seem like it, but it goes very much hand-in-hand with what we’ve been doing.”

What’s most interesting about this change is the potential negative effects it can have on a band. “I know the story all too well,” Miller remarked. “You just see it all the time in the indie rock world. A band puts out an album and it gets a lot of praise. Demand for them gets high and they sell out every show and things are just going great. But then they put out the next album and people don’t like it as much. Instead of people being loyal and still coming, all of sudden, no one comes to the show.” Luckily for Lotus, they haven’t seemed to encounter this problem over the years as they’ve twisted their sound and taking people down different paths here and there. “It always boggles me how dedicated our fans are,” Miller laughed. “A couple of days ago, someone came up to me and told me it was his 135th show. That’s just crazy. Even my favorite bands–I’ve probably only seen them four or five times each.”

It’s not that Lotus is an anomaly in the music world though, the lone band immune to fans departing after a musical shift. Instead, it’s more that Lotus’s approach to their fan’s expectations has always been equally methodical and patient each time they strive for something different. “I think we definitely challenge our audience to some degree since we go down so many paths,” Miller postulated. “People have preferences to certain styles of things we do for sure and I don’t think there’s universal agreement one way or the other on anything. But we never really try to repeat ourselves or settle on anything. We’re always trying to challenge ourselves musically and keep progressing and take those fans along on the journey. I think most will go, but sometimes they don’t and that’s fine. It’s one of those things too that something might come out and receive a negative reaction. You got to just ride out that storm sometimes because a lot of times, that stuff ends up becoming what people deem classic, so who really knows?”

Lotus enjoys a loyal following like few bands in the world today and while it’s something to applaud, Miller is much more real about the reality of that following. “It can be a real double edged sword for us at times,” he claimed. “So much of this following is built upon the reputation of the live show and because of that, people don’t pay as much attention to the studio records at times. We spend tons of time on that stuff too and they are never throwaways for us. At times, I really wish our studio records got a wider audience or at least more recognition for the work we do.”

In the same breath though, Miller pointed to Lotus’ own role in this reality. “I guess we do bring it on ourselves. We’re so interested and invested into putting on a really good live show,” he admitted. “We never want to be the band that’s just going to play the new songs from the new album and ignore everything else. We’re always mixing it up, doing different things night to night, and going deep in our discography and maybe turning those songs around. It’s the nature of the jam world, I guess. It can be burdensome, but you bring it on yourself to some degree.”

At times, Miller comes off as a reluctant giant in the jam world, especially as he discusses favoring composition over improvisation, a thought that may just be sacrilegious to some jam band connoisseurs. “There’s a lot of things you can do with improvising, don’t get me wrong, but I think composition is where things really get taken to different places,” he exclaimed. “There’s tons of stuff to do like on this new record that’s much more song-focused with songs on every track.” While some members of the jam scene spend hours conjuring up different directions they can take a song on stage, Miller is instead thinking of ways the band can branch out musically away from the stage. “I’ve had this idea of doing these group composed minimalist pieces for Lotus that would be from the more classical point of view, but contextualized for Lotus. That’s something I’ve always had in the back of my mind.”

Still, Miller admitted that he goes through so many ideas, most of which he knows won’t get past the initial conversation where he first introduces the idea. “I mean, I could suggest to play thirty minutes of noise every night, but there’d be push back on that and for good reason.” For Lotus, improvisation allows them the freedom to explore ideas they’d love to attack in a compositional world, but just might not ever be able to. “We like talking about experimentation, but sometimes putting serious change and serious experimentation into actual practice can be really tough. Improvising each night gives us a way around that and frees up that anxiety that can come with a band doing a massive change. We can play around with introducing harmonic changes or switch the style and genre of an established song in a few bars on stage and people generally love it. People aren’t as willing to do that when they put on a record at home.”

At the core of Miller’s thoughts and ideas on the band’s success and placement in the musical work is a single concept: constantly evolving. To some, it may read as though Miller’s grown weary of the jam scene, but look deeper and you’ll find it’s just a musician struggling to continue to push himself forward as an artist after a long career. Whereas other artists get content and complacent in their roles, Lotus, again, is different. “We’re not resting on our laurels,” Miller boldly said. “We have plenty of things we still want to accomplish and that list grows each year. There’s so much more room for us to grow and areas we haven’t quite yet reached. We’re out here touring hard and working every day on music so it’s not something we take for granted at all. In reality, it could all collapse on itself on any point so we’re going to work harder each day to make sure it doesn’t, but also enjoy it while we can.”

Lotus returns to Richmond Thursday night with Michal Menert & The Pretty Fantastics opening the show. Tickets are $22 and $25 the day of the show with the doors opening at 7 PM. For more information on the show, click here.

Brad Kutner

Brad Kutner




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