Lotus, currently on tour with their brand new album Monks, played at Marathon Music Works in Nashville on Wednesday 9/18. The brothers Luke and Jesse Miller formed the band back in 1999. Although they’re mainly known as a festival band, they’ve been able to build a strong fan base and have released several studio albums since their beginning days.
The five-piece band is known to be a multi-genre band, always evolving their sound. But for the most part, they tend to gravitate toward elements of electronica mixed with that particular jam band flair that festival-goers love so deeply. Not so much this time: Monks is a completely different album compared to any of their previous work. It’s a hip-hop album that features famous rap artists such as Lyrics Born, Gift of Gab, Mr. Lif and many more.
Unfortunately, Wednesday’s show did not draw a very large audience. But it’s hard to compete with the Americana Music Festival and Conference, which also kicked off on Wednesday. Regardless, Lotus brought an energetic performance, rewarding its fans with familiar tunes rather than just promoting their new album tracks.
Prior to the show, Jesse Miller agreed to an interview with Blank News. Find out what he had to say about the new album and his love for music:
This new album can be purchased on iTunes or you can name your own price and download it via their Bandcamp page: https://lotusvibes.bandcamp.com/album/monks.
Blank: Monks is very different. Tell me why you wanted to do a hip-hop album. And what was the experience like working with rap artists?
Miller: It wasn’t something we really set out to do, but we had a lot of fun putting it together. Musically we’re mostly an instrumental band, so usually we focus on how everything works together and making it work very tightly together. For this project, it was like, what can we get rid of to leave room for the MCs and really showcase the voices and strip everything down. We didn’t just want to jam an MC into one of our tracks.
Blank: Did you approach the MCs, or did they come to you?
Miller: We approached all of the MCs, just like reaching out to either MCs that we liked or asking friends – like Break Science actually pointed us in the direction of CX, who did “Deep Inside the Mothership” track. And Lyrics Born, we had shared the same booking agent, so I just tracked down some phone numbers and got in touch with him. The only one that didn’t work out, we tried to get Charley Tuna and his schedule didn’t work out, but then when he heard the album he was like “Oh man, we gotta do something some time.”
Blank: What’s a crazy story you can share with us about recording Monks
Miller: That album was put together in so many places. And we would just put together a fee, send it to somebody, see if we got anything back. But working with some of the MCs was definitely interesting. Haha, I would get calls “Oh we need this money wired right now or nothing’s gonna happen.” I think in the hip hop world that happens more often and we feel like we may be a little bit more organized. But everything eventually did get done. And it was recorded all over. Some of the basic tracks were done in Philly and then we had MCs recording in all of their different hometowns, and we mixed it in Denver and some of it in Philly. And the mastering was done out in LA, so this thing was just kind of crazy. It was out in the world for a long time, like different parts coming in and going out. It was a pretty collaborative project in a lot of ways, even though Luke and I were at the helm of it.
Blank: When you and Luke started Lotus, did you think you’d be doing this for this long?
Miller: It’s been mostly the same band for as long as we’ve had the band. We never really thought about it that much, we just went for it from the beginning.
Blank: Did it turn out to be what you thought it would be?
Miller: You don’t really know until you do it. No matter how much people talk about touring and what that lifestyle is like, it’s really hard to understand what it’s like until you actually do it. There are obviously the highs of playing the shows, but all the traveling that goes into it is definitely a lot of work.
Blank: How do you keep the balance between life – maybe some of you want a family of your own – and your career, which is music and being on the road so much?
Miller: We’ve tried to just be really strategic about what we do. We play less shows than we used to and try to just be smart about it and be efficient with our time. Because tour life and being a live musician isn’t for everybody. But if you want to play music all the time, and especially if you want to play your own music, it’s one of the few ways to do it. I think everyone understands there are some sacrifices, but in the end it’s worth it.
Blank: Did you always know that you wanted to be a musician?
Miller: No, I got into playing more when I was in high school. We started a band and that’s when I really started writing music and diving into theory and learning that. I did a lot of other things when I was young and music was really only one of those things. But it just grew on me more and more the more I did it.
Blank: What is it that you like about making music? What keeps you doing it, keeps you in it, keeps you wanting to produce music?
Miller: I always feel compelled to be writing music and working on something. Everybody has their own kind of creative outlet, and for me this is mine. Even if we weren’t doing this band, I think I would find some other ways to continue to write. It’s not something I would just let go.
Blank: It seems like you never run out of material, releasing albums left and right.
Miller: We built up a pretty big cache in 2012. Monks, we were actually completely done with about a year ago and we were just sitting on it, because we had Build coming out. We actually have a good amount of other stuff already recorded, too, and we’re figuring out what we want to do with that. Since we’re touring a lot, we like to always continuously write, and we don’t always have one project that we’re writing for. While we were working on that hip hop album and Build, we wrote and recorded another 9-10 tracks that just didn’t really fit either of those projects. And there’s other stuff that we’ve written and started to play live but haven’t recorded yet.
Blank: Have you toured Europe yet?
Miller: No, we’ve never really done anything in Europe. We went over a couple of times for a small festival, but we haven’t done any sense of touring. I don’t think they really know who we are over there. We don’t know how to really crack into it. In the U.S. we’re known as a live band and a festival band and I feel like usually the best way to go over there is to follow a record, and for us it’s the other way around out here. So far we haven’t figured out a good way to overcome that.
Blank: Are you trying to get out of being known as a festival band?
Miller: No, not really. We love being part of the festivals and doing that. And I feel like that’s how we’ve really grown our crowd. But I shy away from calling us a jam band sometimes because people always associate jam bands with bad studio albums, and I don’t want to be known as a band with bad studio albums. I think our studio albums are good and we put a lot of time into them. But I can see where people come from, because the live experience is so overwhelming compared to an album. We never really try to recreate what a live show is when we record an album. They’re two entirely different things in my mind.
Blank: Hopefully live is better than recorded, instead of the other way around, right?
Miller: Yes, it should be an experience, if people can play and figure out a way to engage the audience. Unfortunately now there are a lot of people on the scene that are basically just pressing play on some tracks. That to me is not very exciting. But if people find creative ways to approach it and are really engaged in their own music, that to me is where it becomes interesting.
